Your Team's Final 2022 Computer Rating

Hi Guys -

Sorry for the long delay between posts here - I’ve been distracted the last few weeks by some holiday travel & have gotten out of my normal routine.

Alas! That’s all behind us now: today, we’re putting a ‘bow’ on 2022 by releasing our final computer ratings of the year. Below, we’ve got all 497 11-man teams in the State, ranked from top to bottom.

Now, before you scroll down there, a word of caution: you’re going to see some things that look a bit funny to you.

I’ll call out one in particular: our top 5 has Rockford > Caledonia > Belleville. How could this be? Didn’t Belleville beat Caledonia who beat Rockford?

Well, it’s sort of the same dynamic that we may see play out in the College Football Playoff: if both Michigan AND Ohio State win their Semifinals, Vegas will very likely favorite Ohio State over Michigan, despite Michigan having won by 3 scores in their previous matchup1. Why will Vegas do this? Because they are solely concerned with correctly predicting the outcome of the game at hand: they are not concerned with ranking teams by their resumes.

Our computer rankings take an identical approach: below, we are only trying to predict the outcomes of hypothetical matchups. Sure, a team’s on-field performance matters quite a bit as an input to the model, but specific head-to-head matchups (such as the Belleville / Caledonia State Final Game) are only a small data point in the entire context of each team’s season.

Said another way: if you’re trying to predict the future, you cannot weight too heavily towards one data point: as we all know from watching this sport, the simple ‘bounce of ball’ can have a HUGE effect on any one outcome.

The Rockford / Caledonia series this year is a perfect example of what I’m saying here: ahead of the two teams’ first meeting, we had Caledonia as a 7 point favorite. Well, the Rams turned this on their head when they actually played, blowing out Caledonia by three scores.

These two teams then turned right around and played two weeks later. What was the spread in that matchup? Surely the line would be close to the previous result, with Rockford favored by ~21 points, right? No: we had the Rams winning by only half a point. And that’s almost exactly how the second matchup played out: Caledonia won in 2OT by a single point.

Say it with me one last time: Computer Model Rankings are not fully reflective of a team’s resume to date or head-to-head matchups. That’s what the actual games are for.

Let’s jump in to the numbers……

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Teams 497 - 401

Teams 400 - 301

Teams 300 - 201

Teams 200 - 101

Teams 100 - 1

End of Year Awards

The MHSFCA Coaches of the Year were released on December 5th. Take a look at who made the list here:

• MHSFCA Coaches of the Year 

Lastly, the MHSFCA has also released their All-State and Dream Teams. You can find both at the link below:

• MHSFCA All-State Teams

• MHSFCA Dream Team

And that’s a wrap on the 2022 season guys! A HUGE thank you to every single one of our readers: your kind support is what keeps us going!

But we’re not going away: expect to see weekly content here for other sports, starting with our inaugural basketball computer ratings, which will be going out next week Monday.

We’ll also have plenty of other football-related content throughout the offseason (just like last year).

If you’re interested in either, and have yet to subscribe, please do so below!