Week 9 Collective Rankings and Scariness

Jeff Bull has released his Week 9 Collective Rankings, so it’s time for me to take a look at how the my new and improved scariness ratings compare.

Team	Scariness Rating	Collective Ranking (and difference from Scariness)
Kansas City	1	1
New York	2	2
DC United	3	4 (+1)
Chivas	4	8 (+4)
Toronto	5	7 (+2)
Houston	6	9 (+3)
Colorado	7	5 (-2)
New England	7	3 (-4)
Salt Lake	9	13 (+4)
Los Angeles	10	11 (+1)
Chicago	11	10 (-1)
Dallas	12	6 (-6)
Columbus	13	12 (-1)

A teams scariness rating averages 2.23 points off of their position in the collective rating, which seems like a pretty big skew. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I’m not really rating a teams power—just how they’ve done against recent strength of schedule (and a bit of fudging for playing on the road). Because I weight recent results more heavily, there’s going to be a lot more fluctuation. For example, here are the scariness scores and ratings updated for last night’s game.

Team	Scariness	Scariness Rating (and previous)
New York	3.14	1(2)
Kansas City	2.74	2(1)
DC United	2.35	3
Chivas	2.18	4
Houston	1.65	5(6)
New England	1.61	6(7)
Colorado	1.61	6(7)
Salt Lake	1.46	8(9)
Toronto	1.18	9(5)
Los Angeles	1.16	10
Chicago	1.00	11
Dallas	0.80	12
Columbus	-0.12	13

New York piled on an extra .52 points (and rose a slot in the ratings), while Toronto lost .97 points (and dropped a whopping 4 slots). Is that fair? I think some TFC fans might tell me it’s not, but I think it is.

These ratings still don’t reflect personel changes. Is Kansas City without Eddie Johnson just as scary as they were in beating the Red Bulls last weekend? Not even close, but I’m not really sure how to adjust the numbers to reflect for players who are injured, sitting out a game due to penalties, or playing for their national team.