Maxwell Week 1 Summary: Lowndes dumps Valdosta, Colquitt, Mill Creek nip opposition in top games

(Daniel Varnado/For the AJC)

(Daniel Varnado/For the AJC)

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:

- Lowndes routed Valdosta in the most lopsided contest ever between the two South Georgia rivals. While giving a boost worth nearly a touchdown to Lowndes, the system still has some faith in the Wildcats, dropping them only three points to leave them at number two in Class AAAAAA. Meanwhile Tucker survived an overtime scare from Class AAAAA Kell to move past Valdosta.

- Colquitt County held off a late Norcross rally while Mill Creek staged a successful one against McEachern in two of the top rated games of the season. All four teams are still in the top six in Class AAAAAAA and although Grayson is still the front runner, the computer says there is a 44% chance the eventual state champion was involved in one of these games.

- Grayson hosts Alabama's top team, Hoover, this weekend in a game that unfortunately carries little weight in the ratings. Although I personally consider the MaxPreps/CalPreps formula to be suspect, what with "state scaling" and such, they project Grayson as a healthy favorite by a 31-14 score.

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 73.35%.

For the current season, the ratings accurately account for the winner of 124 of 131 total games including 0 tie(s) (94.66%) and accurately reflect approximately 68.3% of all game margins within 13.93 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: -0.20

By Class

All-Class

Classification rankings are shown in [brackets]. Each team links to its page at the Georgia High School Football Historians Association.

Regions

Each region is shown with its “Competitive Rating”, which is the Competitive Rating 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.