So it's like real school then.

Before you run ageing, could you run a count of how many players are in each grade category, not adjusted for fitness?

Sure!  These are the non-fitness adjusted numbers from the end of season 5 along with the start of season 6 (on the test server).  

Link above is updated with new tab.  Below is a summary as well.  Thanks for reviewing!

Looks like it's easy done to me - just move all of the grades up one position, so the D range goes from 45-54 to 46-55, C goes to 56-65, B to 66-75.

Under this system 17.5% of players start out as As at the start of the year, Bs and Cs are equal at 26%, and the remaining 30% and change are D or F players. By the end of the season based on the S5 numbers 25% of the league will be A's, 33% Bs, 26% Cs with 12% will be D's or below. That doesn't feel that wrong to me.

That's down from 28% A's at the end of the year and 20% of the league starting as A- or better, and should be simple.

A radical change would be to move all grades up six, so D is 50-59, C 60-69, B 70-79 and A 80 or better with A+ after 90, where only 10% of the league would start with an A- or better.

Thanks for your analysis John, this is a big help. I will mull it over for a day or two and post more.  I think I'm somewhere between the +1 and the radical approach.  :-)

I like the radical approach best, lets go for it.

I like the radical approach best, lets go for it.

Thanks to John and Matt for your feedback!

I'd like some more eyeballs and recommendations here.  I added the overall number to your team landing pages and the stats-> player ratings page.  See below for examples.

I think we can all agree on two points:

1) It is unfair that I have to open the season against Roger's team and his league leading 94/A+ MB Wesley Prater.

2) It is unfair that I have be in the same conference as "34-4 Steve" (as some now call him) and all his A+ players.

But enough of my grievances.

I would like to get some more ideas/feedback on this topic.  I think the A+ piece is topheavy and that's before we add in some home court and FIT aspects in a given match.  Please tell me what you think so I can evaluate.  Thanks!

Don't worry Al I know the drill - games against the commish are where you play the youth team...

On the excess of A+ players, looking at the table above surely the simplest solution is just to disband Carlsbad?

Or create another tier?

A* or A++

Or just go with the much better radical idea :)

Clearly, any Bulldog or Tomato needs to be ranked A+++ on general principle.  The rest of us will need more pedestrian rankings.

I tried playing with a bell curve standard distribution and didn't like it at all.  Also tried splitting out static numbers, such as 10 players total per position get an "A", then next 20 are "B", then 30 "C", etc.  Doesn't work well either and is not at all good for comparative talent levels among various positions.

I like John's proposal to simply shift up the tier values at +6 or thereabouts.  Seems cleanest and compensates well for the max, and +1, and +2 players available through recruitment.

If you wanted the "+" to matter more, you could set that to only apply to the top 3-5 players at any position per tier.  Example: of every player that might be a "B" at OH, the best 5 are B+, and the worst 5 are B-.  For positions where there are fewer total players, like L or S, it could just be the lowest and top 3 who get a "-" or "+".  So at a glance you'd know a player is either almost at the next tier up or down, or if an "A+" then he's one of the best in the league at his position.

I should NOT be surprised at all... as I'm reading through this and thinking, "this sounds like we should try to turn this into a bell curve..." and then I get to the bottom and find out that Kevin's already tried this. 

I did go ahead and create a bell curve, just to see it... and here's what I got (I don't quite understand why there are multiple lines... but I'm not a statistician).

The data has a mean of 68 and a standard deviation of 12 (both numbers rounded). A StdDev of 12 is actually perfect as it allows us to break the grades down into 3 equal chunks. 

Here's how that curve breaks down into letter grades:

Rolled up into full letter grades, it looks like this:

(Apologies for massively large chart there!)

It's easy to turn the data into a bell curve. It's much harder to turn the data into a bell pepper

This >

'Clearly, any Bulldog or Tomato needs to be ranked A+++ on general principle.  The rest of us will need more pedestrian rankings.'

