Talisman Red's Mens College Soccer Computer Ratings

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What is this about

We have been using computer rankings in college football for 30+ years (remember the BCS?), and even the NCAA basketball selection committee uses an assortment of these rankings to help select and seed tournament teams. There are not nearly as many people doing this for college soccer, so I felt like this was an opportunity to contribute something new to the community. Here we are.

So it's just a math formula?

Yep, that's all that computer ratings are. You can do it this way, or you can do a human "poll" (coaches, writers, whoever).

The method shown here was created by David Wilson (UW-Milwaukee '65, '66, UW-Madison '67) and has been around for as long as almost all the others you might have heard of (Jeff Sagarin; Ken Pomeroy; etc.). It has consistently produced reliable results in every test I've put it through. For a few years, it was one of the best at identifying NCAA basketball at-large teams but I haven't kept updating those statistics. And, partly, I want to pay respects to him, since he got me into the whole world of rating and ranking teams, many years ago.

Where do the predictions come from?

The score predictions you see do NOT use Wilson's system, since his method is not designed to try and predict the future. But I've written my own system to do that, so I include those predictions here, for the first time in 2024. If they turn out to be good, I'll keep them. If not, I'll take them off and try and figure out why.

Are the predictions any good?

Great question. I'll admit that I've never tracked them in-depth for college soccer! But in 2023-24, for college basketball, they predicted 70.3% of the correct winners (ESPN BPI got 71.4%). And for college football in 2023, they predicted 71.5% of the correct winners (ESPN FPI got 72.6%). So on any given night, I would argue the results are pretty similar to anyone else.

Update: through September 22nd of the 2024 season, the men's soccer predictions have correctly forecast 394 game winners, and missed 172 times, not counting 174 games that ended in a draw. (That would be a percent correct of 70%.) I'm still not sure how to count the draws yet... but I think the result is comparable to my system's success for other sports.

Who are you, anyway?

I have a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and am currently a faculty member at Indiana University in Bloomington. In addition to lots of teaching, I have research interests in the broad areas of thunderstorms and numerical weather prediction (forecasting using computers).

Contact me using this email form if you have questions or non-hateful comments.