Maxwell Week 1 projections show which high school football teams are favorites

These are the current Maxwell projections for this weekend.

The projections are a combination of the current Maxwell ratings and actual scoring patterns. For example, in football, scores of 0, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are significantly more likely than scores such as 1, 2, 4, 5, and 11, and a score of 28 is much more likely than a score of 29.

Aside from the team information, shown below is each game’s rating, the probability of the favorite winning, the median score for each team, and the median margin of victory for the favorite.

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 in proportion to how often each team would win. This rating favors games with highly rated and closely matched opponents.

The median score for each team is the score that team would achieve both less than and more than at least 50% of the time if the game were infinitely repeated. For example, if a team’s median score is 20, then at least 50% of the time, the team would score 20 points or less, and at least 50% of the time, the team would score 20 points or more. The median margin of victory is the difference between each team’s median score and, thus, the margin that the favorite would achieve both less than and more than at least 50% of the time if the game were infinitely repeated.