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The 2024 CQ Ranking Manager Thread

Page 84 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Certainly an angle worth looking at certain teams are going be pitching for there riders to chase UCI points

Saw it with Kern Pharma this Vuelta, sprinting for 7ths and hanging on during harder stages to pick up pts left on the table
I've been applying that angle for many years already! :D Not that it always works, mind. There are still a lot of baffling schedule choices happening with a lot of teams.

Thanks for the update, @skidmark! Looks like I'm firmly back in the podium battle after a few very decent weeks in a row. Even this week wasn't too bad despite not having anybody in the Vuelta GC except Carapaz who almost everyone has.

It's hardly a shalgo specific phenomenom considering nobody can make a dent into that huge gap but the pace has completely dropped since the Tour. After the record setting totals to start the year, it's a bit disappointing to see everybody fizzle out and limp to the finish line.
Also noticeable in that I have one single rider above 1000 points (Carapaz), and nobody else on my team is looking very likely to join him before the end of the season. And I'm still in a podium fight.
 
Also noticeable in that I have one single rider above 1000 points (Carapaz), and nobody else on my team is looking very likely to join him before the end of the season. And I'm still in a podium fight.
Impressive that you are keeping pace when I have four 1k scorers (sure three of them are recycled from my 2022 team but you can't sue me for plagiarizing myself). You really do beat handily me on the cheap guys every season. One of these days we'll have to make a team in common where you'll pick the random, cheap guys that nobody has heard of that and go on to score a million points and I'll pick the expensive, famous guys that go on to score a million points.

Good race with Girmay, Hagenes and Lamperti today.
 
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Impressive that you are keeping pace when I have four 1k scorers (sure three of them are recycled from my 2022 team but you can't sue me for plagiarizing myself). You really do beat handily me on the cheap guys every season. One of these days we'll have to make a team in common where you'll pick the random, cheap guys that nobody has heard of that and go on to score a million points and I'll pick the expensive, famous guys that go on to score a million points.

Good race with Girmay, Hagenes and Lamperti today.
This year I had the benefit that I didn't have to pick so many cheap guys, so it was easier to hit the good ones.

Also, I spent like half the post-reveal discussion hyping Magnier for this game and calling him the best potential new De Lie. So why I didn't pick him is beyond me.
 
So finally displaced from 2nd overall.. had actually expected it much earlier..

Bad thing is really, that especially my rarer riders all seem to slow down their season now.. Have to hope, that Ackermann and Bennett will score some points in the sprinter one-day races in Belgium or France, although form doesn´t seem to be good for both..

Hoped for a few more points from Lund Andresen in the remaining races, but he seems to waste his remaining race days in the 2.1 Cro race together with Bittner and van Uden.
Big dissapointment had also been Teuns in the vuelta. Just the 15 GC points in the end and he doesn´t seem to go into profit in the end. He would have been much more valuable, if he would have ridden the tour in summer and now in the autumn the hillier races... he also has another team for next year, so motivation for remaining races is more than questionable.

Positive for me at least was, that Ayuso didn´t score in Canada and also doesn´t seem to be in top shape. He will ride this week in Luxemburg.

All in all I think I have to be satisfied with a top 10 overall in the end. Top 5 of course would be nice..
 
Imagine being in second place and still being closer to 29th than first...

So finally displaced from 2nd overall.. had actually expected it much earlier..

Bad thing is really, that especially my rarer riders all seem to slow down their season now.. Have to hope, that Ackermann and Bennett will score some points in the sprinter one-day races in Belgium or France, although form doesn´t seem to be good for both..

Hoped for a few more points from Lund Andresen in the remaining races, but he seems to waste his remaining race days in the 2.1 Cro race together with Bittner and van Uden.
Big dissapointment had also been Teuns in the vuelta. Just the 15 GC points in the end and he doesn´t seem to go into profit in the end. He would have been much more valuable, if he would have ridden the tour in summer and now in the autumn the hillier races... he also has another team for next year, so motivation for remaining races is more than questionable.

Positive for me at least was, that Ayuso didn´t score in Canada and also doesn´t seem to be in top shape. He will ride this week in Luxemburg.

