



I want to make something clear about my ratings before I get into this week’s edition: the system I’m operating is highly experimental.Starting this year, for my ratings in the XFL and beyond (i.e. in the CFL and NFL), I’ve begun to use a method that weights the games more heavily as the season progresses. Week 1 games have some meaning, but not as much as Week 2, and certainly not as much as Week 10 and up.This is the first season of football where I’ve decided to update the blog on a weekly basis, albeit first waiting for three weeks of play to pass by.I’ll tweak it in the offseason if I need to. I’m not going to change my system in the middle of a football season just because it’s giving us results that don’t immediately make sense.For this week, I’ve allowed my computer to select the home-field advantage, rather than using an arbitrary value of my choosing. Even knowing how other minor leagues look, it’s a very high value, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Only five road teams have won in sixteen games thus far—and those teams are the top three teams in my ratings by a wide margin.So we end up with a ranking that doesn’t really make sense as a power ranking. It makes more sense if we think of it as a measurement of trajectory. When you give up 64 points in two games and only score 9, it won’t matter much how you performed before that, this early in a season.If the Houston Roughnecks win their first eight games and tank in their last two, their rating should go down, but the bigger sample size of good performances should keep them in the top half of the league, if not in the top spot overall.If everyone continues on their current trajectories, we have three good teams, two or three average teams, and the rest are bad.The problem in prognosticating that is how many question marks we have in the league. How will the loss of Landry Jones affect Dallas? Are the wins by LA and Tampa Bay indicative of future success, or are they one-off occurrences? Can DC or New York win any games away from home?Don’t forget to bookmark or subscribe if you’d like to see more of my ratings for the XFL and other leagues! My Throwback Thursday series continues later this week with a look at the United States Football League.