What is the optimal schedule for all 413 GHSA football teams? Take a look.

Loren Maxwell, founder of Maxwell Ratings, has created hypothetical 10-game football schedules for all 413 GHSA teams, with the goal of limiting travel time and increasing the number of competitive games.

The idea for creating optimized schedules stems from the GHSA’s decision this season to use a math model, called the Post Season Rankings Formula, to select and seed 32-team draws in every football playoff classification.

Region finish no longer matters except to guarantee champions a top-16 seed. All 10 games on a schedule count equally in the formula.

So why have regions if they don’t really matter? What if teams could choose their 10 opponents and let the PSR sort out playoff qualifiers and seeds from that?

AJC Varsity/GHSF Daily challenged Maxwell to create 10-game schedules for every team using the Maxwell Ratings preseason projected margins of victory and the mileage between schools.

After three trials, with AJC Varsity feedback, Maxwell’s optimized schedules produced an average projected margin of victory for 2.7 points across the 2,065 games.

The average margin of victory in actual games through this season has been 22.2 points. Historically, it gets worse during region play. The average margin in all 2025 games, including those region games that create inescapable mismatches, was 25 points.

Producing those tighter games brings more travel, but not much in Maxwell’s optimized schedules.

The average straight-line distance between schools for actual intrastate games this season is 36.5 miles. The average distance in Maxwell’s hypothetical schedules is 43.6 miles.

It’s mostly the extremely good and bad teams that drive up travel. It’s harder for teams such as Buford and Thomas County Central to find competitive games. So Maxwell has Buford and Thomas County Central, 250 miles apart, playing each other in a 10th-game showdown.

For the 95% of teams between the best and worst, the average distance between opponents would be 36.0 miles, similar to the actual 2026 season.

Maxwell did not consider traditional rivalries in his model, and he didn’t account for travel differences in more traffic-congested parts of the state, such as metro Atlanta.

His schedules just show what’s possible.

“The model could be continually adjusted to capture any number of factors: protect the county rivalries, penalize a game that causes a team to cross I-285 after 6 p.m., weight the old grudge games, etc.,” Maxwell said. “But the point is that a model can build more competitive Friday nights than we’re seeing now. It also wouldn’t need to reschedule an entire season. Using it just for non-region games would make a difference.”