'03 FBR Rankings - 10/10/12

What happened to Polaris Black? It seems like a very precipitous fall from TGPL last season to upper 30's rank this season. This was a gritty, hardhat wearing, lunch pale carrying group of girls that was a handful week in and week out. Is there a chink in the rankings calculator that negatively impacts them for some reason?

outonthelimb wrote:What happened to Polaris Black? It seems like a very precipitous fall from TGPL last season to upper 30's rank this season. This was a gritty, hardhat wearing, lunch pale carrying group of girls that was a handful week in and week out. Is there a chink in the rankings calculator that negatively impacts them for some reason?

I've looked very closely at Polaris for the exact reasons that you specify above. There's not really any kind of smoking gun, it's just kind of a numbers thing.

Their current game history is a bit of Jekyll and Hyde. They've either played solid opponents and lost (Lubbock Cruz Azul, LP Dalglish, Sparta, FCD Frisco), or played much weaker opponents and won (Am. Eagles White, FWFC White, Sting East Ledbetter, Mansfield Revolution, HUSA Black). The one exception is a 2-1 Win over DT South Barakat.

The high number of games against weak opponents is really hurting their SoS, and that is what is mostly driving their current ranking.

If you take a step back, and just look at their individual results, they should be somewhere between 20 (beat #20, lost to #21, haven't beaten anyone else in the past 4 months ranked above #20) and 53 (have beaten all opponents they've played ranked #53 and below).

The other problem is that 3 of their wins against weaker teams (Am. Eagles, FWFC, and Sting East) were only by 2 goal margins, which is similar margins to what they have lost to their stronger opponents by. So all things considered, it's not a total surprise that the mathematics put them about 1/2 way between 20 and 53.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you look at this strictly from a numbers standpoint, #37 for Polaris doesn't really look out of whack right now. Of course, numbers don't always tell the full story.

I suspect that Polaris is a bit under-ranked by FBR right now. However, Polaris' history suggests that they aren't afraid to play strong competition and they will fare well, so I would expect that as they play out their fall league season in PTCL and then fall tourneys, they will rise back up closer to where they were last Spring.

Answers with specifics.....I love it.

outonthelimb wrote:What happened to Polaris Black? It seems like a very precipitous fall from TGPL last season to upper 30's rank this season. This was a gritty, hardhat wearing, lunch pale carrying group of girls that was a handful week in and week out. Is there a chink in the rankings calculator that negatively impacts them for some reason?

Also, I believe that they lost several players to Texans Barakat.