Power Ranking Rankings: BNN by Season Edition

By IfhBiff (@Gizmo aka Ifhbiff on Discord) 

Next in our series of articles that have come from data I accumulated from 19 seasons of BNN Power Rankings: This time around, we shine the light right back on BNN itself: I rank each BNN Power Rankings by overall accuracy, biggest misses, hubris meter and other factors to canonically say: What season was the best for BNN’s Power Rankings? They will be broken down and ranked overall, with categories that indicate just how far away BNN was for the season. 

HOW TO READ EACH SEASON CHART

Each team’s bar indicates the gap between the BNN prediction and the team’s actual finish (Green if the team did better; red if the team did worse). If a tie-breaker was needed, the lower number of NonWins was used; after that, teams were co-ranked as a tie. Divine Favor is not used) A checkmark indicates that BNN correctly estimated the team’s final rank; otherwise, the number and directional arrow shown is the difference between prediction and actual.

First up, a season that defies any other categories.

WHERE WAS BNN? NULLIFIED. 

Season 24

Reviewers: 17
Average Differential: 9.18
Biggest Miss: Flowers (+23)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 0
Hubris Level: EXTREME

What a mess. I mean, the season was literally incomplete. And really, other than the Flowers (who so badly wanted to have that +23 BNN Ranking claim to fame), who was even paying attention to the standings anyway? There were a few other things going on in Season 24. (Like previous articles, DNF indicates Did Not Finish… for obvious reasons)

OK, with that out of the way, let’s look at some actual BNN distances …

WHERE WAS BNN? IN OUTER SPACE.

(Hey, I think we just passed Oops! All Keepers!)

Season 12

Reviewers: 9
Average Differential: 5.30
Biggest Miss: Pies (+16)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: Low

That +16 for the Pies matched the Biggest Miss record at the time (originally set when the Lovers finished -16 in Season 8.) That record doesn’t last long though (see next chart). Season 12 was the first time that writers, outside of the BNN founding members, were invited to submit our rankings— one of those new clueless newbs was yours truly. I was only 2 off the average Differential; high hopes for a prediction career that clearly got worse as time went on. But right or wrong, we were mostly in agreement… This is the 3rd least Hubristic rankings ever.

Season 14

Reviewers: 23
Average Differential: 5.42
Biggest Miss: Crabs (-20)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 3
Hubris Level: Moderate

And there goes that 16 off-Differential record. The Crabs came back in Season 13, outperformed our expectations and went right back to winning Championships… So why shouldn’t we expect more Claws Up? Because we hadn’t learned our lesson about Flinch with the Shoe Thieves, that’s why. And on the other claw hand, we also had Magic Goo: there is already an entire article concerning why we were wrong about the Magic. 

Season 8

Reviewers: 5
Average Differential: 4.20
Biggest Miss: Lovers (-16)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: Moderate

And there’s the original 16 off. These big differentials alone didn’t knock these seasons down this far, but they certainly didn’t help. And this chart is weirder than most… usually, you can see that high ranked teams drop and low-rank teams climb, but here, BNN still managed to underestimate a bunch of the top 10 because the Lovers and Millennials vacated their slots completely. First of the “Obviously, Crabs #1” seasons.

Season 23

Reviewers: 21
Average Differential: 6.13
Biggest Miss: Georgias (-19)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 4
Hubris Level: High

What the heck happened in this chart?! The only reason this season isn’t even further higher into space is that we managed to randomly nail the Fridays and the Magic, to go along with the obvious TigerBeam bookends. If you read the Team Estimatable Editions of this series, you know the Georgias have done a good job of confounding BNN in just a short window of time. 

WHERE WAS BNN? SPLORTS BAR ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN.

(Where many bad fan opinions are born.)

Season 13

Reviewers: 14
Average Differential: 5.13
Biggest Miss: Firefighters (+12), Sunbeams (-12)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 1
Hubris Level: Moderate

Fun fact about this season: If you flip the Sunbeams with the Firefighters, and flip the Pies for the Steaks … then we have 5 correct teams instead of 1, and we’d have the closest rankings in BNN history. Both of those pairs of teams just switched places. I’m going to chalk it up to all of them jumping into Secret Base and holding hands.

