Sports rating system

A sports rating system is a system that analyzes the results of sports competitions to provide ratings for each team or player. Common systems include polls of expert voters, crowdsourcing non-expert voters, betting markets, and computer systems. Ratings, or power ratings, are numerical representations of competitive strength, often directly comparable so that the game outcome between any two teams can be predicted. Rankings, or power rankings, can be directly provided (e.g., by asking people to rank teams), or can be derived by sorting each team's ratings and assigning an ordinal rank to each team, so that the highest rated team earns the #1 rank. Rating systems provide an alternative to traditional sports standings which are based on win-loss-tie ratios.

In the United States, the biggest use of sports ratings systems is to rate NCAA college football teams in Division I FBS, choosing teams to play in the College Football Playoff. Sports ratings systems are also used to help determine the field for the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, men's professional golf tournaments, professional tennis tournaments, and NASCAR. They are often mentioned in discussions about the teams that could or should receive invitations to participate in certain contests, despite not earning the most direct entrance path (such as a league championship).

Computer rating systems can tend toward objectivity, without specific player, team, regional, or style bias. Ken Massey writes that an advantage of computer rating systems is that they can "objectively track all" 351 college basketball teams, while human polls "have limited value". Computer ratings are verifiable and repeatable, and are comprehensive, requiring assessment of all selected criteria. By comparison, rating systems relying on human polls include inherent human subjectivity; this may or may not be an attractive property depending on system needs.

Sports ratings systems have been around for almost 80 years, when ratings were calculated on paper rather than by computer, as most are today. Some older computer systems still in use today include: Jeff Sagarin's systems, the New York Times system, and the Dunkel Index, which dates back to 1929. Before the advent of the college football playoff, the Bowl Championship Series championship game participants were determined by a combination of expert polls and computer systems.

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