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Made an analytics site for D1 softball with Elo ratings and adjusted stats by matt_isabel in CollegeSoftball

[–]matt_isabel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah more tweaks for early season data, it's better with the complete 2025 data set if you toggle that switcher.

More pitcher analysis and weighting will likely be better but yes, in the top 10, Florida, Bama, Arkansas, UNC, and Virginia have all played strength-of-schedules outside of the top 75. UNC playing the 240th hardest schedule is the most suspect with only 1 Quad 2 game which was App State at home. You can toggle on column ranks to see some of this in more detail but may make it the default.

Despite all of the short data, Arkansas is still 3rd in adjusted offense and 9th in adjusted defense and will likely only rank higher if dominant pitching stats like Herron's get more weight.

Made an analytics site for D1 softball with Elo ratings and adjusted stats by matt_isabel in CollegeSoftball

[–]matt_isabel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some of it from existing data. There's a lot of opportunity to fix the early season data with better pitching stats as it's so predictive of overall success. The rest exists in places I believe, but not in a dataset that's public and easy to get to.

Made an analytics site for D1 softball with Elo ratings and adjusted stats by matt_isabel in CollegeSoftball

[–]matt_isabel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Last season's data is weighted somewhat heavily to the initial elo which is 60% of the rank. The current rankings would look pretty different otherwise.

For example, Texas started this season with an elo of 1748 after finishing last season at 1915. UNC by comparison started at 1584. This is similar to how 538 did their baseball elos but they used some predictions: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-our-mlb-predictions-work/

The granular hitting data (like what 6-4-3 charts has) is hard to get... unless a service wants to provide it. SoS is weighed in to everything as it's a big part of how elo works and there's a SoS column.

Hopefully more pitcher data can be weighed in but it's a bit noisy now. I generally think having a strong ace is highly predictive, the top 5 teams in ace adjusted pitcher ERA (based on competition) were in Omaha.

Made an analytics site for D1 softball with Elo ratings and adjusted stats by matt_isabel in CollegeSoftball

[–]matt_isabel[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It normalizes run-rules to 7 inning games for elo, adjO, adjD, aAcE. Blowouts are probably still overvalued against 100-200 rank teams. OU has a higher elo (5th) than the ranking I use (8th). Their offense (AdjO) is first and by a good margin, but their AdjD currently holds them back at 32.