Folks I need some help. If I have 3 teams that have played equal number of games (say 10) and I need put them in order for finish how would ties effect the standings. I have 1 team with record of 5 wins 3 losses and 2 ties. Another with 5 wins 4 losses and 1 tie. Final team is 5 wins 5 losses. Who ranks where?
Thanks for your help.

Count the ties as half win-half loss. So the first team would be 6-4, the second would be 5.5 - 5.5, and the last would be 5-5.

Ahh.... The perennial question: what good is a tie?

Rich's system works well, but there are others.

You could do like football does, you would toss out ties in calculating a win percentage:

5-3-2 = .625 (5/8)
5-4-1 = .556 (5/9)
5-5-0 = .500 (5/10)

Or you could use the NHL method of awarding points for wins and losses (2 for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss).

5-3-2 = 12 pts
5-4-1 = 11 pts
5-5-0 = 10 pts

No matter how you slice it, the team with the fewest losses and most ties (in this scenario) will be on top.

Now the real question is this: What are the teams' actual records?

-Craig

This needs to be worked out before the season because different systems can result in different final results.

We had a situation where depending on who you talked to in the league, there were different ways of handling ties. And the final results were close enough that one team was the 1st place winner under some systems and another team was the 1st place team under other systems.

So both teams got 1st place.

I will never understand why these situations aren't settled BEFORE the season starts.

The league said that next year, they'll use winning percentage as the determining factor. But because a forfeit is an unearned win, they don't feel that forfeits should count. So the decision was made that all forfeits are removed from the standings as if they were never played.

So I told them if I win my first game next season I plan on forfeiting the remaining 19 games. That way I'll have a perfect winning percentage.

They're re-evaluating this idea.

The team with most wins is 1st place. If two or more teams have equal wins then the team with fewest losses wins first place. Then two teams with 5-4-1 and 4-3-3 records would have a winner, vs still being tied with 1/2 game for wins formula.