Now that another college basketball season is heating up, Bob Elder has begun his second year of dominetrics.

Earlier this month, the professor of economics posted his first weekly basketball rankings, and he will continue to do so every Tuesday through the end of the regular season, and through the selection of the NCAA post-season tournament field of 68 teams.

Dominetrics was created by Elder and his colleague Scott Beaulier (who taught at Beloit during the 2007-08 academic year) as a way to offer an alternative product to basketball rankings, according to Elder. Unlike the cardinal approach the NCAA takes, he says dominetrics involves an ordinal approach that is less subjective.  

Elder and Beaulier, who now teaches at Troy University, wrote about the method in their February 2011 Journal of Sports Economics paper, “Employing ‘Dominetrics’ to Impose Greater Discipline on Performance Rankings.”

 “Our dominetrics rankings seek to provide an objectivity-maximizing or subjectivity-minimizing ranking of teams that therefore should be of interest to fans of college basketball throughout the U.S. in general and to the people who are on the NCAA's tournament selection committee in particular,” Elder said.

For more information on dominetrics, visit here and click on “basketball rankings” to see the rankings themselves.