Moral Margin of Victory

[vick]

Last week, some of us here were kicking around how to account for margin of victory in computer rankings in a way that doesn't encourage poor sportsmanship. Well, the good folks at footballperspective.com, who know a heck of a lot more about the sport than I ever will, took a look at the problem and came up with what is (tentatively) called "moral margin of victory (http://www.footballperspective.com/moral-margin-of-victory/)," which basically takes the time in which the winning team's lead never fell below thresholds of 8 and 16 points into account, but doesn't provide any extra reward beyond that. Personally I think the refinements suggested in the comments (which, somewhat unusually for the internet, are worth reading IMO) which add in win probability make more conceptual sense, but I like that people are looking at the problem rather than either pretending that margin of victory is irrelevant (as if human voters don't look at it) or that the "convincingness" of a win is entirely determined by margin of victory.