The Basics | The Algorithm | Mission & Vision | Support
Hierank generates four key stats for each team:
1. Rank
This is the straight-forward #1-255 performance ranking among all Division-I teams.
FBS & FCS rankings are also shown on their respective pages, but since there is crossover in scheduling, combined ranking is shown on most pages.
2. Hierank Power
This is the ultimate summation of a team’s performance and Hierank’s primary proprietary value – it’s The Season’s Final Score.
It’s also the value that Rank is determined by.
Hierank Power is indexed on an easy-to-follow 0 to 100 scale, which always self-balances for ‘50.0’ to represent an average performance across all teams, in all contests, throughout the entire season to-date.
3. Volatility
Just as volatile compounds change state easily in nature, volatile teams change state easily week-to-week in the ecosystem that is college football.
Taken as the opposite of “consistency,” more-volatile teams are more-likely to deviate further and more-often from any expected performance. This also means that they are less easy to predict than their low-volatility counterparts, a good consideration for anyone in the betting markets.
On our 0 to 100 index, higher values mean higher Volatility.
4. Normal Power
This is the range of power a team can be expected to perform at most of the time. It is represented as Low-High values one standard deviation from said team’s Hierank Power, based on all matchups.
More consistent, low-Volatility teams will show tighter ranges for this value.
The higher a team’s Volatility, the wider this range will show to be.
Document Navigation
Hierank’s original form was as a Google Sheets doc. This rundown speaks to that user experience:
With nearly 300 individual sheets (one for each league, conference, & team), the Sandwich Button in the bottom-left of your screen is the easiest way to navigate within the actual tool.
Unfortunately the mobile app doesn’t contain a sandwich button, requiring strong swiping abilities to navigate. On the upside, that’s more incentive to help us get this fully-live!
Ranking Pages
Main ranking pages (FBS & FCS) currently give Rank & Team Name to the left, Power, Volatility, & Normal Power to the right, and leave wonky-but-discernible derivation stats in the middle.
Conference Pages
These have the same basic layout as rankings pages, but show only one conference at a time, with members ranked.
The Gold-to-Blue good-to-bad color scaling becomes visually-valuable when looking at less-dominant conferences, like the MAC:
Team Pages
Team Pages give deeper insight on the team in focus, including Game Power – a previously unmentioned value which rates each week’s performance by W/L outcome, dominance (score spread & ratio), & opponent-quality – as well as giving Rank & Hierank Power for every opponent on the schedule.
