Power Rankings (Week 6)

Going off last week, we can calculate a win rating for the winning team; for the losing team, I simply subtract the win rating from 1.  The simplest way to calculate a total team ranking is find the average win rating across all games.  However, we wouldn't be taking into account the teams they're playing, and we wouldn't be taking into account the teams those teams were playing, etc.  It's what they call a recursive function.  At some point we would have to stop calculating these team rankings, as (1) it would take forever, and (2) the differences would be so small that it wouldn't even matter.  So, at some point I'll terminate the series, calculating a team ranking on win ratings alone.  Here's the formula:

TeamRanking1(x) = average (WinRating2 * TeamRanking2(x-1) + WinRating3 * TeamRanking3(x-1) +....)

Where x is some value.  When x equals 0:

TeamRanking1 = average (WinRating2 + WingRating3 + ...)

For this week I set x to 4; any longer and the calculations take alot longer.  My final step is I scale everything to 1; divide each team's team ranking by maximum calculated team ranking to get a final power ranking.  And that takes us to this week's rankings:

Team	Power Ranking
Pittsburgh Steelers	1.000
Baltimore Ravens	0.931
Indianapolis Colts	0.809
Tennessee Titans	0.791
New York Jets	0.759
Atlanta Falcons	0.742
Houston Texans	0.715
New York Giants	0.690
Chicago Bears	0.683
Kansas City Chiefs	0.668
Washington Redskins	0.668
Green Bay Packers	0.645
Philadelphia Eagles	0.628
Denver Broncos	0.627
New England Patriots	0.624
Dallas Cowboys	0.615
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	0.596
San Diego Chargers	0.595
Jacksonville Jaguars	0.595
Cincinnati Bengals	0.581
St. Louis Rams	0.572
Oakland Raiders	0.564
Arizona Cardinals	0.528
Cleveland Browns	0.526
Detroit Lions	0.513
Seattle Seahawks	0.508
Minnesota Vikings	0.461
New Orleans Saints	0.459
Miami Dolphins	0.415
San Francisco 49ers	0.317
Carolina Panthers	0.285
Buffalo Bills	0.247

It's interesting, although we have a bunch of one and two loss teams, there's a pretty clear separation; the Steelers and the Ravens are the teams to beat.  And of course, over time, we'll have a more clear picture.  Next week, I'm going to analyze some earlier seasons, and see how I need to tweak the win rating / power ranking.