re: Congrats UF Ladies Gymnastics

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This is the major problem with gymnastics. How in the world they decided to make wins and losses unimportant is a freaking mystery.

Look at the teams UF has beaten. They should be #1. Here's a pretty good article about the stupidity of it all.

Gynanstics rankings are stupid

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I don't follow college gymnastics at all, so I'm going to take a guess at how it works and why and someone can correct me. What it looks like to me is that gymnastics, because they differ from most other sports in the sense that you're being measured by the actual quality of your performance rather than how you perform in direct competition, rely on a scoring system that is completely unrelated to the teams you happen to be sharing a gym with during a match. Most sports either have you competing head on with your opponent (football, tennis, basketball, etc) or competing simultaneously toward a mutual goal (swimming, track, etc.) Gymnastics, on the other hand, are about how well you perform personally regardless of how well others perform. So essentially, a gymnastics meet would be a convenient way to have multiple teams performing on the same day rather than an actual competition between said teams. That's why wins and losses are irrelevant.

(This scoring system would be much more appropriate to a sport like gymnastics than the more traditional "my team beat your team tonight" system would be. If one team barely "loses" to a team of future Olympic athletes 15 times with an average score of 197.8 to their average score of 198.2 while another team barely "wins" 15 times against a team of morbidly obese paraplegics with an average score of 32.1 to your opponent's average score of 30.7, the first team clearly the better team regardless of the W/L numbers. Or, to put it another way, going 9-3 in SEC football is better than going 12-0 in the Mountain West and nobody would dispute that. Since gymnastics isn't even played head-to-head like football is, it's that much more urgent that they eliminate the issue of quality of opponent from the equation.)

Ergo, it doesn't matter how tough the teams UF has "beaten" are...UF isn't actually competing directly against them. They're only competing in the same location on the same date. So if Team A has performed better on the average over the course of the season, losing to Team B on a given night won't change their relative rankings because the scoring is concerned with how good the team and individuals are overall, taking into account all of their performances (discarding outliers?) to get a more accurate measure of their actual ability rather than a snapshot of a given week. That, really, should be the goal of all sport rankings. How often have we bitched that losing a football game in November carries more weight than losing one in September? How many times have we questioned whether a team is being excessively punished for having a single bad game? The system described above fixes that problem, albeit in a method that isn't quite practical to apply to most sports.

Am I understanding the system correctly?