SoccerMath

Modified the Movers of the Year to include the top 50. Check them out. Teams that are ranked relatively highly, and are on this list, are teams to watch out for. For example, Dunbar moved up 17 spots to #1, Bullitt East has moved up 28 spots to #4, and Mercer County has moved up a ridiculous 37 spots to #8. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings

Check out the Top 50 Movers of the Year on the girls side. It's basically the teams that have improved their rankings most since the beginning of the year. These are good teams to keep an eye on, because there is a good chance that they will keep climbing. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Here are the top 10 in terms of rankings change: Movers of the Week Rank Change 1 Bryan Station 74 2 Conner 73 3 Owen County 73 4 McLean County 57 5 Spencer County 55 6 Williamstown 51 7 Hazard 51 8 Harlan County 49 9 Russellville 47 10 Rowan County 45

It is still relatively early from a statistics point of view. Often, the change in rankings is just as, or more important than the ranking itself. Well, at least the change in rankings should be looked at together with the rankings. If a team is really sky rocketing up the rankings at this point, there is a decent change they will continue to ascend. Check out the Movers of the Year. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings The Maher Rankings Top 20 thru 1/3: Rank Team 1 Paul Laurence Dunbar 2 Trinity (Louisville) 3 Covington Catholic 4 Bullitt East 5 Henry Clay 6 Scott County 7 Ballard 8 Mercer County 9 Lafayette 10 Bowling Green 11 Cooper 12 Southwestern 13 Newport Central Catholic 14 North Hardin 15 Oldham County 16 Hopkinsville 17 Christian County 18 Male 19 Central 20 Doss

The inputs into the model are the games scores from every game, home court advantage. Strength of schedule is implicit in the calculation in that you have to know how good your opponent was to know how good your performance was in each game.

Perhaps we should run a mid-week spin of the rankings!

Looks like CovCath lost, but out of state, so we can't factor it in. My guess is that McNick is pretty darn good though. Owen and Mercer both won so they will be moving up. Christian County also wins.

Exactly! This is why you would have to take the sum total of all the performances of a given team to determine their proper rating, averaging out all the ups and downs, and accounting for any actual changes in performance as the season goes. Of course to evaluate any given performance, you have to have an estimate of the quality of the opponent. To do that you have to take the sum total of all the performances of the opponents to determine their rating, etc. You kind of need a computer for that!

The formula does use strength of schedule. Check out the graph on the page below. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Basketballrankings Kentucky | rankings, Kentucky | KY, Kentucky The vertical lines represent the end of each season. The system peaks at about 82-84% prediction rate each season for boys basketball. However, it gets there at about the mid-point of each season, not the end. It kind of levels off at that point. So, we don't really need the whole season, we have a pretty good read (as good as we are going to get) about halfway through. We aren't quite there yet this season, so you can see we are still in the mid to high 70's in terms of prediction rate, but you will see it climb in the next week or two. Some of the complaints you read above may work themselves out in that time if they are justified. If not, they won't!

No, we don't consider out of state teams, since you have to know the strength of each opponent to rate the result, and we don't know the strength of all the out of state opponents, unless we go to MaxPreps!

Click on the link for the full rankings. Privately we rank all the teams (they all deserve a rank!). We only publish the top 200. Holmes is #27, and Anderson County is #35. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings

The Kentucky girls basketball Maher Rankings have been posted for first time in the 2015-16 season. This is our first year for girls basketball, so go easy on us, but let us know what you think. Also, keep an eye out for any errors, this being our first post. The Maher Rankings have been ranking Kentucky soccer for 5 years, Ohio soccer for 3, and Kentucky boys basketball for 2 years, and has been featured in the Louisville Courier Journal and the Lexington Herald Leader. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Join us on Twitter too for updates, comments or questions: https://twitter.com/MaherRankings Your Top 20: Rank Team 1 Elizabethtown 2 Butler 3 Male 4 Bowling Green 5 Mercer County 6 Allen County-Scottsville 7 Sacred Heart 8 Mercy 9 Murray 10 Franklin County 11 Eastern 12 Henderson County 13 Mason County 14 Simon Kenton 15 DuPont Manual 16 Highlands 17 Southwestern 18 South Warren 19 Bullitt East 20 Harlan

