151-2008: Generalizing Google's PageRank to Rank National Football League Teams

The ranking of sports teams is of significant importance to those who are involved with or interested in the various professional and amateur leagues that exist around the world. We present a ranking algorithm that is simple to implement in SAS code and which gives results that are consistent with some of the best and most well-known computer methods for ranking sports teams. Whether you are trying to get an edge up on the office pool or to rank the teams for your daughter’s soccer league tournament, the techniques presented here will allow you to accomplish this easily. Our method, inspired by the Google’s PageRank algorithm, uses ideas from the PageRank algorithm to rank teams based on their schedule results. We include SAS/IML code implementation of each of the algorithms at the end of the relevant section.