Deconstructing the NWLA Rankings and Our Place In Them
Written by Josh Smith
Many in the league follow the rankings and I generally tweet the new rankings weekly on Twitter or post them on Facebook so everyone can stay current on the status of our good teams on the national stage. But a lot of you may not realize or fully appreciate how the rankings work. Like any rankings system it's not perfect and it's not the first rankings system for this sport but it's been the most fair and longest running rankings system the sport has ever had. It was started in 2006 by a man named John Converse who commissioned a league in Rhode Island called the Rock Hill Wiffleball League. Once his league folded he continued to follow leagues and saw that there was a lack of structure or community among leagues and the NWLA was born. He began ranking teams in 2006 and has been doing it for almost 20 weeks a year every year since then. The fact that one man does almost everything on that website is amazing and his rankings and articles have brought together over almost 100 leagues over that time. So if you find yourself not agreeing with the rankings, that's fine, but please do try to appreciate them.
This year the league gained much more respect in terms of national rankings. Last year we only had a few teams make it into the rankings during the season but never more than two at the same time. I believe Beaver Fever were ranked early in the season but didn't stay for long. Then Maroon Squad and Holy Balls rose in the rankings and stayed there the rest of the year. Maroon Squad topped out at #2 in the rankings before getting their first loss of the season to the Pink Penguins. Up to that point that was the highest ranking a team in this league had ever earned in the National Wiffle League Association rankings. Holy Balls spent time in the lower 20s but ultimately drifted to #44 by the end of the season.
2013 was a landmark year for the league. In case you don't know, the NWLA Rankings are split into two categories. The first category is for "large leagues" (leagues with 6 or more teams) and the other category is "small leagues" (leagues with 5 or fewer teams). An easy way to understand the system is to compare it to NCAA college football rankings. You have your division 1A and 2A schools. So it's sort of like that. This division is to keep the big fish out of a small pond and vice versa. The large league division rankings system ranks the top 50 but the small league division ranks only 25 teams. There are more "large" leagues than small so getting more than a couple teams in the rankings is rare.
2012 was our first year and we only had 5 teams so we started out in the small league division rankings. Our league champion, Beaver Fever went 12-1 all year (much shorter season that year) and ended the season ranked #2. The Honey Badgers finished as #15 with a 7-4 record.
The 2012 and 2013 season never featured us having more than two teams ranked at any given time. Only now in the 12th week of the 2014 rankings do we finally have three teams simultaneously ranked. The Breaking Balls are holding strong to #6 for the third week in a row. Sit On My Base continue to fluctuate in the rankings dropping to #41 (they were #22 the previous week). And for the first time all year the Honey Badgers make their debut in the rankings at #38. The reason for finally entering the fold is most likely because of the fact they won the league championship. This week the league has made history by having three teams ranked at the same time. So we've reached a new level! We used to be charmander now we are charmeleon. But what will it take for us to reach charizard status?
The NWLA rankings are not unlike the NCAA college football rankings in many ways. For example, leagues with more teams are more favored over smaller leagues. So you can think of leagues like Home Run League: Twin Cities and Potomac Wiffle League as the Big 12 and SEC. This type of logic is used in the rankings because it's typical for bigger leagues to have more competition and therefore teams that finish in the top portion of their respective standings deserve recognition. That's a valid rationale and it's for that reason that I think it's amazing that the Breaking Balls were ranked number one at all (for two weeks in a row earlier this year). If our league keeps growing perhaps we will reach the same level as HRL:TC and the PWL but it will take time to get there.
Our league has come a long way in three short years. Our first season only had five teams, and the next summer we expanded to six. Last fall we grew to seven and this spring we had eight teams develop. Fall Ball is showing promise of new teams joining us. Next year could feature 10 or 12 teams if all goes well. As we grow our chances of having 3, 4 or even 5 teams in the rankings go up. But for now we are an 8-team league and we are more along the lines of the PAC-12 or maybe Big 10 at this point. Hey, at least we aren't the Sun Belt. So as much as some of you reading this think Breaking Balls deserve to be #1 indefinitely or we should have more teams in rankings, please take that comparison to heart.
