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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 simple basic statistic better
represents this than final score? The Power Ratings in our
software utilizes more sophisticated mathematical formulas,
but don't underestimate this system. It does produce strong
results and is a good indicator. 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 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 for
both overall and home/Away. Below are screen shots from our
Excel program.
Well how do I use the program. 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.
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.
The last box called "Last Row of Teams" are used if you
want to add or remove teams. So as an example if there are 30
teams in our database and you want to add an additional team,
the value in the box would be changed to 31.
The Pro Football database follows 32 teams, College Football 119
teams, Pro Football 32 teams and College Basketball 151 teams.
You can add as many teams as you want in the future and even
use your own ideas This program is all yours and is
free.
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. Our preference is the Overall Power Power
Rating + 3 for HF or HC advantage. Use the Home/Away Power
Ratings to confirm the Overall PR. Make sure there is a 2
point overlay. The same logic is used for Pro Football and
Basketball.
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