I took a look at the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association poll for girls HERE: Now, I am posting an updated top 15 to compare with the MBCA poll of 1/26.  Again, I am only posting the comparison so that coaches can see and vote for deserving teams that are not on their radar right now. I continue to re-examine ratings and common opponent scores.  Right now, Chaminade is on top, based upon season performance, even though the loss to Father Tolten and Nixa beat Father Tolten.  When you look at all of the game results, this is what the math tells me. Here are the MBCA boy's polls (on the left) and my ratings (on the right):

 I do not mean to ridicule coaches's polls. They certainly have a purpose for local teams.  The coaches know other teams intimately from competition and scout film.  I can see a lot of validity in a local poll. What I don't see in the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association poll in a good representation of the entire state.  Teams go overlooked because they are remote from a lot of the action.  KC coaches probably know the NW area of Missouri pretty darn good and St. Louis coaches the East, Springfield coaches the Southwest.  Get outside of that area, ie the middle north, south or central and there is less visibility. That is the reason for this post...  to raise the awareness or consciences of coaches for teams in their class poll, outside of their region. The MBCA poll comes out weekly.  The rankings were okay early but missed a lot of good or great teams.  The polls are getting better.... maybe some of those 200 coaches that follow me are ...

 All Missouri Boys and alphabetical listing are posted  HERE: If you missed the recent posts on boys and girls ratings, check them out through these links. Class six girls are  HERE : Class six boys are  HERE : Class two girls are  HERE : Class two boys are  HERE : Class five boys are  HERE : Class five girls are  HERE : Class one boys are  HERE : Class one girls are  HERE : Class four girls are  HERE : Class four boys are  HERE: Class three boys are  HERE: Class three girls are HERE: Of course, the earliest ratings I posted are already outdated, with some major upheavals of top teams.  I have made some updates, so you may see differences between the ratings below and the previous links above, but I need to dig back into the top 20 teams in each class and fine-tune them. Here are the All Missouri Girls school ratings and alphabetical listing below that.

Updated 1/31/2022 I have posted all six classes of boys' and girls' high school basketball ratings.  It ain't perfect but it is the only ranking of EVERY MSHSAA sanctioned Missouri basketball team in the state.  As I stated in an earlier post, I published the class six boys and girls at the beginning of January and those ratings are getting stale.  I have added a few key games but need to review the upper classes before I re-issue any of them. In the meantime, I am putting out my all-class rankings with that caveat.  With key conference contests coming up, the top-rated teams will flip-flop quite a bit in the next few weeks.  Those teams are so close in rank that many games will be decided in the final minutes.  So if I have your team a couple of lower than your next opponent, that game is a toss-up.  You can message me and tell me I was wrong.  LOL I will keep polishing these ratings every couple of weeks.  Below these ratings, I have an alp...

 Finally! Some of you have been patiently awaiting Gramps Braggin Rights Missouri Girls Class three ratings.  I hope the wait will be worth it.  While I sometimes am critical of the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association poll, the class three coaches are very attuned to the top ten or twenty teams.... much of those same teams show up in my mathematical model of class three.  In fact, the top five or six are in the same order! I don't mean to slight the MBCA polls so much as to make coaches aware of teams that belong in their top ten but have not been noticed.  I am sure it is hard to keep track of all of the great teams in your class but these coaches have their finger on the pulse of Class Three. It is a busy day for me so I will not go off, waxing poetic about some basketball-related topic.  As a game statistician, I have to score JV and varsity high school games at 4:30 and 6pm tonight and then a college game at 7:30pm.  Without the wonders of...

 Updated 1/30/2022  Blair Oaks added to analysis Rating top teams can be a crapshoot.  Those teams are so close together that on any single night, any of the top teams can blow out another top team.  That happened the other night when Staley beat Liberty 51-36 when the score should have been within a few points.  It happened again when Blair Oaks routed Nixa 79-53.  Yep, Blair Oaks trounced one of the top class six teams by 26 points.  26 points.  Wow! The rating game is dynamic and it can be volatile.  It just takes a couple of games like Staley-Liberty or Blair Oaks-Nixa to flip the top rankings in a second or two.  I go to bed thinking I have these ratings set for a couple of weeks and wake up to see a score that boggles your mind.  26 points!  Ouch!  Nixa fans who were just pounding me because I had them too low at sixth in the state are nowhere to be found after Blair Oaks clobbered their team Friday night. The art of...

