Comments on this week's Extended Standings:

- Although still perhaps a couple of weeks away from being useful, the Extended Standings are already starting to take rough shape. Class AAAAAA has adjusted to above Class AAAAA, so every classification is now in their logical order based on enrollment size. Also, although the Extended Standings are completely unaware of team history, polls, five-star recruits, etc., we can already some of the usual suspects migrating to the top. In those odd circumstances where this is not the case, we can easily go review each team's games to see what is happening.

Games I'm tracking:

I'm tracking three games at this point. One is ELCA's 28-21 loss to Class AAAAA Stockbridge but I'm putting that one on the back burner until later in the season. For now we'll simply note that the GHSA Class A power ratings gives ELCA two points for the game since it was a loss to an opponent in a higher classification, so Stockbridge would have to go 8-2 for that game to be worth ten points to ELCA, which is equivalent to the number of points awarded for a victory over a winless Class A team. My intent is to show how this loss will be treated more equitably by the Extended Standings, but we'll wait until the season has progressed a little more.

For now, let's tie together the next two games I'm tracking, both involving Buford -- their 77-0 victory over Berkmar and their 37-14 loss to McEachern.

First let's reduce their 77-0 rout of Berkmar to a 28-0 win and measure the impact on Buford's xWin%, which is their projected winning percentage if they were able play all of the other 416 GHSA teams. Currently Buford's xWin% is 60.5%. Taking away those last seven touchdowns against Berkmar would drop their xWin% to 60.1%, a relatively small decrease of 0.4%. And as I mentioned last week I expect this difference to become even smaller as the season progresses.

Now let's reset their victory over Berkmar to 77-0 but then take away Buford's last touchdown against McEachern to make it a 37-7 loss. Under this scenario, their xWin% drops to 60.0%, a drop of 0.5%. Still not huge, but notice that Buford's last touchdown against McEachern, a stronger opponent, is worth more than their last seven touchdowns against Berkmar, a weaker opponent.

For our next scenario, let's move Buford's win over Berkamr back to our imaginary 28-0 margin and add just a field goal to Buford's actual score in the McEachern game to make it a 37-17 loss. Now, Buford's xWin% becomes 60.4%, almost the same as they currently have. In short, the Extended Standings see a 77-0 win over Berkmar with a 37-14 loss to McEachern as roughly equal to a 28-0 win over Berkmar with a 37-17 loss to McEachern.

Returning to the Getting it Right series, these scenarios illustrate the equitable principles as outlined in Part I and further discussed in Part IV of the series. Buford is awarded more credit for the 77-0 victory as opposed to a 28-0 victory over Berkmar, which is our second equitable principle, however the credit significantly diminishes, which is our third equitable principle. Additionally, we can see a relatively small score, such as a field goal, against a stronger opponent can be rewarded more than a large score, such as seven touchdowns, against a weaker opponent, which is our fourth equitable principle

Let's look at one last scenario to see the result of the Buford game on McEachern. With the season as played, McEachern has an xWin% of 86.7%, good enough for what would be the 5th seed in Class AAAAA under the Extended Standings. Removing the Buford game altogether drops their xWin% to 81.5% and their Class AAAAAA seeding to 13th.

This is a significant impact in the Extended Standings for a game that is altogether ignored by the region standings. In fact, depending on how the season unfolds, it may very well end up being the most significant matchup of the regular season. As in Part II of the Getting it Right series, the region standings discard about 40% of the fundamental data required to perform meaningful comparisons between teams, so the inclusion of all regular season GHSA games means the Extended Standings are more economical than region standings.

Again, if you have any other games you’d like me to consider, by all means let me know!

Extended Standings

All data is courtesy of the Georgia High School Football Historians Association.

Please submit errors or omissions through their forums.

Extended Standings use the results of the season so far to project each team’s record if it were to play every other team, creating a set of "extended" standings between all 417 GHSA teams.

Each team is shown with it's overall rank, classification rank, classification, actual record, adjusted wins and losses (adjW and adjL), rating, extended wins and losses (xWin and xLoss), and extended winning percentage (xWin%).

Sum of the negative log-likelihood: 472.074325841

Solution converged in 384 iterations