Gramps Braggin' Rights Missouri Boys Class six Basketball ratings - 01/02/2022

 I am starting to wake up after a cloudy 2021 and am getting my mind around the 1100+ boys and girls basketball teams in Missouri that make up classes one through six.  I have a pretty good handle on the St. Louis teams but it is a little harder to quantify the Bootheel, KC, and Springfield area teams without some cross-over on play with St. Louis teams.  But I am slowly getting there and I hope you will all be patient while I grind through the game data.  If I were to capture every game for every team, that would be nearly 17,000 game scores (1100 teams, 30 games per team, but one score for two teams playing).  It takes about four hours to go through about half of a class for boys or girls so I figure I might have my first post for all schools, all classes by mid-January.  I had help from a grandson last year but I just have me this winter and you can get pretty bleary-eyed crunching numbers for four hours at a time.

I have had a number of coaches who are keenly interested in the mathematics behind the ratings, with Tanner Burton, head boys AND girls basketball coach at Higbee, the most recent "devotee".  The ratings are not perfect but they are much better than a coaches opinion poll, especially, as Coach Burton described, "a lot of coaches just don't bother" to respond to the Missouri Basketball Coaches Poll.  The Post Dispatch poll is okay and several other sports blogs also have decent polls, BUT none of them are quantitative and give you a spread between teams.  Several coaches actually use my ratings to determine how many kids might get into a game and set up their rotation, knowing that they have some latitude in playing the second and third line during the game rather than the last 30 seconds.  Mid-game minutes can be a real boost to a kid that works hard all week but thinks he will be sitting on the end of the bench until the game is a blow-out.

I am starting with class six boys.  I will follow that with class six girls and then, in no particular order, get to class one through five.  I really need at least three to five game scores for a team to get a good bead on their rating.  Otherwise, I might have a 1-9 team in the top 10 teams because I only calculated their one win.  Of course, some elite schools travel extensively to outstate tournaments or across state lines and I almost have to rate a bunch of Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee teams to get a good rating for the Missouri team.  So a team like, Kickapoo, Vashon or CBC might not have a robust rating until they play more "home cooking".  I will not make up a rating just to put one of them on top of a poll, even though they might be world beaters by season end.  Math is math and I try to stick with the formulae.

So here are the Missouri class six boys teams.  I have rated them by rating in the first table and by the district in the second table.  Positive feedback is welcomed and I will try to double-check where I might have messed up.

Want more?  Check out my latest All School Metro St. Louis ratings HERE.

Check out the Missouri Girls class six HERE.

The district ratings include an average rating for all teams in the district.  If you are not in class six district eight, consider yourself lucky because there are about five or six teams in district eight that could be in the Final Four with some other district alignment.