Free Excel Power Rating and Selection System Software W/ 10 Year Database
Power ratings are a deadly weapon in any handicappers arsenal. No other method allows us to calculate as accurately and objectively the relative strengths of two sports teams. Unlike Angle and Trend handicapping systems, Power Ratings inform us how many points a team should beat an opponent by. Unlike fundamental handicapping, Power Ratings are purely objective. No emotion or bias is involved.
If Power Ratings are such an exceptional handicapping tool, why isn't everybody using them? Well every handicapper worth their salt is using them. Those who are not often use excuses such as it's too hard and it takes too long. If you fall into this category then this program is just what you have been looking for and best of all its FREE for ever and so easy to use.
The Yellow Column is what we call our Simple Basic Power Ratings and our first step is to use the raw Scores to calculate PR's for both Overall and Home/Away. Before continuing, let me explain my reasoning for using only final scores to calculate PR's. While Some handicappers use all sorts of funky statistics in their calculations, what are we trying to predict? First Downs? Fumbles? Points per Yards? No, we want to know the outcome of the game in Points. What basic statistic better represents this than final score? If there is a stronger indicator, I am not aware of it and I have been handicapping for over 30 years. However, it is possible to modify the final score with these and other statistics to remove the effects of luck and other variables.
The Green Column is what we call our Basic Power Rating. Simple Basic Power Ratings have a major flaw. They fail to take into consideration strength of opposition. A team which beats up on cellar dwellers is a far cry from a team which can do it to the upper echelon. So what do we do here, we average the PR's of a teams opponent and plug it into our formula.
The Blue Column is what we call our Final Adjusted Power Ratings. While our Power Ratings are good, they can be made even better. One problem is they fail to reflect recent performance. All games are now weighted incrementally. This is what we call Front Loading.
You now have the ability to calculate razor sharp Power ratings. Below are screen shots form our Excel program.
Well how do I use the program. We have a 10 year database you can experiment with. The first "Compute all Power Ratings" button is used only once. It calculates all the Simple Power ratings in the Yellow Columns based on all the games in your data base. So if you feel you don't want to go back to 1998 you just delete those dates out of your database. Its all up to you.
Second step is selecting the date. Very important, if you select too few games then you will get an error. Always make sure to use a minimum of 3 games for both Home and Away.
Third and final step, click on the "Compute Power Averages based upon Date". This will calculate all the Final Power Ratings in the Blue Column.
By the way the last box "Last Row of Teams" are used if you want to add or remove teams in the future. Right now we have 119 College teams so the value must be set for one extra team which is 120.
College Football has all 119 teams and Pro Football has all 32 teams. You can add as many teams as you want and even use your own ideas to convert these program to any sport with a little programming. This program is all yours and is free for ever.
Well how do we handicap a game? Lets use Arizona @ Home Vs. Arizona St.
Arizona's Final Overall PR is 101.8 and Home PR is102.7 while Arizona St's Overall PR is 108.8 and Away PR is 109.1. Comparing Overall PR's you have 101.8 - 108.8 = 7 points which Arizona St should be favored by. Using Home/Away PR's you would get (102.7 + 4) for Home Field - 109.1 = 2.4. Therefore Arizona St should be a 2 1/2 Point favorite. The same logic is used for Pro Football.
College Football
Professional Football
Professional Basketball
