Talisman Red's Womens College Soccer Computer Ratings

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Feel free to share these, but with credit to talismanred.com. Thanks!

(Other divisions might be available later, but not just yet...)

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.

Are these ratings any good?

Is the coaches poll any good? I think "good" is subjective. The ratings take into account every single game for the entire season -- much more information than a human could manage to handle -- and produce a ranking of every single team -- again, much more than any of us could do.

Here's what the top 12 looked like at the end of the 2023 regular season -- so judge for yourself. If you notice that a team's record is not correct, that's because a game was missing in the NCAA database. It's more common than you think. :-(

--- Division I --- 2023 end-of-regular-season Wilson Ratings

                       W  L  T
                       -  -  -
  1  Florida St.      16  0  1  730  --#1 seed
  2  UCLA             16  1  1  691  --#1 seed
  3  Stanford         15  0  4  678  --#2 seed
  4  Clemson          15  3  3  666  --#1 seed

  5  Penn State       13  2  4  662  --#2 seed
  6  North Carolina   10  1  8  658  --#3 seed
  7  Brigham Young    16  2  3  657  --#1 seed
  8  Arkansas         14  4  2  652  --#2 seed

  9  Notre Dame       11  3  4  651  --#3 seed
 10  Memphis          18  1  0  650  --#6 seed
 11  Texas Tech       15  1  4  649  --#2 seed
 12  Nebraska         14  3  3  645  --#5 seed

The other #2 seed in the bracket was Brown, ranked #19 in Wilson. Although they were 11-2-2, the computer judged that they played a weak schedule and would have put them on the 5-seed line. Memphis, according to Wilson, was way under-seeded and should ahve been on the 3-seed line. But ultimately, you be the judge.

Do you do score predictions?

The Wilson formula, used here, is not designed for that. I have developed my own formula and use it in lots of other sports (link at the left), but I haven't tried that for here yet. Maybe eventually.

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.