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:

- The opening round was smooth sailing for the favorites as the computer picked 98 of the 112 first round games correctly (87.5%), including 16-0 in AA and 15-1 in both AAAAA and AAAA.

- Although all the favorites hung in there, there are still two underdogs who advanced to the second round that each have less than 1 in a million chance -- Maynard Jackson in AAAAA (1,877,054.67 to 1 odds) and B.E.S.T. Academy in AA (1,372,745.89 to 1).

- One way to measure the parity of a classification's playoffs would be to calculate how often the same team would be crowned champion in consecutive tournaments if the tournament could be replayed an infinite amount of times. For example, Class AAAA would have a higher chance of the same champion repeating primarily because of Cartersville's dominance, thus less parity. Using this measure, here are the title races with the most to the least parity (lowest to highest chances of the same team repeating in an infinite simulation):

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 0.10%.

For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 1,998 of 2,150 total games including 0 tie(s) (92.93%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 12.79 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: 1.18

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.