- This week I've made four changes to the Extended Standings, three of which are largely cosmetic and two come straight from reader feedback.

The only change of real substance I made was to split Class A into "Class A - Public" and "Class A - Private" and create the respective anchors for those classification.  I decided to make this change since the GHSA effectively treats each as a separate classification for playoff purposes.

The second change is entirely cosmetic.  I added a column called "Seed" in which I show the seed of each team under a proposed system I'll outline in Part VIII of the Getting it Right series. Once that is published, I'll show the brackets each week of what a playoff for each classification would look like if the Extended Standings and the seeding system were in use for this season.

The third change is also purely cosmetic, which was to simply show the Adjusted Winning Percentage (adjW%) rather than the Adjusted Wins and Adjusted Losses. This change is based on feedback from a reader that the cumulative nature of Adjusted Wins caused some confusion.

Finally, for those who have reviewed the 2014 Extended Standings spreadsheet in Part VII of the Getting it Right series, you'll notice I've now made provisions for out of state teams, again based off of feedback from a reader.  The effect of including out of state teams will be mostly cosmetic except where an out of state team has played more than one GHSA team. In this case, the games will provide additional comparisons for the Extended Standings to consider.

- The spreadsheet used to calculate the Extended Standings will be included each week from here until the end of the regular season. With it, you can add, edit, or delete games just as I am doing in the "Games I'm Tracking" section below. I encourage readers to fully test the Extended Standings and ask that you provide feedback in the comments section. The spreadsheet is explained at the end of Part VII in the Getting it Right series.

- Concerning the Extended Standings for this week, they look fairly decent.  Already the Extended Standings would place 59 of the 60 teams in the AJC polls in the playoffs if they were held today.  Over the next two to three weeks, the top teams should completely emerge.  Compare that to this week's region standings, which only consider about 60% of regular season games, and the Class A power ratings, which are not equitable as seen in Part II of the Getting it Right series and as I'm about to illustrate again below.

Games I'm Tracking:

I'm still tracking three games at this point, including the McEachern-Buford contest from Week 3 and Buford's 77-0 mauling of Berkmar in Week 2.  McEachern dropped a surprising loss to Peachtree Ridge and Buford had a bye week, so I'll let the two games rest and look at the one we put on the backburner last week, ELCA's 28-21 loss to Class AAAAA Stockbridge.

Currently ELCA has a xWin% of 43.8%, good enough for 14th in Class A - Private.  For reference, Stockbridge has a xWin% of 78.3% and is ranked 16th in Class AAAAA.

Here's let's just remove the ELCA-Stockbridge game altogether to see the effect on ELCA's xWin%, which drops to 42.7%.  In short, battling Stockbridge to a 28-21 loss improved ELCA's xWin% by 1.1%.

Let's compare this to the Class A power ratings where ELCA earns 0 points for their loss to Stockbridge, 2 points for the loss being to a team four classifications higher, and 10 additional points since Stockbridge is currently undefeated.  So losing by a touchdown to undefeated Class AAAAA team comes to a total of 12 points.

For this week, if ELCA's Class A power rating is above 12, then the net effect is that ELCA is penalized for playing and losing by a touchdown to an undefeated Class AAAAA team.

[NOTE:  I suspect ELCA's power rating is above 12, but I rely only on CheerTigerDad's calculations in the GAVSV.com Class A forum and he has not yet published them for this week.  The official GHSA Class A power ratings are calculated by MaxPreps.com and as of the official posting on the GHSA website at 9/15/2015 6:09 am, it is rife with errors.  For example, ELCA is listed as 3-2 in spite of only playing four games.]

Also note that the 12 points in the Class A power ratings is equivalent to a one-point victory over a Class A team that finishes the year 2-8.  If Stockbridge finishes the regular season 7-3, then ELCA would have been better to defeat a winless Class A team to get 10 points for the victory instead of the 9 points they would get from losing to a 7-3 Class AAAAA team.

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.

The spreadsheet used to calculate this week's Extended Standings is attached here: 2015 Extended Standings - Week 4.  Games can be added, edited, or deleted to see the impact on the Extended Standings.

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

Sum of the negative log-likelihood: 551.595501543

Solution converged in 1,270 iterations