Elo rating
A running team strength rating that rises after wins against strong opponents and falls after losses to weak ones.
Elo was designed for chess and adapts cleanly to team sports. Each team carries a single rating; after every game the winner takes points from the loser, and the size of the transfer depends on how surprising the result was. Beating a much stronger team moves the rating far more than beating a weaker one.
Sports variants add home advantage constants, margin-of-victory adjustments so blowouts count for more than one-point wins, and between-season regression toward the mean to reflect roster turnover.
Elo is cheap, interpretable and a stubbornly hard baseline. Any more complex model should be required to beat it before it is trusted.
Related terms
See it applied
Every published call on AI4Gameday carries a stated confidence and is graded in public once the game is final.