 I just "finished" up Missouri class three boys basketball ratings.  When I say "finished", I think of the cute little sign my wife hung in the bathroom long ago that said, "the job's not finished until the paperwork is done".   I will never actually be finished with basketball ratings.  On some nights, there are 150 to 200 games in the state and while I try to capture as many as possible, I do not.  That reminds me of Yoda telling Luke, "There is no Try.  Do or Do Not!"  So Yoda, I am pretty certain, I do not capture every score. The other problem with ratings is the conundrum of parity within a district or conference.  Take the Metro Catholic Conference with Christian Brothers, Chaminade, De Smet, SLUH, and Vianney (well, at least the first four).  Just this past week, SLUH beat Chaminade, Chaminade beat De Smet and CBC, CBC beat De Smet and Chaminade and De Smet beat SLUH.  How do you rate all those results?  If I put one te...

 I talked about MLK yesterday and then found this YouTube video of James Taylor's "Shed a little Light" by the Maccabeats and Naturally 7 singing the song in front of Lincoln's Memorial.  It is a stirring performance and tribute to Martin Luther King and worth watching HERE . So, lately, I have been trying to shed a little light on Missouri class four boys basketball teams.  Part of my problem was with Vashon, a team that is always seemingly on top of their class, and even one of the best teams in all of Missouri.  The problem has to do with rating the teams on their schedule....  Nationally ranked teams from across the United States.  Makes it difficult because rating all of their opponents requires diving down another deep rabbit hole to rate those teams before I can assign a rating for the Wolverines.  I often have to wait until mid-January, after they have played more local teams, to get an accurate rating of Vashon. The other complication with thi...

 Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Holiday and I always find myself reflecting on where we are since he was killed in 1968.  I don't wonder if our world would be different, no, I wonder how our world might be better if MLK and Bobby Kennedy's lives had not ended so suddenly and tragically in the Spring of 1968. Dr. King would have been 93 this year.  How would he have looked upon the mess we have, the division and differences, the haves and the have nots, of 2022?  How would he have felt about the roll-back of voting rights, the police actions against people of color, the white supremacist movement that seems to be growing?  How would he feel about the decay of our inner-city schools and the increasing disparity between the very, very rich and the vast majority of middle and lower-class people that are struggling to make ends meet? Is not being a good Christian more than just looking after oneself?  Is not the plight of our neighbor important to us anymore?...

 It is that time of year.  Time to fish or cut bait.  Time to revisit the team makeup and make adjustments.   Some teams don't need adjustment.  Everything is working and the team is performing up to expectations.  Even if the team is performing well, you want to give some younger kids some varsity experience and a taste of what it will be like in the next few years. For some other teams, the squad might have a 6-10 or 8-8 record, when you started the season like gangbusters and you had thoughts of a 25 win season.  Reality sets in and you realize the kids on the court or on the bench are not plus players, but zero-minus performers.  You put them into the game and hope and pray you still have a lead when the starters go back in.  You work to get these guys productive when they do play but it's that time of year where some changes in rotation or personnel might give your team a lift.   Sometimes, that's when you look at the juni...

 As I crank through and post more Missouri boys and girls basketball ratings, I often get feedback, both positive and negative.  I guess you need to develop a thick skin if you do this type of thing.  It's not just the fans for top teams.  The most vocal fans are sometimes the fans or coaches of class one or two teams that are in the middle or bottom of the ratings. Yesterday and this morning, I had four responses to Tweets that hit home, several very helpful, one a slap in the face: Reader Garrett Weaver asked if I used an API or did I manually enter data?  What's an API, you ask?  Well, an API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface which would be a mechanism to populate the rating algorithm with basketball game scores automatically.  I imagine you could dump a HTML newspaper link (or copy and paste) that contains scores and it would automatically place these scores in the appropriate team rating.  Everything recalculates and all I d...

