Player rating
Shortlistr College Impact (SCI)
Our headline player rating. SCI rolls every on-ball action a player makes — passes, shots, dribbles, defensive recoveries, set-piece deliveries — into a single 0–100 score that says how much that player actually moved their team toward winning.
What it measures
Goals and assists are loud but rare. SCI looks at the thousand small things in between — does this player advance the ball into dangerous areas? Do their defensive actions actually break the opponent's attacks? Does their finishing beat what an average player would do from the same situations? Every action is converted into the value it adds (or costs) and then aggregated.
How it's adjusted for the college game
A goal against a top-10 team is worth more than a goal against a #300 team. SCI explicitly accounts for the strength of the opponent on every action, the conference the match was played in, and the game state (winning, drawing, losing). College soccer has wide parity gaps — we don't pretend it doesn't.
What you'll see it on
Player profile pages show the 0–100 SCI and a tier label (Elite, Top 5%, etc.). The Top By Archetype board on the College Hub uses SCI to rank the leading player in every role. SCI rebuilds nightly from the prior day's matches.
Team rating
Shortlistr Team Strength
A 0–100 score for every NCAA D1 program, rebuilt nightly from every match in the season. Team Strength is what powers the rankings, the opponent adjustments inside SCI, and the strength-tier colour buckets you'll see across the site.
What it factors in
Match results (win/draw/loss), scoreline, home/away, expected goals (the quality of chances each side created and conceded), and — critically — the strength of the opponent. A draw against the #2 team is worth more than a win against #200.
Why it converges over time
Early in the season the score moves quickly as the model gets new evidence. By mid-season it settles. End-of-season Team Strength is what we use for ranking history and head-to-head comparisons.
How it's different from RPI
RPI (and selection-committee RPI variants) is built on win percentages and opponent win percentages. It's a record-based metric. Team Strength is a quality-based metric — it looks at how teams actually played, not just whether they won. Two teams can have identical records but different Team Strength scores because one of them out-shot, out-chanced, or beat better opposition along the way.
Conference rating
Shortlistr Conference Strength
Aggregated Team Strength rolled up to the conference level. Used to compare leagues, weight cross-conference matches, and contextualise where a player's minutes are coming from.
How it's built
Average Team Strength across all D1 members of the conference, with adjustments for non-conference results against teams outside the league. Conferences with fewer than four D1 members are excluded from the public rankings (we filter them out where you see top-conference lists on the hub).
Why it matters for player evaluation
A player's stat line in a top-quartile conference is doing different work than the same line in a bottom-quartile conference. SCI's opponent-strength adjustment uses Team Strength directly, so the conference effect is baked in at the action level — not bolted on later.
Player roles
Player Archetypes
Every D1 player is classified into one of ~30 playing-style archetypes — Inside Forward, Inverted Full Back, Deep Playmaker, Sweeper Keeper, and so on. The archetype answers "what kind of player is this?" before SCI answers "how good are they?".
How the classification works
Each archetype has a fingerprint — a set of on-ball and off-ball behaviours that define it. A player is matched to the archetype whose fingerprint best fits the actions they actually take during their minutes. Position alone isn't enough; two centre-backs can be doing wildly different jobs.
Why we use it
Recruiting a striker isn't really about "a striker" — it's about whether you need a Target Forward, a Pressing Forward, a Poacher, or an Inside Forward to fit your system. The Top By Archetype board on the College Hub gives you the leading SCI score in each role so you can shortlist by playing style, not just by position.
How often it recomputes
Archetypes update at the end of each season once a player has enough minutes in their new system to classify confidently. Mid-season archetypes are provisional and flagged as such on the player profile.
Data & cadence
Our database
Shortlistr's analytics run on a college-specific dataset that updates every two hours during the season and rebuilds nightly. Every NCAA D1 match across both the men's and women's games is ingested, normalised, and made available to the metrics above.
What we ingest
Match results and box scores, full event-level data for every match (every pass, shot, tackle, recovery, etc.), team and player metadata, NCAA Transfer Portal entries, and roster movements across the season.
How we keep it accurate
Every sync pass is checked for coverage and row-count drift. When the data feed misses a match, our pipeline detects the gap and backfills automatically. Manual reviews are run on edge cases — player merges, mid-season transfers, redshirts.
What's public vs paid
The hub, rankings, and player profile snapshots are free. Exact 0–100 scores, full team strength history, head-to-head comparisons, and CSV export are part of the Pro · College DB plan.