Overview

This ranking system depends entirely upon expected margin of victory (or defeat), and the actual result of the game. All games during the season are weighted equally for all teams. The ranking of each team is used to determine a theoretical point spread for each game. If a team beats that point spread, their rating is increased proportional to the margin over the point spread, and also proportional to the ranking of the opposite team. If a team fails to meet the margin of victory or defeat, that team's rating will decrease as per the same factors mentioned above.

Expected Margin of Victory

As mentioned before, this value is determined from each team's ranking. The value will be recalculated each week, which means the factors of each teams other opponents and results will cause the margin of victory to be a dynamic, everchanging calculation. For instance, let's say Team A, with a ranking of 1300, plays Team B, with a ranking of 1200, in the first game of the season. Team A wins the game, as expected, but not by the margin that was expected. Thus, Team A's ranking may drop to 1275, while Team B's ranking will rise to 1225, let's say. Over the course of the season, Team B underachieves, and Team B's ranking drops to 1100. This means that Team A SHOULD HAVE won Week 1's game by an even larger margin than previously calculated, and thus they will lose more than the 25 points which were originally calculated after Week 1.

Homefield Advantage

Three points will be added to the road team's score for purposes of determining the margin of victory for the winning team.

Overtime Games

Overtime games will be counted as a tie (with 3 points subsequently added to the road team's score).

Preaseason Rankings

Each team is given a preseason ranking which is just for the purpose of giving the ranking some sort of meaning early in the season. Otherwise, the winner by the widest margin of victory in the first week of the year would be ranked #1 early on, which is crazy. However, after Week 6, I will reset all teams preliminary ratings to 1200, and the ratings will all adjust to their respective places.