All in all I think I have to be satisfied with a top 10 overall in the end. Top 5 of course would be nice..
As I alluded to earlier, the scoring has dried up for pretty much everybody. While it's not impossible that some late season scoring binge by a rare rider or two might push a couple teams above us in the rankings, the 250 points gap to 4th place is pretty significant this late in the season. To fall out of the top 5, you would need to not pass my team, and then either have all three of JumboVismaFan, Squire and Madrazo jump past your team OR have at least one team close a 400+ points gap with like a month to go. Top 10 is pretty much guaranteed at this point.
 
As I alluded to earlier, the scoring has dried up for pretty much everybody.
I've noticed that. It has meant that I have been able to move into the top 10 due to some rareish picks like Alaphilippe, Vlasov, Alec Segaert, Lorenzo Milesi, Georg Steinhauser, Hagenes, Gil Gelders and Jörgen Nordhagen.

Hopefully Alaphilippe, Segaert and Nordhagen can do well at Worlds so that I can keep climbing a bit.
 
Update #35: Yellow Knight gets Punk'd just before update

This week had a bunch of one-day races, with the Canadian WT races giving the most points, but a number of .PS and .1 races in Italy and elsewhere providing plenty of opportunity to score as well.

This Week's Top Scorers

RankTeamPoints this week
1RestInPunk604
2Yellow Knight595
3Crevaison583
4Armchair cyclist581
5ingsve541

To pull back the curtain: this update was ready to go, with Yellow Knight ekeing out their team's third win of the season, when I noticed a comment above that CQ had ever so slightly changed the spelling of Matis Louvel's name (thanks for that Eyeballs Out), which would make it not read properly on the CQ spreadsheet for the 6 teams that had him. It so happened that one of those teams was in 2nd for the week, behind Yellow Knight by a few points, and Louvel ended up getting 18 points this week, which flipped the top 2 spots after I realized the error.

So anyway: RestInPunk takes the week, thanks not just to Louvel, but much more mainly due to Michael Matthews (220 points, 2 teams) and Biniam Girmay (132, 48), as well as Alessandro Covi (76, 24) and 9 other riders scoring between 10 and 30 points. Yellow Knight had a great week in 2nd as well, thanks to Girmay and largely to unique pick Mathieu Burgaudeau, who got 167 points for winning the somehow 2.1 Tour of Istanbul. Davide De Pretto (68, 2) and Anders Foldager (66, 2) also contributed. Just scraping by Armchair Cyclist to make the podium this week was Crevaison who had Girmay, Alaphilippe (117, 10), Covi and several smaller contributors.

This Week's High Movers

RankTeamUp/down
1Armchair cyclist(+6)
1Crevaison(+6)
3vladimir(+5)
4Yellow Knight(+4)
4ingsve(+4)
4RestInPunk(+4)

A similar group of teams here, although 3rd and 4th in the prior rankings tie here. Crevaison and Armchair Cyclist both gain 6 spots in the overall, while vladimir moves up 5.

Green Jersey Competition

RankTeamTotal
1Googolplex294
2Jakob747261
3Amethyst242
4JumboVismaFan231
5shalgo229

Overall game leader shalgo gets 3 green jersey points for a 14th place tie on the week, but that's not enough to move up out of 5th in this ranking, and no one higher up makes a move either, leaving Googolplex still 33 points ahead of Jakob747, and at least a weekly win ahead of everyone else.

Top 10 Overall

RankUp/downTeamPoints
1(-)shalgo15219
2(+1)EvansIsTheBest13604
3(-1)Earns198513544
4(+1)JumboVismaFan13291
5(-1)Squire13289
6(-)MADRAZO13279
7(-)HoudiniCycling13141
8(+1)adamski10113077
9(+4)ingsve13069
10(+1)Salvarani13022

In the overall standings, shalgo increases their team's lead by a bit, to no one's surprise. This feels like the 2024 Giro by now, with EvansIsTheBest filling the Dani Martinez role as the best of the normal humans, finally moving past Earns1985 after threatening for several weeks. Further down, the winner of the original CQ game in 2011 - ingsve - makes an appearance in the top 10 for the first time in awhile, as does Salvarani. They do so at the expense of Nakazar and the winner of the 2nd edition of the CQ game in 2012 - skidmark - who fall out of the top 10.

