The Maxwell Ratings will rank the Georgia High School Association's 422 teams throughout the 2018 season. The ratings are based entirely on historical performance and on field results and do not consider personnel changes on the player roster or coaching staff.
Interesting results:
- What an interesting finish to a rather staid season -- After so much stability at the top for the majority of the season, there was little to help us anticipate some significant upsets this past weekend, specifically Milton’s defeat of Colquitt County, Bainbridge’s victory over Warner Robins, Heard County’s surprise over Rockmart, and Clinch County’s downing of Irwin County. In fact two of those were rematches of lopsided regular season losses.
How big were those upsets? If all four of those games were to be played again, the computer would still pick the same favorites (albeit to a lesser degree this time!).
- Colquitt County’s loss dropped them below a rating of 100 and removed them not only from consideration of this season’s national champion, but from the discussion of whether this was the best Packer team ever.
However, four state champions, and 12 other schools, put out their best product ever this season:
- Bainbridge was not only one of the big surprises this past week, but in the playoffs in general. However, of the 2,296 games played, the computer found their 23-0 loss to Crisp County to be the most unlikely result of the entire season.
Maxwell GHSA Football Ratings
As this season's games are played, the Maxwell Ratings will be based on a modified logistic regression of the current football season's results in combination with each team's historical performance. More recent games and games against similarly rated opponents carry more weight and the weight of each team's historical performance diminishes as the team's season progresses.
The current total weight of all team's historical performance is 0.14%.
For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 2,130 of 2,296 total games including 0 tie(s) (92.77%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 13.93 points.
The ratings are scaled so that 100.00 is the rating required to win 91.5% of all games in an infinite round robin tournament against all teams in the highest classification. The schedule strength is the rating required to win 50% of all games in an infinite round robin tournament against a particular team's opponents.
All data is courtesy of the Georgia High School Football Historians Association.
The Maxwell Ratings are a regular feature of Georgia High School Football Daily, a free e-mail newsletter. To join the mailing list, click here.
Home Advantage: 1.16
By Class
All-Class
Classification rankings are shown in [brackets]. Each team links to its page at the Georgia High School Football Historians Association.
Regions
Each region is shown with its “Competitive Rating”, which is the Competitive Rating is the rating required for a new team to that region to have a chance of going undefeated in a round robin schedule among region teams equal to the chance of being selected region champion if picked at random. For example, there are four teams in 1-AAAAAAA, so the chance of a new team being region champion if picked at random is 1 / (4 + 1) = 20%. Therefore the Competitive Rating is the rating required to go undefeated in a round robin tournament among region teams 20% of the time. This rating favors regions with larger numbers of highly rated teams. The “Average Rating” is the rating required to win 50% of all games against the region’s teams in an infinite round robin competition.
Least Likely Results
These are the least likely results of the season using the ratings above. These may change as the season progresses. Each row shows the game data, the difference in the teams after accounting for the home advantage, the expected winning percentage of the favored team, and the likelihood of the on-field result.
Highest Rated Matchups
These are the highest rated matchups of the season using the ratings above. The game rating is the rating required to win 50% of all games in an infinite round robin competition against the expected rating of the loser of the game, which favors games with highly rated and closely matched opponents. These may change as the season progresses. Each row shows the game rating, the game data, the difference in the teams after accounting for the home advantage, and the expected winning percentage of the favored team.
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