MaxPreps rankings

[PA Dad]

I have no idea how MaxPreps determines its rankings, but I was curious to see how Arkansas teams ranked.  Here is the national preseason rankings for selected 7A and 5A teams in Arkansas:

Bentonville 202

Fayetteville 223

PA 402

NLR. 500

Wynne 1652

Batesville. 1745

I seriously doubt that PA could beat NLR (although I wouldn't be flabbergasted if that happened). But, the rankings for Fayetteville and Bentonville look reasonable to me.

No ranking, particularly preseason, is very accurate.  But, is MaxPreps anywhere close regarding Arkansas teams?  And does anyone know how MaxPreps determines its rankings?

[Proud Buckaroo]

I wouldn.'to base nothing off of maxpreps. A lot of their information is secondhand. They get most of their information from coaches, or people who actually enter the information.

[The Future]

Well think about it. There's how many teams in Arkansas? Each preseason here on Fearless, how many of us put together polls and rankings and how many of them are different? How many arguments and disagreements do we get over which team deserves what ranking? There are a couple that are very good at it here and most tend to agree with, but even still no one agrees 100%. However tough it is to rank what 200 someodd teams here in Arkansas, its insanely harder to rank every team in every state of the country. I remember a few years ago I checked Huntsville's ranking. It was like 13000 something. How did they know for sure that Huntsville was worse than the team ahead of them and better than the team behind them?

Anyone who has made any rankings has done this before. It mainly happens towards the bottom of the list. You come across a couple or a few teams that you just don't know which to put above the other. They are just so evenly bad and you have no 100% reasoning why one should come first. So what do you do? You guestimate. Flip a coin. You just put one first then the other second. If you were doing the 5A for instance, you'd more likely than not have that problem with the bottom 3 or 4 or so.

Ok now take that to a national size. Instead of listing 32 teams in a classification and coming across 4 teams you don't know about so you randomly put them somewhere, now you are dealing with thousands upon thousands of teams and you might come across 2500 that you just don't know about so you randomly put them somewhere. If you want a pretty basic ranking for the teams in Arkansas, you can make 3 groups: the powers, the average, and the nobodys. Which gets the most attention? Which get talked about the most? The powers of course. We want to make sure those for sure get their appropriate ranking. The others we don't care about as much. Maxpreps along with any other national rank system is the same. Outside their top 250 or 500, I'm sure they couldn't care less about which team is ranked where all the way down to the bottom.

Anyways to answer your questions:
I guess they are about as accurate as they can be giving they are ranking every football team in America.

When you go down their list and highlight every Arkansas team and put them in order on a separate list, yes I think they do fairly well at ranking Arkansas teams. Now where they have them in their overall rankings I have no clue. I have not seen the 201 teams above Bennie to say for sure 202 is a fair spot.

No I don't know but I'm sure strength of schedule goes in to it, meaning teams that play OOS powers like Bennie and NLR are gonna be ranked higher than those that don't.

[HorseFeathers]

SOS is in it....probably a lot of historical stuff..who knows what else

[PA Dad]

Well think about it. There's how many teams in Arkansas? Each preseason here on Fearless, how many of us put together polls and rankings and how many of them are different? How many arguments and disagreements do we get over which team deserves what ranking? There are a couple that are very good at it here and most tend to agree with, but even still no one agrees 100%. However tough it is to rank what 200 someodd teams here in Arkansas, its insanely harder to rank every team in every state of the country. I remember a few years ago I checked Huntsville's ranking. It was like 13000 something. How did they know for sure that Huntsville was worse than the team ahead of them and better than the team behind them?

Anyone who has made any rankings has done this before. It mainly happens towards the bottom of the list. You come across a couple or a few teams that you just don't know which to put above the other. They are just so evenly bad and you have no 100% reasoning why one should come first. So what do you do? You guestimate. Flip a coin. You just put one first then the other second. If you were doing the 5A for instance, you'd more likely than not have that problem with the bottom 3 or 4 or so.

Ok now take that to a national size. Instead of listing 32 teams in a classification and coming across 4 teams you don't know about so you randomly put them somewhere, now you are dealing with thousands upon thousands of teams and you might come across 2500 that you just don't know about so you randomly put them somewhere. If you want a pretty basic ranking for the teams in Arkansas, you can make 3 groups: the powers, the average, and the nobodys. Which gets the most attention? Which get talked about the most? The powers of course. We want to make sure those for sure get their appropriate ranking. The others we don't care about as much. Maxpreps along with any other national rank system is the same. Outside their top 250 or 500, I'm sure they couldn't care less about which team is ranked where all the way down to the bottom.

Anyways to answer your questions:
I guess they are about as accurate as they can be giving they are ranking every football team in America.

When you go down their list and highlight every Arkansas team and put them in order on a separate list, yes I think they do fairly well at ranking Arkansas teams. Now where they have them in their overall rankings I have no clue. I have not seen the 201 teams above Bennie to say for sure 202 is a fair spot.

No I don't know but I'm sure strength of schedule goes in to it, meaning teams that play OOS powers like Bennie and NLR are gonna be ranked higher than those that don't.

Good post.  Thanks for the insight.

I think you are probably on the money in saying that MaxPreps(and other ranking services) do a pretty good job ranking the top tier teams.  And, as you say, ranking every team in the country is an impossible task.

You are probably correct in listing the factors considered, but I'd like to be able to find out for sure how  they compile their rankings.  Rankings always involve opinion, but some rankings use some objective factors.  I suspect that MaxPreps does that and I'd like to know what the objective factors are.

[HorseFeathers]

http://www.maxpreps.com/utility/about_rankings.aspx

[PA Dad]

http://www.maxpreps.com/utility/about_rankings.aspx

Thanks.  That's interesting.  They rely entirely on a computer program except for the top 25.

[itsslim]

How about good ole pine bluff number 1 in the state and 118 in the nation!!! Don't leave us out!!!

[Overdahill]

How about good ole pine bluff number 1 in the state and 118 in the nation!!! Don't leave us out!!!

Thanks for throwing that in: I was wondering where PB was on the list