IRB World Rankings 'Analysis'
As a geek, and with all the excitement over the Rugby World Cup in recent weeks, I have been looking at every bit of info I can about it. Stats can be amazingly interesting.
The key stat for any rugby fan is the world rankings. The way this is calculated is quite complex and is designed to give a mathematical representation of the performance of each team over the years.
To summarize the way they do it .
Step One: Check pre match ratings
Step Two: Allow for home advantage
Step Three: Calculate the Rating Gap
Step Four: Check the possible Core Rating Changes
Step Five: Apply weighting factors
It is great, but I was disappointed by the 'Analysis' offered. I was hoping to see great charts show the points changes over the years. Instead it, rather bluntly, gave only the position ranking changes over the years. Not that interesting.
The first thing that came to my head is to do it myself and that is what I intend to do.
I could not find a link to any raw data but they do offer up an archive of the rankings going back to 2004 when they were introduced.
My approach will be to extract the numbers from the archive using a script that will cycle through the dates and grab the countries and their ranking values for each day going back to 2004 and convert it from html tables to csv.
I then intend to use Googles public data explorer http://www.google.com/publicdata/home to create visualisations of the data and also use their existing Geo data to add mapping and population data to the mix.
Will post the result here when done.