I believe YC's point of saying "current top 20" is a good one. Along with other comments on this thread tend to indicate the accuracy of the Maher rankings this early in the season is maybe just a step or two ahead of guess your (intelligent) best.

An example, the Cincinnati Enquirer put out a preseason coaches poll. This poll had Anderson HS ranked #2 in D1 in Cincinnati. The Maher ranking currently has them ranked #109 in OH. Quite a LARGE discrepancy.

 

With that said my hat's off to Madison Central for putting together a difficult and challenging schedule. Good luck and good health to the Indians this season.

S.warren, Lafayette, mercer,bowling Green, cov cath, woodford, lex cath and Montgomery. It's gonna be a tough ride . My bad 8

 

Don't forget to throw PLD in there and your at nine... :thumb:

An example, the Cincinnati Enquirer put out a preseason coaches poll. This poll had Anderson HS ranked #2 in D1 in Cincinnati. The Maher ranking currently has them ranked #109 in OH. Quite a LARGE discrepancy.

 

If you look at Maher for SW Ohio Division 1 Cincinnati area schools (making it more apples to apples) the discrepancy is not as large (Anderson starts at 13 or 14). Anderson beat higher ranked La Salle in a scimmage last week... it won't show up in Maher, but confirms that coaches opinion of what teams might be like this year could be more accurate than Maher which starts with where last year ended. The two should converge somewhat as we get a couple weeks of play under the belt. I feel like that's been mentioned before, but maybe not...

"If you look at Maher for SW Ohio Division 1 Cincinnati area schools (making it more apples to apples) the discrepancy is not as large (Anderson starts at 13 or 14)."

 

Fair enough and thanks Sir for clarifying Anderson's OH rank. I'm still having trouble defining the search option on the Maher site. Still would seem to make a ton of sense for Maher to just post an OH rank and a KY rank.

Maher factors in whether game was away or home, Maher rating of each team, and score of each game. Madison Central tied a higher ranked team in PLD away (0-0) and beat two lower ranked teams away 4-0 and 6-0. All of CovCath's games were home and two of the wins were by a single goal. It'll sort out over time and CovCath's strong schedule means they'll have lots of opportunity to stay high in rankings. Plus, this year quality results against Ohio teams will posively affect Maher rating as well (whereas they weren't factored in last year). I think there is some material that explains what factors Maher considers. It's not a coaches or fans poll; no subjectivity; it just crunches numbers and churns out a results.

 

I couldn't have explained that better myself. I would add one point-in the last couple years, the major criticism of our system, has been the duration of the bias toward historical results. That is, it took too long for the system to react to teams that drastically changed their level from last year to this. So, we made an adjustment. The adjustment is going to allow more change in the beginning of the year. In fact, great change over the first few weeks. We explained it further in our preseason post on the website. It will settle as the year goes on. We performed trial runs with the changes on the 2015 season. Interestingly, the overall prediction rates were largely unchanged. Typically, in most mathematical ranking systems, you won't see published rankings until about mid year. All of this sausage making is lost on the public. I think that's no fun. This is the most interesting time of the year. We can take a little criticism, and it is more fun to track the progress of your team for the whole year like this.