ELO Rating

THIS will be the most thought-provoking piece i've ever written. I wanted to approach it from a few different angles, and finally arrived at something spontaneous and fascinating. The ELO rating as i've come to understand it, is a system where teams or individuals are rated based on how they win against others. The more someone wins, their rating goes up. I've come to see it as a measuring stick that weighs how much better someone is than all others involved simply based on how much and often they win. It's used most traditionally in chess and poker, however I found out about it through FiveThirtyEight and their application of it to NBA Basketball. Even so, my purpose for writing this is far more abstract than that and for those with an astrology background, "Neptunian," in nature. Essentially, I want to use the theory behind the standard ELO rating system to change modern-day sports.

Following up on a recent piece I wrote concerning Moneyball, the sports world has gone crazy with all these advanced metrics and statistics; it's just chaotic. It led me to an idea: how about we come up with a formula in sports where games and contests can be decided not based solely on how many points are scored, but how well teams or participants perform in comparison to others depending on select key ratings, with point totals being the least significant that matters. Like in Major League Baseball (MLB) RBIs (runs batted in) are weighed heavier than solo home runs, or in the National Football League (NFL) defenses who force turnovers in the red zone are rated higher than defenses who simply win the time-of-possession battle; fact is if the numbers or analytics are gonna tell the story let them tell the whole story! Then when everything is combined mathematically, we really know who won. Comprehending sports in the 21st century would make so much more sense - at least to me, if we used the ELO rating system's theoretic principles to adopt a rating system for each sport that allowed all metrics a considerable amount of power that determines actual wins and losses.

I'm not here to criticize games or game-play; my aim is to make the sports experience much more meaningful - to fans, media and ball clubs alike. To revisit a point I made with Moneyball, it can be highly rewarding anytime you identify an opportunity to try something new and innovative. In this case, we're extrapolating today's scoring system by involving more known variables and determining wins based on key critical factors, then scoring accordingly. Racking up 'style points' this way may still seem good, but more rewarding would be achieving victory with a competitive ELO rating.

The article on Moneyball can be found here. More information on the ELO Rating system can be found here, and FiveThirtyEight's article on ELO Rating applied to the NBA can be found here.


Thank you for reading!


This article was written and edited by Cedric Denson as a product of CollegeWorld, LLC

CollegeWorld, LLC. - C3World@Outlook.com - @C3DWorld
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