Season 21

Reviewers: 12
Average Differential: 5.21
Biggest Miss: Breath Mints (-15)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 3
Hubris Level: High

It doesn’t really help a season’s total score if we successfully identified the 23rd and 24th ranked teams. That’s like knowing which kid is going to get picked last on the sandlot. Really, this season just shows us dropping a handful of specific teams like Traitor Concrete Shoes, and the rest of the league generally stepping up to take those places.

Season 10

Reviewers: 4
Average Differential: 3.70
Biggest Miss: Sunbeams (-12)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 1

Hubris Level: Low

It may be *slightly* harder to predict the #1 team… but it wasn’t from season 6 through 10. And I’m going to claim that we actually knew the Sunbeams would be the Park Walkin’, Sun 2 Smiling machine they’d become in Season 11, but we just called it a little early. Yeah. Oregon Psychics, that’s it. 

Season 19

Reviewers: 4
Average Differential: 5.67
Biggest Miss: Firefighters (+16)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 5
Hubris Level: High

How do we manage to exactly predict 5 teams, but still have this chart go all over the place? I’ll let you in on a little secret… *whisper* This is what the chart would look like if season 19 produced Wins instead of Unwins. BNN was left with a quandary on this Election day… how to rank the teams? What if some reviewers went for the worst on top but others went for the best on top? It’d be a mess! It’d be inaccurate! It would be… well, pretty much not that different from other seasons. If I ranked this based on the Unwin version of the final standings, then Season 19’s Differential would be 10.17; almost double the next season down. And really, we “correctly” ranked zero. So consider yourself lucky you’re even in this category, season 19. 

Season 6

Reviewers: 2
Average Differential: 4.35
Biggest Miss: Breath Mints (+14)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 3
Hubris Level: Low

If you haven’t been around this long, have you ever gone back and looked at BNN’s very first Power Rankings? It’s ADORABLE! Just the original two writers, putting two lists together in a classic low-scale website chart. No explanations. Very little Hubris variation (oooh, two teams were listed 7 slots apart. The controversy!) And my favorite part, this little quote here:

“The Season 5 Election brought unprecedented change and chaos to Blaseball as we know it”

Were we ever really so innocent?

WHERE WAS BNN? TAILGATING IN THE PARKING LOT.

(Ya know … grilling, doing Ollies, practicing Necromancy. Pretty standard stuff.)

Season 11

Reviewers: 2
Average Differential: 4.55
Biggest Miss: Sunbeams (+10), Breath Mints (-10), Pies (-10)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: Nonexistent

Before the UnWins of Season 19 and the Nullifications of season 24, there was the Sun 2/Black Hole Season 11. Win Objects were a thing for the first time, but we had no idea it was coming. The Crabs just Ascended, we were first still realizing how much Flinch hurt the Shoe Thieves, and the offensive onslaught was just about to hit its apex. And there, standing up against the tides like Immateria, with only their Egos keeping them on base, were Cal and Firewall. They went into the first Grand Siesta knowing that they couldn’t stand much longer. BNN was about to come back bigger and stronger, much like Blaseball itself. 

Season 22

Reviewers: 11
Average Differential: 4.25
Biggest Miss: Georgias (+12), Mechanics (+12)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: EXTREME

We flipped the Breath Mints and the Crabs, but to be fair:

– They were both in the same division, so that’s a bold call in the first place.

– They finished with the same W/L record; the Crabs only won out from bonus Win Objects.

– The Breath Mints stomped the Crabs in the Mild League finals anyway, on their way to the Championship.

Season 18

Reviewers: 22
Average Differential: 3.96
Biggest Miss: Flowers (+12)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: Moderate

Leave it to the Flowers and the Crabs to muck up what otherwise would be a stellar prediction season for BNN. The threeson before this is (spoiler alert) arguably the Power Rankings’ high watermark; this is where the leaks started to show.

Season 20

Reviewers: 16
Average Differential: 4.13
Biggest Miss: Lift (+14)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 3
Hubris Level: Moderate

Season 20 was the first to bring us the Underbracket. We predicted it would be owned by the Lift or the Wild Wings. The Lift decided they wanted to be a good team and jumped up 14 slots, then got picked for the Underbracket Wild Card, and had their showdown with the Wings anyway. Then, in the end, the Wild Wings blew it and gave the first-ever Underchampionship to the Lovers. 

WHERE WAS BNN? IN THE BALLPARK.

(You see what we did there? ‘Cause that’s a real phrase. Ballpark. Yeah.)

