This is how it all started…

Opinions are like …, well, everyone has one. But not everyone’s a good one. And mine may be worse than yours (if so, join and write a better one). But ranking teams can be science. And that I’m good at doing.

The Option Four rankings are a weighted ranking system that ingests all game scores for the year, accounts for the age of the result, the location, and the probability of alternate outcomes, and then compares all teams in Division 1. We produce a first-to-last ranking of all teams that have played enough games. Soccer is a fickle game, so the better team doesn’t always win, and ranking based on that takes a lot of data to overcome the randomness. But the correct use of appropriate algorithms is a far more accurate measure of this than even a group of humans opinions.

We’ve produced rankings for years, all for fun. But they consistently outperform the polls and the NCAA seedings for predicting outcomes. So we’re going public.