Maxwell Week 9 Summary: Archer upends Grayson; Lowndes ascends to the top

The Maxwell Ratings will rank the Georgia High School Association's 418 teams throughout the 2017 season. The ratings are based entirely on historical performance and on field results and do not consider personnel changes on the roster or coaching staffs.

Interesting results:

- In a battle between four unbeaten Class AAAAAAA teams, Archer downed Grayson in a 6-3 defensive slugfest while Lowndes topped Tift County in a 51-38 shootout. The end result was a shuffling in the rankings, allowing Lowndes to move into the top spot, the first time any team other than Grayson has been rated number one in the state since Week 10 of last year.

- There is roughly an 11% chance that one of those games was a preview of the state championship game. Grayson has about a 5.7% chance to have an opportunity to avenge their loss against Archer in the title game while Tift County has about a 5.6% chance to do so against Lowndes. In total, there is about a 34.5% chance that the final two will come from those four.

- Hiram shocked Carrollton for the state's most least likely result of the season. It's not just that Hiram won in spite of being a 29-point underdog, nor is it that Carrollton would still be a nearly two-touchdown favorite if they were to play again today, but it's the surprising 41-14 margin of victory that makes the result stand out.

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 4.97%.

For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 1,381 of 1,462 total games including 0 tie(s) (94.46%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 12.01 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.

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Home Advantage: 1.21

By Class

All-Class

Classification rankings are shown in [brackets]. Each team links to its page at the Georgia High School Football Historians Association.

†-Plays non-region schedule

Regions

Each region is shown with its “Competitive Rating”, which 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.