Season 17

Reviewers: 21
Average Differential: 3.54
Biggest Miss: Magic (+11)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 2
Hubris Level: Moderate

Yellowstone Redux! That’s the big miss here in season 17. It didn’t have the emphasis that the original Magic warcry of “WHERE IS BNN?!” the first time, but that’s probably because the Magic were busy mourning their own; Season 17 is when they were Redacted down to looking like a social-distancing clubhouse. They had so few players that they could all stand six feet apart. One other Magic note for this season BNN Board Member Dan ranked the Magic #2 in Season 14 and was very proud of his Hubris, but the BNN contributor who ranked them the highest here? Why, it was Mister Joey T Badger! This season, the T stood for “That’s a good prediction!”

Season 7

Reviewers: 3
Average Differential: 3.65
Biggest Miss: Wild Wings (+12)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 3
Hubris Level: Low

Fortunately for Season 7, Forsythia’s “Rankings based on Who I Want to Smooch” were not averaged into the final results on BNN, or this would be a very different blurb. But other than that little fun aside, this season stands out as the standard-bearer for “Pretty Good in all aspects.” It’s not the top three of any of the metrics I used here, but it is no lower than 6th for any metric, which is the defining story of Season 7: That +12 for the Wild Wings. And lost in that bit of history is the Breath Mints also trying to pull off a Cinderella story. 

Season 16

Reviewers: 29
Average Differential: 3.08
Biggest Miss: Lovers (+9), Tigers (-9)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 1
Hubris Level: High

TWENTY NINE Reviewers And we still managed to do a pretty dang good job! Sure, that Hubris meter is pretty high; some of us were all over the map. But BNN really grew into its own right here, and I think this is the point where this article should acknowledge the hard-working Editors that compiled all our messy scribbled napkins and turned them into a working format that I was able to mold into these charts today. For this shining moment, BNN was in our hearts and in our minds. Also, the first of three seasons where the Biggest Miss was single digits (even if we did it twice).

Season 15

Reviewers: 23
Average Differential: 3.38
Biggest Miss: Breath Mints (+8), Dale (+8)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 1
Hubris Level: High

Story time: Between Seasons 14 and 15, there was an attempt (for reasons I still don’t fully understand today) to anonymize the Power Rankings. Instead of filling in our respective sheets, or the eventual community Google Sheet, the BNN Editors set up a Google entry form that put our rankings in. To this day, I can only identify each individual reviewer as whatever timestamp was associated with their entry. The idea was scrapped since we all had fun with what our individual hot takes were and the concept of Hubris as an artform was solidifying around Blaseball. But maybe, there was something to this anonymous thing. Without the need to get credit for our hot takes, we scored one of the most accurate Power Rankings in history. Only our inability to nail multiple exact rankings prevents this season from being a work of art.

What’s the lesson here? Hubris is good for the game, but maybe it’s bad for Power Rankings. We are all merely playing our roles, and we almost played them to perfection here, if not for one asterisk scenario.…

WHERE WAS BNN? ON THE MOUND, THROWING OUT THE FIRST PITCH.

(Camera flashes popping, BNN waving to the world… and it’s a perfect strike! OR WAS IT?)

Season 9

Reviewers: 1
Average Differential: 2.20
Biggest Miss: Millennials (-9)
Correctly Ranked Teams: 4
Hubris Level: N/A*

I mean, look at that beauty. Not only is that Average Differential the lowest, but it is SO low that the gap between this one and second best is larger than any other gap between two seasons, with the exception of Seasons 24 and 23.  Season 9 is also tied for the second most exact predictions (4), and tied for the second smallest Biggest Miss (by one slot). 

But this is Blaseball, so of course, any record stat comes with an asterisk.

*When I started this project, I went back through BNN’s Discord archives and found the links for several of the sheets we used. We found all of them… except season 9. Why was Season 9 so difficult to track down?  Well…

Which leaves me with no Hubris Level at all. Instead, I gave this season the maximum possible amount of Hubris.  What’s more hubristic than one person speaking for all of us?  And yet, even with that penalty… Season 9 wins.

So pour one out for Firewall Andrews, retired from blaseball reporting.  They alone managed to produce the truest Power Rankings that BNN has ever produced. When blaseball returns, BNN will go right back to the shenanigans. Because we are here to infotain you, because we love this splort of ours and because, Gods helps us, we do so love that tall drink of Hubris.