You may remove any mention of those crazy tomatoes though

Rob, that's a great chart, even if it breaks my page margins and runs off to my neighbor's house off the right side of my screen!

I'm somewhere between the radical approach that was one of the ideas John had mentioned or just going with the excellent work that Rob has done.

Can someone get a letter of thank you out to Rob's high school math teacher on this?  :-)

Once +1 FIT and home court are factored in the "in match" grades will be a little higher and I think that's fine too as each of these approaches result in fewer A+'s.

Can I get a few more comments here before I code things please?

Rob is either...

a) a school teacher

b) has a statistician type job

c) has a photographic memory

Nobody remembers all that stuff without good reason

NOBODY

I spent sometime last season looking for Grade E players.  Could we add Grade E and spread out the grades further? This would help with the congested middle of Rob's excellent analysis?

There are no grade E's in the US grading system but I understand why it's confusing

Is that because F can be turned into an E with one single swipe of a pen?  Time for bucking the trend in TMVL?

Sure, skipping the "E" doesn't make a lot of sense, except for being able to say, "F is for Failure.  D is for Diploma."  Perhaps E can be for Extra credit needed.

You could really mix it up and go with the Japanese video game-style grading where there is an utterly arbitrary S rank above A rank.

In any case, I'm always hesitant to trust ranking/grading advice from a country where Division One actually means division three, and the League Championship isn't really the championship, so a team that can boast to being "The League Championship Champions!" are really in 21st place, below the 20 teams in the Premier League.  Not to be confused with other "premier leagues" like the Northern Premier League Premier Division, who are actually in the 7th tier of the EFL pyramid, not anywhere close to The Premier League.  It's almost as bad as claiming the title of World Series when only two countries have teams in the league (Major League Baseball).

Sounds like the National Rugby League over here in Australia. Should be the Eastern States and a team from New Zealand League.

Sorry if not right place to put this.

I absolutely love all the tangents in this thread. 

Re: Craig - you are right... NOONE remembers this stuff... I literally googled how to make a bell curve in Google Sheets LOL... the rest of the understanding of it did come back to me from HS stats afterward though lol

Like I said..let's get that thank you note out to Rob's high school math teacher...

well i guess we can all be thankful that Carlsbad's three !A+ seniors will all be retiring at the end of the year. there is hope for us all in PAC8 yet!

You rescued this thread with '...I literally googled how to make a bell curve...'

Then ruined it with '...the rest of the understanding of it did come back to me from HS..'

Aaarrrggghhh (think Charlie Brown)

Last season I asked for some discussion on an update for translating the Overall rating number (like 88) to a letter grade. 

I had a lot of feedback as noted above.

One coach, Rob Peterson, got out his protractor, slide rule, Texas Instruments calculator, pocket protector, and did all the math PLUS some bell curves.

To paraphrase Shakira: "bell curves don't lie". 

I did not get time to implement it last season (and I have it literally coded like 7 places at least; so its no small undertaking; my fault). 

But now I'm going to.  I've looked at the end of last season data and also some matches where home court adds to the overall number.  I think Rob's approach is a good one to move to for Season 7 and I'm planning on implementing it.   We can certainly tweak it in the future.  

I think this is the last major item I need to wrap before running end of season processing.  I have some web page updates I'll need to deal with, but hopefully this is it.  Hoping to wrap this on Thursday/Friday (Nov 3-4) and then run aging. I'm not sure I've bought into the F+/F- levels yet because when you are an F, you get an F.  But maybe I will...

To be clear, if this works out reall well we should all sing Rob's praises.

If it doesn't, well, you'll know what to do...

Here's how the bell curve breaks down into letter grades:

This can only be a good thing. It's disheartening to have all A+ only to be beaten by better A+

The bell curve reigns supreme!

Though now Antioch only has 1 A- player... OOF we aren't that good.

It does help expanding the grading system. Easier to decide who to train and who not to. Only one A- player but at least no F- ones.