Guide · 5 min read
Power rating vs. résumé
The best team and the most deserving team are separate questions. A power rating answers the first; a résumé ranking answers the second.
Power: who is best right now?
A power rating is predictive. It asks how good a team is, using every score and margin, so it can say who would be favored on a neutral field. It can rank a two-loss team that lost close games to elite opponents above an unbeaten team with a weak schedule, because the two-loss team has shown more.
Power ratings drive our weekly picks: the gap between two ratings, plus home field, is the projected margin.
Résumé: who has accomplished the most?
A résumé ranking ignores margins and asks only about wins and losses, weighted by how hard they were to get. Ours uses a benchmark team, the 25th-best team in the division, playing every game on a team’s schedule at the same venues. Add up the benchmark’s win probabilities and you know how many wins a top-25 team would expect. Subtract that from the team’s actual wins and you get wins above benchmark.
A hard schedule lowers the benchmark, so a 7-2 team against strong opponents can rank ahead of a 9-0 team against weak ones. A loss is always zero: you never get credit for losing to a good team, only less blame.
Which one matters?
Both. If you want to predict games, use power. If you want to argue about who should be in the playoff, résumé is closer to how the selection committee thinks, which is why our playoff projection is built on résumé rank.