Final Ratings for First Semester 2015

The last set of ratings before the holiday break are now posted.  

Once again, all the caveats about limited data still apply.  Nevertheless, the ratings would still "retrodict" about 79% of debates correctly, which is actually fairly well in line with how the final ratings from previous seasons performed.

There were many notable performances worthy of acclamation.  Northwestern MO's run to the finals at the Wake Forest tournament helped them move up 5 spots to #10.  Vermont BL went 7-1 and had some huge prelim wins, inching them closer to the top 10.  Despite losing in doubles, Berkeley SW's undefeated tear through prelims enabled them to rise to #5.  Major gains were also made by Kentucky GV, Baylor BZ, WGU MS, Baylor EG, and Kentucky AM.  Wake Forest AS was hurt by virtue of remaining stationary, as a couple of teams gained the points necessary to move past them.  Having attended only 3 tournaments is saddling Wake with a relatively large deviation.  Both Kansas BR and BiCo moved up a handful of spots to be right at the first round cutoff.  Central Oklahoma HS combined a perfect regional performance with a solid showing at Wake to move up several spots.  Finally, the largest jump in raw points came from Houston BR, who advanced 55 spots by picking up 139 points with their efforts at Wake.

Some may wonder why Berkeley MS still leads Michigan KM at the top of the ratings given Michigan won the Shirley (and Harvard before that).  There is a lot that could be written on the subject, but I'm going to keep my comments relatively brief due to potential conflict of interest issues.  The short of it is that Berkeley did little to persuade the system that its rating was too high, and Michigan didn't do enough to persuade the system that its rating was too low.  Specifically, based on their previous rating Berkeley was expected to pick up about 9.2 wins against the 11 opponents they competed against at Wake.  They went 9-2 and so fell short by 0.2 wins.  Michigan was expected to get about 9.4 wins in their 13 rounds.  They went 11-2, thus exceeding the prediction by 1.6 wins.  Michigan did make a fairly substantial gain on Berkeley in terms of ratings points, but it wasn't enough to make up the balance.  It probably doesn't take any fancy statistics to look at the past two tournaments and see two things about their relative performances.  Michigan has more quality wins, but Berkeley has better losses.  Berkeley's only losses have been to the #2, #3, and #7 teams.  By contrast, Michigan lost to #1, #11, #18, and #49.  On the other hand, over that same time period Michigan has 9 wins against those currently ranked in the top 10 versus Berkeley's 4.  Either way, both of these teams are performing exceptionally (as are many others), and it will be interesting to see how the rest of the season plays out.