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The Ratings Game - Today’s High School Ranking Services

by: Steve Dorsey
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By the time Christmas rolls around this year, Jamie DeMoney will have scoured more than 2,000 DVDs of high school football games sent to him by coaches nationwide. During the course of the upcoming 2010 season, Dallas Jackson will speak to an average of nearly 200 coaches a month.


DeMoney and Jackson work for different entities, but all of their work and effort is aimed at one common goal – determining which high school football team is the best in America. Last year, they reached the same conclusion when unbeaten Don Bosco Prep of Ramsey (NJ) was crowned the national champion for the first time.


DeMoney of PrepNation.com and Jackson of RivalsHigh.com agreed that Don Bosco Prep earned the recognition as No. 1 in the nation. They were not alone in their assessment. So did USA Today and MaxPreps. Even Ned Freeman’s unique computerized poll placed the New Jersey team atop its final 2009 rankings.


Twenty-three years ago, National High School Sports Hall of Fame journalist Doug Huff originated the National Prep Poll, the first weekly national high school rankings with regional lists for football. For several years, it was the only such poll that tracked and ranked high school teams both regionally and nationwide.


In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of national rankings, from USA Today’s Super 25 to MaxPreps’ Freeman Rankings that rank all 14,000-plus high school teams in the United States that play 11-man football. Why a need for so many polls? Football fans thirst for them, says DeMoney of PrepNation.


“It is what drives national coverage of high school football,” DeMoney said. “It’s about which state is better. To promote the game is its greatest attribute.”


Fans from football-crazed states such as California, Florida, Ohio and Texas vehemently have claimed for years that their respective state annually produces the best high school players and teams. DeMoney and Jackson both acknowledge that many of the top-ranked teams in their polls annually include teams from those states. Indeed, three of the first four, and six of the first nine national champions in Huff’s National Prep Poll were from California, Ohio or Texas. Florida has produced two of the last four.


Don Bosco Prep was the first school from the Northeast to be proclaimed national champion in the 23-year history of the National Prep Poll. While the Ironmen from New Jersey were a consensus No. 1 choice among the national pollsters, there were differing opinions as to the order of the rest of the rankings, even among the top 10. Abilene (TX) was No. 2 in the final rankings by Freeman, MaxPreps, PrepNation and USA Today, but was ranked No. 5 by RivalsHigh, which had Lake Travis of Austin (TX), in the second slot behind Don Bosco Prep. Only two of those five polls agreed on the No. 3 team, with four different teams holding that slot at the end of the season.


There was even some criticism of the polls ranking Don Bosco Prep No. 1 because the Ironmen played only 12 games, compared to the 16 games that Abilene played en route to winning the Texas Class 5A-Division II state title last season. But DeMoney points out that Don Bosco Prep had key out-of-state wins against California’s De La Salle and Alabama’s Prattville, both nationally ranked teams and powerhouses in their respective states.


“It’s not one of those arguments where you can reach a legitimate conclusion,” DeMoney said.


So how exactly do DeMoney, Jackson and the others who compile national rankings reach their final conclusion? The basic methodology is similar, but emphasis on criteria varies somewhat with each one.


DeMoney, who is based in Iowa and succeeded Huff as editor of the National Prep Poll in 1999, bases his criteria on a team’s strength of schedule, winning a state championship, impact players and performers, coaching and recent tradition. He begins working on his preseason rankings in the spring by pouring over questionnaires he sends out to approximately 200 coaches nationwide. DeMoney also works for the Forbes scouting service, a job he said requires him to watch more than 2,000 tapes of film each year.


“I put as much work into this leading up to the start of the season as I do during the season,” DeMoney said. “The preseason poll is the foundation of the whole season.”


Jackson, the national high school analyst at Rivals.com, said he relies heavily on feedback from a vast network of RivalsHigh state site publishers, recruiting analysts and coaches.


“I spend my entire weekend talking on the phone (during football season),” Jackson said. “I had to buy a larger memory card for my Blackberry.”


Jackson said that Rivals has contractual agreements with web site publishers in 43 states and confers with them regularly for feedback on what teams deserve consideration for the rankings. He begins researching about 450 teams in May and whittles them down to the RivalsHigh 100 by early August when the web site announces its preseason rankings.


One of the primary criteria Jackson relies on is the amount of starters a program is returning, especially Division I linemen prospects.


“The offensive line is the most fundamental part of the sport,” Jackson said. “If a team has three D-I players on the offensive line, that carries more weight in my mind than if they had three D-I wide receivers or a D-I quarterback. It doesn’t matter how great a quarterback or wide receiver is if there’s no blocking.”


Owner of calpreps.com, Ned Freeman works for MaxPreps and they publish two national rankings. The MaxPreps Xcellent 25 is a human poll selected by the web site’s writers. The Freeman Rankings, which ranks all 14,688 school teams in the United States, are determined by a computer program developed by Freeman. The opinions of coaches, sportswriters and fans do not factor into the Freeman Rankings. Prior history of a program, school size and comments on internet message boards carry no weight whatsoever. “At the end of each season we email every coach with a questionnaire that includes schedule, returning starters, all conference players,” said Freeman. “We then enter each team in a computer with software we’ve specifically developed. It’s somewhat subjective but we process all the information to make our best guess going into the season.”


