Playoff Success Rating

How do you quantify playoff success? That’s a question five BL users pondered a few months back. The goal was to create a Playoff Success Rating (PSR), a term coined by Phil, and evaluate each user’s success across BL history.

I tasked Phil, Connor, Lucky, and Ben with coming up with a formula based on how far a user went in a given season. For example, Phil valued a WC exit at 1 point, DR at 3, CCG at 7, SB loss at 15, and a SB win at 40 points. These values were added over all seasons to produce a user’s overall PSR.

Other users, such as Connor, weighed each cycle differently based on his perceived difficulty. The only other model to value cycles differently was mine, and admittedly I went a little try-hard to come up with quantified cycle weights. Alas, they both accomplish the same thing.

Because everyone’s weights were different numbers, the models were hard to compare. Which is why I added my own twist called NPSR, which forces every model’s average to be 1.

Here are the five NPSR models across six cycles:

The first thing you notice is how far of an outlier Austin is. His PSR is basically six times the average. The true BL GOAT.
2-4 gets interesting as Morty, Cody, and myself share these spots on all models.

One thing Phil was very interested is was what he called PSR+, which is PSR divided by total seasons played. The idea was to measure how impactful a contender has been while they were in the league. To remove some outliers, we only include users that have been here 10+ seasons.

And finally, here is the aggregate total of all five models. Consider this the “All-Time BCS Ranking” for playoff performance.