ELO Scoreboard for TYFA

During the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with the Texas Youth Football Association (TYFA) to develop an ELO scoreboard, through a Sports Analytics Seminar I took at Trinity University.

TYFA needed a seeding system that could break the ties in their record-based rankings. For example, a number of teams might go 5-3 or 6-2, and there would not be enough playoff spots for all of them. They presented even more challenges because they wanted to encourage specific competitive ideals:

- First, to further discourage teams from forfeiting games (without incidentally punishing or disproportionately rewarding the 'winner' of such games)

- Second, to keep winners of talent-imbalanced games from "running up the score" in an effort to pad their point differential.

ELO was chosen because it can be generally straightforward as a ranking system, but has been adaptable to a variety of contexts--FiveThirtyEight's NFL ELO model is a good example of how malleable ELO can be. It was also important (for the coaches and parents of the athletes) that results be immediately available, which kept me from using other methods, such as Oracle.

Solving these issues was very interesting and the project was surprisingly fun to work on. In the interest of full transparency, I was lucky to find a single-game ELO function (which I lightly modified) available on Stack Overflow. Everything else was coded from scratch in R.

Contact me at ty@tykrieger.com if you have any questions, or for a coding sample.

Have a great day!