Division 2 Power Ranking: Heading into the NASL Fall Season Edition
The Gold Cup took a toll on some USL and NASL clubs, but now both leagues are back in league play for the back half of the season. Is there a new leader?
It’s that time again. Both the NASL and USL saw a healthy amount of their players appear in the Gold Cup, some of them even putting in stellar performances. Their play is just a sign of the improvement from both leagues over the last few seasons. Now, the NASL gets ready to head into their Fall Season while USL teams continue to push for a playoff spot.
The Open Cup matches and their weight in our formula are now an afterthought for everyone except NASL Spring Season Champions, Miami FC, and USL side FC Cincinnati, who will finally meet in Cup play next Wednesday (Mother Nature permitting).
That being said, let’s dive into this fresh batch of rankings, as the month of July shook up our rankings quite a bit.
Rating Method
Feel free to skip this if you don’t care. Also, feel free to double-check our work.
First, we asked ourselves the question; how could we quantify what makes a soccer team better than another? What stats or figures would you include? We considered all meaningful competitions Division 2 clubs participate in (i.e. the US Open Cup, Canadian Championship, and Caribbean Cup), and came up with the following formula,
(Total Goals Scored)-(Total Goals Conceded)+(Shutouts)+(Comeback Wins)+(Adjusted Road Points)-(Adjusted Dropped Home Points)= Index total.
Then, we took the index total and dived it by an adjusted match rate, to level a number of matches played by each team, for a final adjusted index total.
We used the 589 regular season matches from USL and both the Spring and Fall NASL seasons last year to adjust our point totals. Those matches saw 264 home wins, 157 draws, and 168 away wins. Considering each team’s total games across all competitions brought the average match count for each team to be just under 20 matches, which was used to find the adjusted match rate.
All stats are up to date as of July 28, 2017.