Short write-ups of what the ratings and results show about college sailing. Each says how its numbers were computed and where they could be wrong.
Sort 30 venues by how results respond to wind after the fleet is taken out: river venues get orderly in a breeze, a few open-water ones get messier, the Chesapeake likes a southerly. Small effects, carefully isolated.
Both track form. The difference is propagation: in a joint fit every result informs every connected rating, both ways; in Elo a race touches only its boats, once.
A rating is a log-strength fitted to every race at once, smoothed week to week. Frozen at the start of a season, it orders 70.4% of boat pairs correctly.
A worked example on Brown's fall 2025 roster. A crew rating is small and uncertain: the best crew rates +0.19 (about 0.4 places a race) with a 54% chance of being best on the roster.
A sensitivity analysis. Add your two skippers' ratings and compare the total with the field's average. Above it, the better skipper belongs in A. Below it, in B. Teams below the line still start the better skipper in A 85% of the time.
A one-point rating edge means a 73% chance to beat another boat in a race; two points is 88%. How to read the numbers on the site, and a check that those chances match what happened.