Those Avida rankings are very interesting, but I agree they don't mean much in their current format.
Maybe if the idea was tailored and more was taken into account, they could hold some sway. Something like the snapshot also relating to the same time in the previous season might help.

As for the duel meet rankings, they've pretty much become a farce. I've spoken to a bunch of coaches who said that when they started out they tried to keep track of times and so on, and it was (obviously) too much to do.

Now days they said they sort of look around if they have time and take an educated guess. A little scary, but maybe there's no other way....

I saw something once which had a site that attempted to take a team's best current times and (theoretically) pit them against other teams' best and in that way come up with an "in season" ranking. I don't know what happened to that, but it was a fair idea...

[This message has been edited by Aquabullet (edited 1/27/2011 8:14a).]

'Now days they said they sort of look around if they have time and take an educated guess. A little scary, but maybe there's no other way....'

...which is exactly what any poll in any sport pretty much is.

Having a ranking like that would be great Bullet, if you set up "hypothetical" duels where you have everyones best times from duel meets it would make for a great ranking, but at the same time that still wouldn't account for teams tapering for duel meets

swim-rankings.com used to do rankings based on hypothetical dual meets like that. unfortunately, that site hasn't been updated since february of 09

I've toyed with that idea before...what makes it really hard to do is how many different events that can be swum.

Also agreed that when you can compare it to other seasons, it can become more useful.

I think it's more useful as a tool for analysis. Swimming is moving more and more statistical every year, and I'm sure there's at least some coaches who track these same things for their own teams. Of course, there's some coaches who have the attitude of "I know everything, the way I'm doing things is the right and only way I'm ever going to do things," but an enterprising coach might at least attempt to draw some valuable conclusions about training styles from these stats.