Gramps Braggin Rights Missouri Boy's Class four basketball ratings - 1/18/2022

 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 this season, in particular, has to do with the impact of covid Omnicron on basketball team performance.  Most teams will have two or three players out for key games and it makes it hard to rate teams.  Team A beats team B by 10, team B beats team C by 10, team C beats team D by 5.  That would calculate at team A beating team D by 25 but then you open up the Newspaper (link) to the high school scoreboard and team D has beaten team A by 25!  What can you do?   Especially when you find out that three high-scoring starters were missing from team A's boxscore.

What do I do in these situations...? Punt?  If teams are really close together, you can work the ratings to flip the teams, but when they are 20 points difference and the lesser team wins, I have to consider it an upset and treat it as such.  I keep the team average for the season and don't try to flip the two teams.

So, when someone messages me and says, my team beat team X and should be rated higher, and I look at the season results, sometimes they are right and I adjust and sometimes I just ignore them....  Consistency wins over fluke upsets.

I hope the sheds a little light on my statistical model.  I still have class three boys and girls to analyze and then I will update all of them every couple of weeks through March.

Here's the Missouri class four boys ratings.  You can argue all you want about the top 10.  LOL

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:

Here are the Class Four Boys ratings, first by rank and by district in a table below that.

 

Here are the class four boys by district.  Watch out for districts five and six which will be wild

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