I'm totally impressed that you've gone to the major effort of creating these rankings - kudos! So please take this as a creative suggestion not criticism. In future, how about somehow basing the rankings on where a team finishes in the pack, for instance 10th in a festival of 50 boats equates to only top 20% but 10th in a festival of 180 boats is top 6%. This approach removes the need to 'factor' for bigger festivals. Just a suggestion, keep up the great work!
Although the link says Rankings, we really refers to these as Standings where teams collect points for top 10 placements... similarly to motorsports. We had discussed many different methods ever since we decided we wanted to somehow compare different teams and we came to the conclusion that other than dumping all the teams into one big body of calm water, there's no real way to determine the ranking of teams. Therefore we came up with this method of points. With points it removes the "one-hit wonders" or the "one festival per year-stacked teams" from placing high and rewards teams that race in more festivals. Now what would prevent a team from entering only in small races to load up on points? Technically the amount of sponsorship and the size of their wallets. There are some checks in place though to highlight teams that do.
We include other information on the rankings in addition to the total points collected to give a more rounded view of the competition
Top 10 Placements - the number of times this season has finished in the top ten in a race/regatta/festival.
Total Races - The number of races the team has attend. This is the total number of races, whether they place in the Top 10 or not.
Avg Placement - The average placement the team achieves in all their races
Placement Percentile - The average percentile of the team achieves in their races. In other words... where the team places in relation to other teams, which paddleho suggested.
With these other values, one can interpret a range of expectations of these teams. For example, if we take the ratio of top 10 placements to the number of total races, we get a rough idea of how competitive the team is (on paper) since it shows how consistently the team finishes in the top 10.
Back to the "big fish in small pond" team that only races for points in small races. Usually a high Placement Percentile would indicate that the team would not place high in races since there are other teams that would place higher (ie. a PP of 25 would mean that on average 25% of the pool place higher than the team). Now if we see that this team has a large number of Top Ten Placements and a high average placement yet has a high PP, it would mean that logically the team has only raced in small races since like paddleho mentioned 10th in a festival of 50 boats is only a PP of 20 (Since most small races range around the 25 teams range, 10th place in one of these races would give a PP of 40). Like all thing statistical, the more data we get, the more reliable the interpretations.
Of course the main fact is that to even be considered, the team still needs to place in the Top Ten of at least one race. These standings are far from perfect, but it gives people an idea of where they're at and maybe even goals to achieve.