 The 2021-2022 season could be a challenging one and not just because the class five girls are loaded.  The rampant explosion of the Omnicron variant of Covid 19 is making it hard for teams to field entire teams each game.  While Omnicron is less serious than the Delta version to the vaccinated folks, it is more highly contagious and spreads quicker than the deadly Delta variant.  So team members are getting sick, left and right, but because it seems to be less lethal, kids are bouncing back onto the hardwood courts faster.   So, is the basketball season at risk like it was in 2020 when championship games were canceled?  Hard to tell but hopefully the season can be completed and players will bounce back quickly, without the long-term post-infection symptoms of the Delta variant.  It's not the most pleasant event to talk about but it is the elephant in the room. Whitfield leads my class five ratings but another state championship is not a slam dunk...

Is it any surprise to see Webster Groves and De Smet on top of the class five boys basketball ratings? If you watched the Coaches vs. Cancer finale between these two schools in late December, you would have seen one of the best games in recent St. Louis basketball history.  You can still catch it on Lafayette's YouTube channel HERE .  It was really gracious of the CvC tournament to live stream the games.  I am not sure they had planned to, but with the pandemic, I think they might have been concerned about fan safety.  If you watch the game, send them a donation too. Webster Groves, coached by animated and energetic Justin Mathes, just plays hard-nose, intense basketball on both ends of the floor.  Led by lefty PG Matt Enright, SG Ethan Chartrand, and sophomore forward Iziah Purvey, the Statesmen aren't tall but they are quick and smother the other team's offensive plans.  De Smet, with a historically rich basketball tradition, has D-1 recruit Brian Taylor...

 Oh, how things change!  I remember a few years ago when Dora and South Iron were the top teams in class one and were actually top teams in the state!  Dora, coached by Rick Luna, with Luna's triplet sons, and Isaac Haney, a D-1 Missouri State recruit, edged out an outstanding South Iron squad, coached by Dusty Dinkins.  I wrote about the legacy of Dora in a blog back in 2020 HERE  and recalled the outstanding teams that my Mother's hometown of Mountain Lake, Minnesota had back in the 1930s.  There is a lot of pride in your basketball team in a small, rural town.  In fact, it might be the only good thing in town all winter, so the pride and swagger of a town might revolve around some 15-17-year-old boys or girls and how they do on a hardwood court. Fast forward two years and Dinkins and the South Iron Panthers are still one of the best class one teams in the state.  Dora, on the other hand, moved to class two and has not won a single game this ye...

 After posting the class six Missouri girls basketball ratings, I opted to drop down to class two.  Why would I do that, you might ask?  Well, there is a certain fella down in Alton, Missouri who has kept in contact with me all summer, keeping me up to speed on their AAU boys team and I told him I would post class two next if he would retweet the class six boys and girls.  And he did retweet the ratings so I am posting the class two girls and, eventually, get to class two boys in a few days. There are some really good class two girls teams and the Missouri Basketball Coaches Poll has, for the most part, put the best teams in the top ten but they have missed a couple too.  Coaches, don't overlook North Platte, New Haven and Salisbury, next time you vote. One of the things that slaps me in the face, when I do the ratings, is the disparity between teams in these smaller classes.  I mean, score differentials of 70, 80, 90 points and I wonder how that makes the ...

 "Ah, Finally", they say.  Gramps has been doing all these boy's polls and neglected the girls!  I guess I might not be the only one neglecting the girl's basketball in Missouri.  These gals work just as hard as the boys and play great basketball but the boys always seem to get the majority of the press.  Maybe that is changing when you have a national-caliber team like Incarnate Word that just destroys area teams. Depending on which Poll you look at, Incarnate Word is darn good.  No, not darn good, damn great,  winning by an average of nearly 40 points per game, scoring 68, and giving up 29 points each game on average.  ESPN had the Red Knights ranked at #21 in a mid-December poll.    In that same link, ESPN has an article about Christine Grant, a long-time proponent of the Title IX initiative, which gave girls a chance at playing sports back in the 1970s, that most high schools had devoted to boys only.   According to the art...