Rating Systems Challenge: A Victory for ESPN BPI, a Review and a Mea Culpa

This post is part of a series about the 2016 NCAA Tournament.

First things first: there was a serious error in all my previous posts. I was working off of old data for Nolan Power Index. In fact, I was working off last year's data. Funnily enough, last year's NPI ratings outperformed every one of this year's systems in the 2016 Rating Systems Challenge. Unfortunately, that's not how this works. As usual, the real NPI ratings finished poorly, dead last. This means the winner was actually ESPN's BPI. This also means that not a single system this year picked the correct National Champion.

Rating Systems Challenge: A Rational Championship on the Line

This post is part of a series about the 2016 NCAA Tournament.

Villanova's triumph over Oklahoma in the Final Four closed the book on Sagarin and Pinnacle's Vegas ratings. The last two systems with a chance to clinch the top spot in the 2016 Rating Systems Challenge are ESPN's Basketball Power Index and Warren Nolan's Nolan Power Index. BPI picked North Carolina to win it all. NPI is the only system that picked the Wildcats. Tonight's National Championship game will decide this year's best bracket.

It Begins: 2016 Edition

This weekend marks the opening of the 2016 Major League Baseball regular season. Rational Pastime will be following it game-by-game, updating RPScore ratings along the way and checking in occasionally to see what insights the data yield.

As in the past, this year's RPScore ratings are seeded with WAR projections from FanGraphs and park data from ESPN. The season projections and spreads above are the result of running that data 1,024 times through my season simulator. At this point in the season, these projections are rather broad. For instance, the 20.6-win 90% confidence interval is nearly twice as large as the 12 win spread between the best and worst American League teams' median projections. In another instance, last year's disappointing Washington Nationals are just as likely to win 80 games as they are 100.*

*Please head on over to Cards Conclave to read my analysis of the Nationals' offseason and expectations for 2016.

But first, let's take a look at how we get there from here.