Bill's Power Ranking (BPR)

The Bill Power Ranking (BPR) attempts to statistically rank each team's performance in each Yahoo category. Our league is based on head-to-head match-ups, and that's cool... but do you feel lucky? The BPR calculates how each team statistically ranks over the whole season taking the element of chance in head-to-head games out of the equation.

Scoring in our fantasy league is based on 10 separate categories. The BPR determines your relative strength in each category, sums them up and that's your BPR.

Specifically, BPR is calculated in 3 steps/tables:

• Table 1 Weekly Averages - This table lists the average score for each team in each category.
• Table 2 Category Rankings - This table ranks each team's average score in each category. For example, if your team averages more homers than any other, then your rank in this category would be 8. If your team had the worst average, then your rank would be 1.
• Table 3 BPR - Your team's BPR is sum of its rankings in a number of categories. A high ranking is better than a high one: 8 is best, 1 worst.

  In Table 3, a number of BPR-related stats are given:

  • Hit BPR - BPR (sum of ranks) in the hitting categories
  • Pitch BPR - BPR (sum of the ranks) in the pitching categories
  • BPR - BPR of all categories (or just Hit BPR + Pitch BPR) minus 5
  • BPR Rank - The rank of your team's BPR versus others... the best team is ranked #1, the worst #8.

A note on the "minus 5" in the BPR. This is done to eliminate the statistical error that occurs by ranking teams 1 through 8, which leads to an average ranking of 4.5. Subtracting 0.5 from each category ranking (and therefore 5 for all 10 categories) moves this average rank back down to the expected 4. This means that a team with a perfect ranking of 8 in every category will have a BPR of 75. A terrible team with a 1 ranking in each category will have a BPR of 5.

One other statistical gremlin... in the cases of ranking ties, Microsoft Excel rounds up. So, the BPR numbers may be very slightly inflated.

enjoy... yow, bill

williamt@williamt.com