The Kentucky boys basketball Maher Rankings have been posted for first time in the 2015-16 season. Only our second year for boys basketball, so go easy on us, but let us know what you think. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Join us on Twitter too for updates, comments or questions: https://twitter.com/MaherRankings Your Top 20: Rank Team 1 Paul Laurence Dunbar 2 Trinity (Louisville) 3 Covington Catholic 4 Bullitt East 5 Henry Clay 6 Scott County 7 Ballard 8 Mercer County 9 Lafayette 10 Bowling Green 11 Cooper 12 Southwestern 13 Newport Central Catholic 14 North Hardin 15 Oldham County 16 Hopkinsville 17 Christian County 18 Male 19 Central 20 Doss

I gotcha, sorry. Here try this: Maher Rankings | Category Archives: 2015 Kentucky SoccerKY Kentucky | basketball, Kentucky | ohio, Kentucky Also, we updated the post, adding all time top 25 Western Kentucky, and all time top 25 Eastern Kentucky lists.

Just posted the all time KY Boys Maher Rankings. Check them out and share some stories of the old teams, oh yeah and argue with the numbers! We've also sorted the rankings to look at a top 25 for Western Kentucky all time, and likewise for Eastern Ky. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Lastly, we updated the girls post with top 25's for both Western and Eastern Ky teams.

How do we find what, the rankings? We calculate them!

Ok, well, we can realistically go back to 2005, so we did. Check them out. Do you agree, disagree? Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Stay tuned for the boys!

The season ending Maher Rankings have been posted. Check out the Movers of the Year and the Upset of the Year. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Your top 20: Rank Team 1 Covington Catholic 2 Trinity (Louisville) 3 Bowling Green 4 Henry Clay 5 St. Xavier 6 South Oldham 7 Daviess County 8 Madison Central 9 Oldham County 10 Paul Laurence Dunbar 11 Kentucky Country Day 12 Tates Creek 13 South Warren 14 Montgomery County 15 Mercer County 16 DuPont Manual 17 Hopkinsville 18 Woodford County 19 Lafayette 20 North Hardin

The rankings are updated. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Your top 20: Rank Team 1 Henry Clay 2 Trinity (Louisville) 3 Bowling Green 4 Covington Catholic 5 St. Xavier 6 South Oldham 7 Daviess County 8 Madison Central 9 Oldham County 10 Paul Laurence Dunbar 11 Kentucky Country Day 12 Tates Creek 13 South Warren 14 Montgomery County 15 Mercer County 16 DuPont Manual 17 Hopkinsville 18 Woodford County 19 Lafayette 20 North Hardin

The rankings have been updated as of 10/18, the end of district tournament play. Check them out. Maher Rankings | Kentucky High School Soccer Rankings Your top 20: Rank Team 1 Bowling Green 2 Trinity (Louisville) 3 Henry Clay 4 Oldham County 5 St. Xavier 6 Covington Catholic 7 Daviess County 8 Madison Central 9 South Oldham 10 Kentucky Country Day 11 Hopkinsville 12 Montgomery County 13 Tates Creek 14 Woodford County 15 South Warren 16 Paul Laurence Dunbar 17 DuPont Manual 18 Mercer County 19 Lafayette 20 St. Henry

I couldn't have said that better myself!

It's the one goal squeakers against teams ranked 25 thru 75 that are holding Ballard back. The Manual win is quality though. Definitely one of the better teams in the state, but 13 doesn't look too far off.

No worries! Can't put CovCath #1 though - the numbers are the numbers!

You are most welcome.

