NWSL Power Ranking Averages - Week 14

Only 5 of the 7 sites ranked this week, and once again there is a tie at the top! This time it’s between North Carolina Courage and Portland Thorns FC. Averages do not include the games from Wednesday night. One last item, if you think you missed seeing the Week 13 rankings, you are right - there wasn’t one. I was out of town to watch the Utah Royals FC vs Portland Thorns match. Last week’s numbers are included below however.

As always, if you know of a site I have not used please let me know in the comments and I’ll look into adding it!

Sites Used

• Five Thirty Eight (Projected Pts.)
• Soccer Club Stats (Win League %) - No Ranking Wk. 14
• Backline Soccer
• Reddit/r/NWSL
• RSL Soapbox (Published earlier this week)
• NWSL - No Ranking Wk. 14
• Freeborg Power Index

You may notice the list includes ‘analytic’ sites; they serve to function as a stable counterbalance to the rest which are based more on personal opinions, and those done by ‘team’ blogs’. There are also included sites that some will argue are really ‘prediction rankings’ - but in reality isn’t that what a Power Ranking is (see the quote at the top).

• Highest Standard Deviation: Portland Thorns at 0.89
• Lowest Standard Deviation: Orlando Pride and Sky Blue FC both at 0.0

Site Bias

All sites are going to have bias, whether conscious (blogs) or due to analytic calculations (based on past performance for example). This section lets you see the extent that sites are biased for/against teams.

Site Accuracy

This is simply how close each site is to average each week. Getting all sites exactly on average is extremely rare (in all the years I’ve tracked this it’s never happened).