Re-Ranking 2007 Tournament Results

What follows is two different methods of ranking tournament bouts. Both methods are based on how Flat Track Stats determines it's rankings. The factors used here are opponent skill, score difference, and blowout adjustment (together, the Bout Outcome Factor). Factors in FTS rankings that aren't relevant to tournaments are not being used: participation, tournament bonus, bout decay, etc...

Teams are ranked within each bracket, so if a team drops out in the 1st bracket, of course they will never be ranked among 2nd bracket teams. Dotted lines indicate bracket separation.

Teams are ranked only by the last bout they played. This is to compensate for the fact the teams enter higher brackets on buys, and thus cannot be adequately compared to the records of team's that started from the first bracket. It makes sense to us that advancing to the next bracket for winning a bout is an adequate reward. The other possibility is to count all bouts played in a tournament when determining rankings. This introduces the strategy of running up the score in earlier bouts. Teams that enter on a buy however would be at a disadvantage for not getting this opportunity to run up the score. This seems counter-intuitive to us because a buy is an award for doing well in the season leading up to the tournament.

So another way of looking at this system is that it ranks the losers of each bracket. This can be seen in the calculated BOF of each bout. The top of each bracket is the greatest BOF (a negative number since it was a loss), and the bottom of the bracket is the smallest BOF.

We're proposing two variations in how we determine opponent skill. The first "Seeding by Incoming Ranks" uses the ranking of a team as they entered the tournament to determine opponent skill. However we normalize the rankings to the number of teams in the tournament. So even if the incoming ranking of the worst team is 19th, they will take 12th place in a 12 team tournament. We use the WFTDA ranks most recent to the tournament date. Ranking by this method fulfills the logical statement "Team A should be ranked higher because they came close to beating Team B who's been ranked highly this season and entered this tournament with a strong ranking".

The second "Seeding by Outgoing Ranks" uses the tournament results themselves to determine opponent skill. This makes for a recursive (self-referencing) system. This is possible since the top 4 teams are set in stone (determined logically by wins/losses since they all played each other). The 2nd highest bracket can be determined using the 1st bracket's rankings. Which allows the 3rd highest bracket to use the 2nd highest rankings, etc... This system fulfills the logical statement "Team A should be ranked higher because they came close to beating Team B who ended up doing really well in this tournament".