Freeman, an admitted math and computer junkie, acknowledges that his preseason rankings are largely based on the amount of returning starters and projected strength of schedule for each team, making the first rankings subjective to that factual information. But once the games begin, the rankings adjust weekly based on results, quality wins and margin of victory. “We use a lot of state associations to get updated results every Friday night,” adds Freeman. “They are posted in their entirety. A total of 40 or so states mandate the respective coaches to post their scores within an hour of the end of the game. Then, with the data in the computer, the rankings are updated in a more objective manner.


“As the season progresses, the computer completely erases the preseason info,” Freeman said. “It’s completely unbiased. The difference in our poll, compared to human polls, is that if a team wins a close game against an opponent that on paper it should have beaten handily, its ranking will be hurt.”


Freeman said that his typical Friday night during the season extends well into Saturday morning, retrieving scores from web sites around the nation. But it’s a labor of love.


“It seems overwhelming at first, but it’s really not that bad for football,” said Freeman, who began charting and ranking teams in California in 2001, expanded it to national rankings in 2003 and came on board with MaxPreps in 2004. “It’s doable in large part because of the internet. It’s fun stuff, but I’m a numbers guy.”


Freeman accepts the fact that his rankings will receive some criticism, mostly from fans on the web site’s message board who believe their team should be ranked higher. “People will always complain, and there’s some legitimate arguments,” he said. “Our objective is to give credit to teams that play a tough schedule.” As the explanation on the MaxPreps web site states, “Ned’s system just takes into account the facts. Cold, hard and unfeeling facts – but as accurate, objective and fair as possible.”


Those who disagree with last year’s final rankings, particularly those from No. 2-ranked Abilene, would love to have seen a showdown between Abilene and Don Bosco Prep. Jackson admitted that he was “late jumping on the respect wagon last year with Abilene,” which he placed at No. 5 in his final rankings for RivalsHigh.


“I’m at the point now where I don’t pay too much attention to the criticism,” DeMoney said. “Fans take it a lot more serious. I think it’s important to be as fair and accurate as can be, and I work hard at it. I don’t know if Don Bosco would have beaten Abilene last year.”


To many coaches, even at top schools, national rankings are simply not that important. “If we get a ranking, that’s fine, but who cares?” said assistant coach Harry Schmidt of Southern California’s Edison High, which finished 6th in the final MaxPreps Freeman poll last season. “Our big things are not the rankings. Our big things are having our kids playing up to their potential and giving everything they’ve got,” Schmidt noted. “Sometimes we wish we weren’t ranked as high as we are ‘cause everyone’s gunning for us.”


DeMoney said that the majority of football coaches he talks to would, like Schmidt, like it if national polls “just went away.” But as long as there’s interest among fans, that’s likely not going to happen, judging from the proliferation of nationally-televised games and rankings in recent years. Attaining a lofty national ranking and the exposure that comes with it, DeMoney said, is “something that players will always remember.”


All of this begs the question, “Is a national championship game for high school football on the horizon?” Freeman said he doesn’t see it happening in the near future, but said it’s not impossible.


“A few years ago, I would have said definitely, ‘No.’ It’s closer to that in basketball,” Freeman said. “I definitely wouldn’t rule it out, but I think it might be 10, 15 or 20 years off. I would love to see it happen. I’d like to see how correct I was (with rankings).”


Jackson said he doubts it will happen unless state associations come on board and approve it. “It would certainly be interesting,” he said.


Ken Massey, one of the mathematicians whose computer models were used to create the Bowl Championship Series rankings for college football in 1999, decided to stage a virtual national championship and created a computer program that simulated a high school football playoff tournament last January. It included a 64-team field – one state champion from each of the 50 states and 14 at-large teams selected by USA Today. The teams then were seeded into four 16-team regions just like college basketball’s March Madness. For what it’s worth, Don Bosco Prep won the Massey Virtual National Championship, defeating Cardinal Mooney of Youngstown, Ohio, 33-24 in the title game.


Steve Specht, the coach at Ohio powerhouse St. Xavier in Cincinnati, believes that the recent proliferation of nationally-televised games on ESPN and the growing emphasis on national rankings definitely is changing the landscape of high school football in America.


“Our fans love it, our community loves it. They live on it,” Specht told the New York Times in 2007 when St. Xavier went 15-0 and was No. 1 in DeMoney’s final National Prep Poll rankings. “And as a coach, it’s nice. But when you go through a season always focused on the polls, it puts a giant bull’s-eye on your back. Whether we like it or not, we’re playing a national schedule now. I’d rather call up 10 local teams here in Cincinnati, but teams look at the rankings and won’t play us anymore.”


Even Huff, who planted the seeds for national rankings more than two decades ago, is in awe of the manner in which they have grown in popularity.


“If you’d told me (23 years ago) that this stuff was going to be covered so widely, I wouldn’t believe it,” Huff said.






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