Week#3 brings another 8000 games and 1300 additional teams who have reached the 5 game minimum and are now being ranked. We have reached 32k game scores versus 25k during the Week #3 rankings a year ago. What does all this mean?

This biggest impact of these numbers is that unless you are at the very top of the rankings, you moved down this week. Take the USA Bantam Tier 2 rankings, for example. We added 121 teams to the rankings this week and there are now 452 ranked teams. Last year we added the green up and red down arrows to signify movement from one week to the next. These are great little indicators, but when we are adding handfuls or dozens of teams to the rankings, these indicators can be misleading. I strongly encourage you to compare your team to others in general or others in your league from one week to the next.

The upcoming weekend is the US Columbus Day holiday (big in the Northeast) and Canadian Thanksgiving. Great tournament weekends like this one are a good opportunity to get games into the system that continue to help us compare different groups of teams to one another. They are also an opportunity to incorrectly identify an opponent and incorrectly skew the rankings. If you plan on submitting games after the weekend, we strongly encourage you to understand the exact identity of your opponents. Regardless, best of luck this weekend!