D3hockey.com Computer Rankings - Dec. 5

by Steve Wiitala

View women's rankings here.

Here are this weeks men’s D3hockey.com computer rankings.  For purposes of comparison, we have included last week’s rankings and ratings for each team, as well as where teams are ranked in this week’s D3hockey.com poll.  As we might expect, Norwich has a substantial lead on the rest of nation.  This was helped by the Cadets weekend sweep that included victories over Castleton and Skidmore.  Their weekend boosted their rating index by 50 points.  Elmira continues to hold second in the rankings and its lead over Oswego despite the fact that Oswego defeated Elmira twice on the first weekend of the season.  Since then they have played a stronger schedule and have capitalized on it by going 7-1, with the Soaring Eagles only loss being to Norwich.  Oswego since that start has gone 6-1-2 with a loss at the hands of Utica, and ties with Plattsburgh and Morrisville.

Some people observed that last week’s rankings seemed to be a bit biased in favor of the East, due to a lack of presence of Western teams in the top ten.  The situation looks a little better this week because UW-River Falls made a big jump from 16^th to 6th, and a gain of 56 ratings points thanks to their weekend sweep of UW-Superior.  The other thing to note is that there are a lot of teams from the West that are just outside the top ten -- in fact there are five Western teams in the second ten.  Note that as evidenced by some of the big moves we saw this week that there is still a lot of variability in the computer rankings.

Fourteen of the 16 teams in this week’s D3hockey.com poll (the extra team because of a tie for 15^th) are among to the top 20 teams in this week’s computer rankings.  The two that aren’t in the top 20 are Adrian and MSOE.  Both teams have good won-lost records, but their strength of schedule numbers are very poor.  Adrian’s opponents have a winning percentage that ranks 68^th, while MSOE opponents have a winning percentage that ranks 77^th -- dead last.  When we build a team’s enhanced winning percentage, we combine their record with the record of the teams that they have beaten.  The teams that Adrian has beaten have a winning percentage of 0.3059 and the teams that MSOE has beaten have a winning percentage of 0.2118.

The other side of the coin revolves around some teams that are in the top fifteen of these rankings but not ranked in the human poll. Probably most interesting case is Manhattanville.  The Valiants are in exactly the opposite situation as MSOE. With a 2-3-1 record, they are below 0.500 but still show up ranked ninth here. The teams that Manhattanville has played have strong records, and the fact that they have beaten Neumann and Utica, and tied Williams means that their “inside” numbers are very, very good.  Its strength of schedule is second in the nation and when we calculate their enhanced winning percentage, they rank second in that category as well – behind only Norwich.  This suggests that Manhattanville has the potential to be successful as the season progresses based on their performance against very strong opposition.

The standard warning for this early data still applies.  It is early in the season, and the indices can fluctuate considerably at this stage for teams which have played only a handful of games. For example, Manhattanville has played only six games so far so its their rating could fluctuate significantly after playing just a few more games.  As always, if you have questions or comments, feel free to drop in to the D3hockey.com message board and leave a message.

Thoughts?

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