Heartland Top 50

Why the ranks have ranges, and why this stops at 15 states. Each program is rated against the teams it actually plays, which is almost entirely inside its own state. Putting two states on one scale needs games played across the state line, and there are few of them: about 2% of all games. So each state's position carries real uncertainty, listed below, and a Texas program compared to a Missouri one inherits it. The Range column redraws every state's position from its own interval and reports where each program lands.

Alabama (13.8), South Carolina (13.8), North Carolina (14.2), Pennsylvania (15.1), Michigan (15.6), California (16.7), Nevada (17.5) and Arizona (17.9) are all rated in our data and are deliberately absent, with the width of each cross-state window in brackets. Those windows are wider than the gaps between the programs on this list, so including them would add names without adding knowledge. Alabama misses by the smallest margin, at 13.8 against a 13 point line, which is a reminder that the line is a judgement rather than a fact about football. We would rather publish 15 states we can defend than 23 we cannot.

Where this page is on thinner ice. Putting two states on one scale assumes the only difference between them is a shift, and that every point is worth the same in both. Tested on the games played between them, that holds for most pairs and fails for 3: LA-MS (0.76), MS-TN (1.12), AR-OK (1.40), where 1.00 would mean the scales match. For those pairs an offset moves the average into place but still misjudges the extremes, which is where a top-50 list lives. The rank ranges do not capture this, because they vary the offset and not the scale.

Why some famous programs are missing. A program needs 20 games against its own state to be ranked here, because every rating on this page is built out of in-state results and a program with three of them cannot be placed against one with forty. That bar removes the national academies, which is not a judgement about how good they are: Bethesda Academy (GA, 39 games, 0 in state), Rabun Gap-Nacoochee (GA, 40 games, 4 in state), Illinois Crusaders (IL, 40 games, 5 in state), Riverfield Academy (LA, 35 games, 0 in state), Oak Forest Academy (LA, 37 games, 6 in state). IMG Academy is the clearest case: 31 games in our data and 8 against Florida opposition. They play a national schedule by design, so the thing that makes them interesting is exactly the thing that makes them unrankable by this method. Rating them would take a national solve, and centering_test.py is the reason we do not publish one.