The 2024 CQ Ranking Manager Thread

[Eyeballs Out]

Update #34: Jon Ezeitza comes out on top as more than a dozen teams crack 1000 on the week

[snip]

spreadsheet link

LOUVEL Matis has undergone a slight name change in CQ to LOUVEL Matîs. Affects just 6 teams.

 

[Squire]

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! 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.

 

[EvansIsTheBest]

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.

 

[Squire]

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.

 

[RedheadDane]

And Kasper Andersen finally scores some points...

 

[Earns1985]

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..

 

[EvansIsTheBest]

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.

 

[ingsve]

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.

 

[RedheadDane]

My riders for the (rest of) the week:

Amdi
Andersen
Asgreen
Bendixen
Bjerg
Blume
Changizi
Cort
Foldager
Gregaard
Holm
Kamp
Kron
Larsen
Nielsen
Norsgaard
Salby
Sander Hansen
Skjelmose
Stokbro
Wallin
Würtz

 

[skidmark]

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

Rank	Team	Points this week
1	RestInPunk	604
2	Yellow Knight	595
3	Crevaison	583
4	Armchair cyclist	581
5	ingsve	541

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

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

Rank	Team	Total
1	Googolplex	294
2	Jakob747	261
3	Amethyst	242
4	JumboVismaFan	231
5	shalgo	229

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

Rank	Up/down	Team	Points
1	(-)	shalgo	15219
2	(+1)	EvansIsTheBest	13604
3	(-1)	Earns1985	13544
4	(+1)	JumboVismaFan	13291
5	(-1)	Squire	13289
6	(-)	MADRAZO	13279
7	(-)	HoudiniCycling	13141
8	(+1)	adamski101	13077
9	(+4)	ingsve	13069
10	(+1)	Salvarani	13022

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