The rankings generally favor the more heavily populated regions of the country as well. Some of you may realize the vastness of the NWLA. There are 72 leagues and 523 teams total in the association. There are four divisions: East, Midwest, South, and West. The East and Midwest regions feature about 75% of the leagues in the country so it's logical that teams in those regions receive about 90% of the love in the rankings. If you're interested in how many leagues and teams are in each region, here is the break down:
East: 30 leagues | 218 teams
Midwest: 24 leagues | 174 teams
South: 12 leagues | 80 teams
West: 6 leauges | 51 teams
If you take that knowledge and look at the Top 50 teams of the large league rankings you will now have a better understanding of the rankings system. There are 5 teams from Potomac Wiffle League represented and 5 from Home Run League: Twin Cities. Each of those leagues have about 20+ teams in their league. Other leagues like Kalamazoo Wiffle League and Wiffle in Southeast Michigan have 3 teams in the rankings. WSEM has 10 teams in their league while Kalamazoo has 16. The fact that we have 3 teams in the rankings as well is pretty amazing. But of the 50 teams presently in the rankings, 22 are from the East, 20 from the Midwest, 6 from the South, and only 1 from the West. We represent half of southern teams in the rankings because there are only 3 leagues in the South region that have 6 or more teams in their league. The West is a struggling region with a high turnover rate with leagues and most of them have five teams or fewer. The South region, our region, used to be smaller as well. 12 teams is the largest amount of leagues in our region to ever exist at one time that I am aware of. The region gained 3 or 4 new league this year alone so hopefully this is a trend we can see continue so that the South can even out the rankings.
Another issue with the rankings is that there is no uniformity of seasons. Leagues start and end their seasons at different times. For instance, our league has one of the earliest starts in the country. So we are almost halfway through our season before the first week of the rankings come out on the website. Its for that reason that some of our teams start out very high on the rankings. As the summer rolls by other seasons begin and our teams either hold steady their position in the rankings or they start to fall. There is also no uniform amount of games to a league's season. So you'll have an 18-2 team from one league sometimes ranked over a 14-0 team from another league. The start time and length of seasons will always vary and it's because of this reason that the rankings can be change A LOT from week to week. Sit On My Base have been ranked as high as 14 and as low as 43. Every week they typically go up and down. Their latest movement in the rankings saw them drop from 22 to 41.
The aforementioned issues really bring the rankings down and then there's the level of competition. Some leagues pitch fast, others slow and many leagues provide game video so that we can see how competitive they are but unfortunately there are several that do not offer that perspective. It's at this point that I cannot help but wonder how long it takes John to come up with his rankings. Surely it's a grueling progress that is full of second guesses and gut feelings. It's not a precise exercise because the leagues are not precise themselves. Any flaw in the rankings is a direct reflection from flawed leagues. Often times we will see a team from a league that has almost no competition shoot up in the rankings because they are whipping up on everyone. This was the case with Maroon Squad last year. Then you have legitimately good teams like WSEM's El Diablos that are ranked #21 because they have a handful of losses from other pretty good teams in the league. In this regard parity is not rewarded with good rankings.
But whatever the flaws with the rankings system and the leagues that make it so, it's vital to remember that the rankings do matter, but at the same time don't matter. It's something to talk about at the water cooler at work with guys on your team or in your league. It's not a make or break decision the guy makes on whether or not you get ranked. The fact it exists at all is pretty cool. Could it be more efficient? Yes. But that will never happen while leagues continue to start and stop all over the place and play various amounts of games during the season. How could you clearly and fairly rank teams in that scenario? So my request is to take the rankings for what it is and not take it too seriously.
Perhaps we can get leagues to cooperate with a more uniform season-length and start date to make it a little more fair but that's a tall order. Also, the thought of personally ranking 75 teams each week gives me a headache. Maybe he would be willing to share the load with a handful of other guys and have something like the "coaches poll" rankings at some point to take a lot of guess-work out of the rankings. Regardless of how the rankings evolve, I am glad they exist and am happy that we have reached a new milestone regarding them.
