Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008

Opinion: Take rankings with a grain of salt

The start of football season is still two weeks away, but excitement for the opening night game between Olathe East and Olathe North is building.

The Hawks and Eagles — ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the pre-season Sunflower League coaches poll — won’t face off until Sept. 5, but one prognosticator has already predicted the outcome. According to Ken Massey, East will beat North 23-19.

And just who is Ken Massey? Excellent question.

Apparently he’s a guy who invented a computer system that www.highschoolsports.net is using to rank all of the teams on their site in their respective league, district, class, state and region. Oh, and they’re ranked nationally too, in case you were curious as to where North stacked up among all the teams in the United States (No. 1,175, according to Massey).

That particular Web site, www.highschoolsports.net, used to contain team schedules for schools across the country and that alone made it a valuable resource. But now it appears to be trying to cash in on the burgeoning high school sports fan market.

In addition to the Massey Ratings, the site also has added action photos on each school’s page, though as of Thursday the five photos on the front of East’s page were actually all of Olathe South softball, which might not sit well with the Hawks’ legion of fans in that sport.

Therein lies the problem with a national Web site presuming to rank local football teams — if the Web administrators aren’t even familiar enough with Olathe sports to get the team photos right, how can they expect to accurately rank teams or predict which will win in a given week?

Apparently they believe it’s possible because Massey has developed a computerized rubric that doesn’t require any of the unwieldy hassle of actually going to games and watching teams play. The Web site touts Massey’s system as one that is used by the NCAA’s Bowl Championship Series, and we all know that everyone in the nation is happy with how those teams are ranked.

The Massey Ratings seem to have some serious flaws, the main one being that at this point they appear based entirely on how a team did last year, with no consideration of how off-season changes may have affected it.

Olathe South, for example, is ranked first in the Sunflower League, while conventional wisdom suggests that the Falcons will have a tough time winning the league while replacing a plethora of key seniors and trying to learn a new coach’s system.

League coaches picked South fifth and one would think they know more about it than a computer, being that they’ve actually seen all the teams. Of course, none of those coaches picked Shawnee Mission Northwest to finish first last year so perhaps the best strategy would be to treat all ratings and predictions as fun conversation-starters rather than any sort of real guidelines.

That being said, Mr. Massey ranks South as the No. 2 team in Kansas Class 6A, East as No. 3, North as No. 7 and Olathe Northwest as No. 23. Let the debate begin.

Submit an ad