I wonder this every year I see various national ranking of top high school football teams. The top 50 every year is filled with teams with 1, 2 and ever THREE losses. I’m sorry, but there are thousands of high schools in the country. 1 loss, ok, maybe a fluke, or you lost a thriller to another top 50 team. But a high school football team that loses 3 games has no business being considered in the top 500, let alone the top 50. It seems like ranking a kid with a 3.0 GPA as one of America’s top students. So why does this happen?
Because it’s probably a team that has gone out of it’s way to play other top ranked teams. My high school traveled to Minnesota, Nebraska and nowhere Kansas to play the best.
Also, I’ve NEVER seen a 3-loss team on those rankings.
There’s this slight problem that assuming that the winning team of a football game correlates precisely with the better better team. The result merely tells you who was the better team during that particular game. There are a number of reasons why a team might be good enough to place in the top echelon of the game but have had a few stumbling blocks along the way, injuries being the most obvious. To offer another possible explanation, when I was a freshman in high school, we almost certainly had the best soccer team in the state’s “Class D”, but the team we met in the finals was better in the conditions that were at hand: a foot of snow on the ground.
The only rankings that should automatically use the result of a game to determine relative ranking are those contractually obliged to do so, especially when you only play one game. There’s a very good reason why European soccer leagues have a separate cup championship “playoffs” while the winner of the “regular season” is generally considered to real winner of the league: the best team is more likely to be determined over 40 games than one.
On a completely separate topic, I find the idea of ranking high school sports teams nationally to be a complete joke. Comparing schools in different states just doesn’t make much sense since they’re not part of the same governing body. If a state really wanted to and was of decent size, they could produce the best high school sports team in the nation just by creating a magnet school that recruited state-wide based on talent, then let the student athletes be coached in their chosen sport by the same people all year. Since the area high schools draw from and the rules for off-season practice potentially vary, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly fair way to rank schools.