AAF Computer Rankings: 2019 Season, Week 1

Welcome to the inaugural edition of my Alliance of American Football rankings.

What we have here, rather than a proper FredRank, is a rating system similar to the one Jeff Sagarin uses for all the sports he keeps track of. Here's what that means.


  • This rating system is solely based on score margins. It does not take into account any other statistics.
  • Sagarin calculates a preseason ratings for each team, and up until a certain point in any given season, those preseason ratings account for part of the overall rating. This is to prevent a small sample size of games from skewing the results too much. Since, however, there was no prior data to inform the results here, the ratings you see are based solely on one week of results.
  • This method involves reducing the squared error in the difference between actual and expected results. In a sense, the rating of a team is supposed to represent the best fit for the data set that is the results of each game involving that team.
  • Keep in mind, we have one week of results. We haven't seen half these teams play a home game yet; we won't see Atlanta or Salt Lake at home until week 3. Given this, I've adjusted the ratings to assume a home field advantage of 3.00, and the ratings have also been compressed to keep the range small. In the future, as we have more data and the "web" of teams becomes more interconnected, I will be applying adjustments less and less until I eventually stop applying them altogether, likely at some point near mid-season.


With all that said, here are the ratings!


Now, again, this very clearly reflects one week of results, as the four teams that won are the top four here. I think it's fair to say that all eight teams truly have a chance to make the 4-team postseason ... just that some of them need to make more adjustments than others.

Based on the above ratings, and with the aforementioned home field advantage of 3.00, here are my spreads for the 2nd week of games, which features four inter-conference matchups.

Stallions @ Iron: BHM -12.0
Hotshots @ Express: AZ -6.0
Apollos @ Commanders: ORL -7.6
Legends @ Fleet: SD -4.9

I really do believe all four favored teams should win these games. However, I would name the Stallions as the most likely team to win in an upset. Conversely, I believe the Fleet are a lock to win their game.

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