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:

- Benedictine and Manchester became the latest favorites to fall, joining Lowndes and Cartersville as teams that were once pegged to take home the title but are no longer playing. They also leave their respective brackets wide open as parity has come to define the last two rounds after favorites dominated Round One.

- Eagle's Landing Christian is the only remaining heavy favorite, although Buford, Marist, and Greater Atlanta Christian have just slightly better than a 50% chance of winning out.

- Two great matchups this weekend as Buford takes on Rome in a rematch of last year's Class AAAAA title game and Colquitt County visits Brookwood in an effort to avenge a mid-season loss and advance to the title game for the third time in four years.

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 0.08%.

For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 2,067 of 2,246 total games including 0 tie(s) (92.03%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 12.87 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: 1.04

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.