This is a long one, grab a cup of coffee. Well, I don't take too much exception to anything said except this, "Your system rewards teams that "win", even if they play and win 9-0 against teams that haven't won a game ....more than rewarding teams that play competition." and this: "Seems only correct the last two weeks of the season.....pretty useless" If it is granted the system is "correct" during the last two weeks and useless before that. You draw a mighty thin line between correct and useless. Check this chart out. Maher Rankings | KY Boys Historical Prediction Rates thru 8/23/15KY Kentucky | KY, Kentucky | , Kentucky You can see the performance of the boys system throughout the year for each of the last 6 years. For the boys you can see that the system generally tops out around 85% prediction rate for the last couple weeks, while it usually bottoms out around 77-80% prediction rate early in the year. Where do you draw that "useless" line, 82.5%? The prior comment about not rewarding competition, however, is slightly less well-founded, and can be used to argue the South Oldham point just a little, though I don't argue with the point that South Oldham may be the best team (more on that below). South Oldham beat #49 Shelby County, #57 CAL and #1 42 Bryan Station in their first three games, and LOST a combined 0.30 scaled rating points. Not a whole lot, but they actually lost points because of playing over-matched competition. With their win against Dunbar, they picked up 1.11 scaled rating points in a single game. The reward for playing competition is solidly rooted in statistics, and generally accepted in the field. The win vs. Lafayette is solid for sure (they gained 0.3 pts), but probably couldn't be used to argue #1 even by a common sense method. Clearly, at this point in the season, last year's performance is heavily weighted. Ever notice when the BCS first published their rankings? About halfway through the college football season. Why? Because publishing a ranking one tenth of the way through a season is impossible if you assume everyone is starting from scratch. And why would we start from scratch every year? Clearly Trinity and Dunbar are going to be better than most small schools in eastern KY where soccer is not played as much. We can make a more intelligent guess to start a season, but it will always be just that at the beginning of a season, a guess. Several years ago, we didn’t publish until week 3 or so, to avoid most of this consternation. But the plain and simple fact is, it’s fun to track the performance of your team right from the start, even if it isn’t perfect at first. This is a sticking point that I have written about before. It’s a tricky thing: Last year's performance weighs too heavily for some folk's satisfaction, but it has been optimized with probably a hundred different experimental methods performed on a database of about 15,000 games in KY, 70,000 games in Ohio, and another 100,000 or so KY basketball games. This method keeps predicting the best. Basically, when I try loosening things up a bit to react more quickly to this year's results, teams bounce around too quickly. For example, South Oldham might have jumped up to #1 with their great opening week, but a team at #1 27 or something catches a couple bad breaks and is dropped to #1 73! This type of change creates less arguing, but it isn’t as good. I don't know that there isn't room for improvement, there surely is, but for now this one is the winner, getting to around 85-90% by year’s end depending on the competitiveness of the group of teams. So, by the common sense method, it’s hard to argue. South Oldham beat Dunbar, Dunbar beat Bowling Green, Trinity has a tie. If I was voting I might put them #1 , but I’m picking a #1 based on 3 data points! Is there another team out there who might be able to make a similar claim? Maybe. The Maher Rankings use every single game in the state as a data point. Over the long run, that’s what I’m going to go with.

The rankings have been updated. Let us know your comments, here or on the site. Maher Rankings | Category Archives: 2015 Kentucky Soccerrankings Kentucky | KY, Kentucky | rankings, Kentucky Here is your top 20 Rank Team 1 Sacred Heart 2 Owensboro Catholic 3 Notre Dame 4 South Oldham 5 DuPont Manual 6 Boyle County 7 West Jessamine 8 Lexington Catholic 9 Assumption 10 Paul Laurence Dunbar 11 Bowling Green 12 Newport Central Catholic 13 Henderson County 14 Tates Creek 15 Henry Clay 16 Woodford County 17 Thomas Nelson 18 Russell 19 Highlands 20 Male