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:

- Grayson topped McEachern in perhaps lackluster fashion, winning only 12-7 in their only in-state contest for another month. Although the win wasn't as impressive as the Rams might have liked, this season already has some nice parallels to last year's championship run -- a first year coach with extensive previous experience in a successful program, plenty of talent, and a win, albeit tight, against one of the few true competitors in AAAAAAA. However the ability of McEachern to stay close tells us more about the Indians, and by extension Mill Creek. Grayson may be the clear front-runner, but don't write down the state title in ink just yet.

- Colquitt County opened slow, but eventually overtook Tucker to avenge one of their surprising losses from last year. Look for Colquitt to avenge yet another loss against Roswell this week and then make the march toward Martin Stadium to face Lowndes at the end of October. Amazingly they were 0-3 this time last year when Roswell handed them yet another loss, a 34-3 drubbing which was the second worst defeat of the Rush Propst era. However the Packers have rolled to 10-1 since then.

- Lowndes overpowered Parkview 64-38 in game that the score makes it look closer than it actually was. Just as Colquitt County, look for the Viking to roll through their schedule at least until region play. Lowndes plays their next three games at home and their next four opponents are a combined 2-8.

- Perhaps the most surprising result of the weekend was Wayne County downing Valdosta 23-13 under first-year coach Ken Cribb. Cribb coached Bluffton in South Carolina to a 65-26 record over seven years, including taking them to the semi-finals three times and the finals once.

- Macon County was dropped by Irwin County 36-28, to become the only top rated team in any class to fall out of that position (Tucker remained the highest rated team in AAAAAA despite losing to Colquitt County). The victory by the Indians moved them up to number two among the Class A-Public schools. Irwin County will have a chance to make another statement when they face their next opponent in two weeks, Class A-Public's new top rated team, Clinch County.

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 41.81%.

For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 452 of 474 total games including 0 tie(s) (95.36%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 13.03 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: 1.12

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.