National prep FB rankings

My guess is that most years, the best team in the nation isn't ranked in the top 10 -- or at all. Too many variable, too many teams. Even if you limited it to nothing but undefeateds, you're probably looking at 200-300 schools that fit that bill.

Meanwhile Booker T. Washington (Florida) just scored to go up 35-3 on Summerville (S.C.) on ESPN, though they'll be kicking it to ESPNU so they can show the horse racing show. BTW is ranked ninth nationally, Summerville eighth.

 

That's a good word, and one I always kept handy when talking about the rankings.

It's the same if you try to rank your local teams, for that matter.

 

There are 1,200 public high schools in the state of Texas alone. Somebody thinks you can rank the 25 best teams in the nation? Seriously?

 

I don't think it's realistic, either, but don't go overboard. Out of those 1,200 high schools, you can throw about 1,100 of them out of the mix right off the bat.

 

The rankings don't work with colleges, where you can at least make an effort and see most of the relevant teams' games on tivo, etc. There's simply no way to do this with high schools.

We do know this, though: Valdosta isn't as good as the best team from Utah. Or at least, they weren't last year.

 

That happened recently in that ESPN HS basketball game this year when a Chicago area HS team with Jordan's sons and a Top 15 USA Today National ranking played an Indy team with no national rank and a few losses and got blown out by 40-something in one of the most lopsided games you'll ever see. Just further illustrated how meaningless the national HS rankings are.

 

That happens a lot in prep rankings; the journalist tends to over-react when he sees the son or daughter of an elite athlete. There's no guarantee that the second generation has anywhere near the same skills.

Jeffrey Jordan was a good example of that. He was nothing more than a mid-major type of prospect, a Penn State type.

 

So, in your scenario, we start with 100 schools in Texas. Add in schools from the other 49 states, almost all of whom will never EVER play each other or even have an opponent who played an opponent who played an opponent. Rankings are still impossible. I've just moved to the third state I've lived in, and I can't promise how the teams here would fare against teams from the other two states.

 

Here's the difference between HS and college rankings. With college polls, you can play six degrees of separation with any two teams and connect them pretty quickly. Florida beat Florida State which beat Wake Forest which beat Connecticut which beat Navy. Or something like that. Can't do that in high schools, because with the exception of the big-time programs, almost everyone else plays within a 100-mile radius of their home field. No such thing as common opponents, common opponents' opponents or down into infinity with a 10-0 in Oregon and a 10-0 in Louisiana.

 

I've hesitated wading back into this because it probably won't help, but I think you're wrong if you think there are no tools available to evaluate the relative strength of high school teams across the country.

That tool, with a pretty large sample size, is major-college recruiting.

The problem, of course, is that once you've established some notion of relative strength across the country, you're going to wind up with 9 california teams (for instance) and 7 each from Texas and Florida and one from oklahoma and one from, oh, let's say Ohio.

Well, that's not very sexy from a readership standpoint, so what you waind up doing is "slotting" the best team from each of the best states – and again, you have ways of ranking those if you so desire. That way, you get the best team from Tennessee or Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama into the mix along with the others.

Much of what's said here accurately reflects the situation in football. The elite basketball and baseball teams do, indeed, often play each other and have for quite a while.

 

The other problem with national HS polls is they tend to be insular. The teams that have the longest or most obvious tradition find their way into the polls every year unless it's clear they're down. It's like the hard card in NASCAR: once you're in, you're in.

 

High school rankings are what some readers want, or they wouldn't be in papers in the first place. Of course they can't be accurate because the top schools can't play off from every state, so we really don't know who's the best. However, readers like them, so what's the harm?