This week sees the Tour of Luxembourg, a whole slew of 1-day races across Belgium and a few other countries, and the start of the Worlds with the elite men's ITT on Sunday.

spreadsheet link
 
Imagine being in second place and still being closer to 29th than first...


As I alluded to earlier, the scoring has dried up for pretty much everybody. While it's not impossible that some late season scoring binge by a rare rider or two might push a couple teams above us in the rankings, the 250 points gap to 4th place is pretty significant this late in the season. To fall out of the top 5, you would need to not pass my team, and then either have all three of JumboVismaFan, Squire and Madrazo jump past your team OR have at least one team close a 400+ points gap with like a month to go. Top 10 is pretty much guaranteed at this point.
I am better staying pessimistic, so that I am not disappointed in the end... ;)

We are very lucky, that de Lie didn´t score that much in Quebec, Montreal and yesterday in Wallonie. Otherwise JumboVismaFan would be up with us already..
 
Update #33: hayneplane squeaks out a win by a single point

This update is for the second week of the Vuelta, as well as the Renewi Tour. I should get caught up on this week's update in the next 48 hours.

This Week's Top Scorers

RankTeamPoints this week
1hayneplane612
2zigzag_wanderer611
3Senderos574
4Squire500
5pman490

It was the closest of finishes this week, with hayneplane taking it from zigzag wanderer by a single point. hayneplane got all their team's points from 5 riders, with some interesting symmetry at the top. Alec Segaert (231 points, 16 teams) had a breakout performance in the Renewi Tour, while unique pick Aaron Gate got the exact same 231 points from winning the Tour of Hainan. Beyond that, hayneplane got sadly some of the last points of the season from Wout Van Aert (120, 6), then 20 points from unique pick Milan Menten, and 5 points for finishing a WT race from Quinn Simmons. Those 5 points were crucial in getting past the second place team, as zigzag wanderer spread things out a bit more between Segaert, double stage winner Pablo Castrillo (140, 2), Ben Turner (89, 54), Max Poole (65, 16) and a few others. Senderos winds up in third with Segaert/Turner/Poole as well as Per Strand Hagenes (142, 20).

This Week's High Movers

RankTeamUp/down
1pman(+7)
2Senderos(+6)
3Berflamand(+5)
4hayneplane(+4)
4tobydawq(+4)
4bminchow(+4)
4Leadbelly(+4)
4Fivezzz(+4)
4Eric10(+4)
4ingsve(+4)

The movement in the standings is getting quite minimal by the end of August, and pman ends up on top of this ranking, moving up 7 spots this week with Hagenes/Van Aert/Turner and a few others.

Green Jersey Competition

RankTeamTotal
1Googolplex294
2Jakob747261
3Amethyst242
4shalgo226
5JumboVismaFan215

No scoring by anyone in the top 5 this week, so it's an easy summary as there is no change.

Top 10 Overall

RankUp/downTeamPoints
1(-)shalgo14145
2(-)Earns198512441
3(-)EvansIsTheBest12412
4(+3)Squire12246
5(-1)adamski10112091
6(-1)HoudiniCycling12000
7(+3)Nakazar11964
8(+1)JumboVismaFan11941
9(-3)MADRAZO11919
10(+2)Salvarani11908

The podium remains the same, with Earns1985 and EvansIsTheBest still quite close (Earns gained 21 points this week). Further down, Squire makes a big leap with 500 points on the week, Nakazar similarly rises 3 spots, while Salvarani enters the top 10 at the expense of team skidmark (sob sob).

Okay the next update will have Vuelta GC points! I'll get it out sometime Wednesday this week and then we'll be back on schedule.

spreadsheet link
Awesome. Going to finish well down the standings and learned a lot about where points are most reliably scored for next years game but delighted to pick up green jersey points for the first time since the very first week of the season.
 
Maybe I should just be like "Yup. I got riders. I might get points - but most likely not anything major."

BTW, stop scoring. You're getting a little too close for comfort!

I'm still over 300 points behind. QS screwing Landa over cost me too much, and Aberasturi abandoning the Vuelta (although it did give him the opportunity to ride GP de Fourmies) and crashing in the EC RR didn't help either.