Exploring Parity for the 2019 - 2024 Seasons [v0.8]

College - Mens
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WPEX is maintained by Gold Bar Sports Tech—we’re a small team focused on tools for the water polo community. Over the past few weeks, our summer intern Luka and I built a site to explore how rankings translate into actual match outcomes.

We pulled matches from the 2019-2024 seasons and used CWPA-style rankings to look at how often different ranks win when matched up (ie #1 vs #3, or #5 vs #7). Then we visualized all those results across five fairly complete seasons.

A few things stood out:

  • There’s surprising parity near the top: matchups between ranks 1 through 4 are often toss-ups.
  • Some ranks (like #7) show much more predictable outcomes against teams above and below them.
  • It’s not a bug that you see two #1’s facing off—CWPA rankings allow for ties.

:link: You can check it out here: https://wp-rankings.vercel.app/

We’re still working on:

  1. Page loading speed (be patient, it’ll get there!)
  2. Adding more data
  3. Polishing the UI, but we wanted to share what we’ve got so far.
  4. Making the chart play nice on a small screen

Big thanks to Luka for pulling this together. If you have feedback, see anything weird, or just want to talk about the data, we’d love to hear from you.

4 Likes
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This is pretty awesome. Thank you for making it available publicly.

2 Likes
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Of course! When we were in “the lab” making this, I was very eager to share this.

We’re going to reach back a few more seasons to get a better sample size. There’s a few areas where the matchups are a little sparse.

From there, we’ll take a look a the women’s seasons (and potentially other sports) to compare parity trends across different landscapes.

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Fun data.

1 v 4 is a toss up. 2&3 crush the 4 seed.

5

thanks for sharing!

would be curious if you would be wiling to share the data loaded from MongoDB. I suspect that Luka [or someone] has developed an automated way to scrape results but it would be interesting to see the raw data, thanks anyway!

6

Some of that is “secret sauce” for us, but I’ll follow up on DM to figure out if we can help you :slight_smile:

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A few updates here:

  1. Pulled in more data for earlier men’s seasons
  2. Begin adding data for the women’s seasons
  3. Added line graph to track individual teams rankings over time (scroll to the bottom of the page to check it out)

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