Today sees our English launch of the NextGenXV Table, which uses the ELO Ranking System to determine positions in the table.

Every week since the start of the season we have been logging every 1^st XV result in England and, as the second half of term gets underway, we can now make public the impact of those results on our rankings. The table will be updated and expanded upon each week, with the aim being to give you a fairly accurate picture as to where each teams sits in the overall picture of the school game in England.

The hope is that this will be able to answer the age-old questions at the end of the season; who is the best, and how did we do.

Even better though, it will do so in a way that does not reward huge one-sided scorelines and actively encourages games against competitors on your level. In essence, a big school beating a small school will earn precious little on the table from it, but if the small school beats the big school, their reward will be high.

Each week the Table will change as teams results directly impact upon it, so keep visiting to check up on how you are doing in the table!

Week 1 Top 25:

Of course there will be many questions, and as you can see things are extremely tight, we have debated long and hard here at NextGenXV over exactly how to produce this Table, why we should produce it, and how it will work.

So below are a few answers to those key questions:

Why do we need another table?

There is no perfect system for determining ‘the best’ or even how good any individual team’s season has been, but there are some that are better than others.

For a number of year’s we have had to field questions from disgruntled readers about schools’ positioning in tables or entrance, or lack of, to knockout competitions, which the largest complaints tending to be that current options are either misrepresentative or unfair.

As that noise has built we faced a question, do we sit on the sidelines and add our voice to that, or do we try to offer a solution. We opted to offer a solution and while it is not perfect (can there even be a perfect solution?) it offers a pretty accurate reflection of where each team sits.

How does it work?

The ELO rating was invented by Arpad Elo and it’s use has mainly been in chess. However the system has been adapted for use in American Football, Rugby League and since the end of the 2018 World Cup FIFA have used ELO as their ranking system.

ELO is used to predict the outcome of a game essentially, every team is given a pre-season numbered rating These are done in increments of 10 points, the team that has the most potential and toughest schedule will be assigned a pre-season rating of 1,490. In other words a Top 5 would have a pre-season ELO rating as follows:

1: 1,490

2: 1,480

3: 1,470

4: 1,460

5: 1,450

This essentially means that we believe that there is a 55% chance that the number 1 listed pre-season team would beat the number 5 pre-season listed team.

Teams are allocated pre-season points until we reach number 50 on the table who are assigned 1,000 points meaning we believe our pre-season #1 team would have a 95% chance of beating the #50 ranked pre-season team.

Teams ranked 51 – 100 are assigned 950 points with any team outside of the Top 100 starting the season off with a 800 point rating.

When two teams of an equal rating face off against one another it is expected that should they play on multiple occasions they would win an equal number of times.

When it comes to different ratings, the odds widen and therefore the winner stands to gain fewer points for a win and a loss could punish them badly. So for example a difference of 10 ratings points means that there is a 51% chance of the higher rated team winning, 50 points 57%, 100 points 64%, right through to a 96% chance of a team winning when they are rated 500 points higher.

So every game that is played, there is a relative ‘expected’ outcome teams therefore accrue or lose points in the table relative to their expected performance.

How did we judge our pre-season rating?

There were four criteria:

• Last year’s 1^st XV performances
• Last year’s Colts performances
• Strength of fixture list
• Incoming players (i.e. if a team had a poor Colts season but has four England internationals joining, it would be logical to assume that their expected performance will be higher than it was at Colts level the year prior)

What if the pre-season rating is wrong?

The beauty of the ELO system is that teams are very quickly reverted to a ‘true’ position even if their pre-season rating was out. If a team was falsely lowly rated and is now competing well against top rated teams they will rapidly rise, and vice-versa. We also have the ability to adjust the pre-season rating if someone is clearly out of position.

What is the point?

There are two main points:

• To provide a solution that our readers have been calling our for over several years.
• To add another layer of fun. School sport is meant to be fun, hopefully this will add to that fun as teams can see their efforts each and every week reflected on the table.

It’s not about elitism or making teams having a hard time feel worse, indeed we will not be publishing the lower end of the table for precisely that reason. It is about adding to the fun, adding another competitive edge, and driving engagement and participation in schools rugby through another avenue for promotion.

Does it encourage a ‘winning is all that counts’ attitude?

In short, no.

There is no reward for thumping victories, nor for beating teams that, frankly, you should be comfortably beating.

The system rewards positive results against teams you should be competitive with, or against teams you are not expected to be able to compete all that closely with. You cannot ‘game the system’ by hammering teams below your level.