Vikings Message Board.Com

Hi All,
I hadn't seen any scores from last weekend except the Vikings game which I watched. Today I decided to check the standings to see how the other teams in the division fared. So there is a 4 way 1-1 tie in the division. GB is listed 1st on at strib, espn, nfl, and cbs-- fine, they're 1-0 in the division, you can easily argue they are first. But 2 of the sites had Detroit 2 and Chi 3 while the other 2 had Chi2 and Det 3. All the sites had MN last.

Does anyone know how sites determine order this early in the season?

I would have thought they would have used standard tie-breaking rules. Head-to-Head first so clearly GB is ahead of CHI. Division 2nd, so I would expect to see CHI last as GB is +1.00, DET/MN are 0.000 and CHI is -1.00. Next is conference record-- GB/DET are both .500, CHI again is -1.0 and MN is 0.0.

I can kind of see why a conference win outweighs a Non-conference win so Det goes ahead of us. But what sort of a tie-breaker puts CHI ahead of us, much less #2?? Common opponents maybe? Just seems odd that the standings uniformally put MN last.

No biggie-- I'd put them last too because imo they should have managed a win last week, but objectively speaking, I'm not seeing the reason.

Any thoughts?

Honestly I doubt anyone is putting much thought into the rankings. The odds are so slim that they'll stay tied for very long (probably not even past this week) and it's so early that I doubt they're worried about working out tie-breakers, etc.

It wouldn't surprise me if the rankings were more opinion based than anything else.

Cliff wrote:Honestly I doubt anyone is putting much thought into the rankings. The odds are so slim that they'll stay tied for very long (probably not even past this week) and it's so early that I doubt they're worried about working out tie-breakers, etc.

It wouldn't surprise me if the rankings were more opinion based than anything else.

I doubt these days that those web pages have much if any human input at all. They pull the scores from an NFL database and some algorithm spits out standings. I would expect the algorithm to be unchanged all season long so it *ought* to account for tiebreakers, etc. even now, so that the right results show late in the season. I really doubt that someone is assigning slots.

Hmm.. It could be an alphabetical thing-- after 1-0 division puts GB first, Chi/Det/MN would be alphabetical. Those that went GB/Det/Chi/MN could have done conference record to put Det 2nd but still reverted alphbetic on Chi/MN since MN had neither a conference record nor a division record to compare against.

Logically the Vikings should be 2nd. The first tie breaker is divisional record. Chicago already has 1 loss in the division, which neither the Vikings nor Lions have, so theoretically, the Lions and Vikings have the upper hand over the bears because either team has the hypothetical potential to go undefeated in the division, which the Bears do not. The second tie breaker is conference record, where the Lions already have a loss to SF. So similarly the Vikings still have the potential to go undefeated in the conference, while the Lions do not.

Or at least that is the way I would look at it from a purely numbers based argument

Cliff wrote:Honestly I doubt anyone is putting much thought into the rankings. The odds are so slim that they'll stay tied for very long (probably not even past this week) and it's so early that I doubt they're worried about working out tie-breakers, etc.

It wouldn't surprise me if the rankings were more opinion based than anything else.

At this point, it is more or less, like splitting hairs on a bald man.

PsyDanny wrote:
At this point, it is more or less, like splitting hairs on a bald man.

Good one.