Who's Number One in Missouri Boys Basketball? 1/25/2022

 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 the process of rating teams statistically includes doing what I call a "sniff test" on the ratings.  Sort of like your dog on a walk, when you want to keep going, and he or she wants to stop on a boulevard and smell what some other pet left on a previous day.  

Sometimes it stinks.  No, I don't mean the boulevard, but I am talking about the ratings.  No, not my ratings but those other guys.... the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association poll or Gateway Sports Venue or 810 Varsity.   Just Kidding.... LOL

So here is one of my sniff tests.  I took the "top" teams in the state.... Chaminade, De Smet, CBC, Vashon, Lee's Summit, Liberty, Nixa, Staley, Blair Oaks and Bolivar and looked back on their season to check my rating in the model.  I call it a raw rating check because I take their opponent rating plus the spread to get a game rating and average all of those for a raw score.  The raw rating does not take into account what I call weighting.

Weighting involves looking at who has beaten whom and placing the teams in a rank order based on those contests.  Sometimes I will add the rating for that game multiple times in the rating model to get team A (the winner) above team B (the loser).  Sometimes I ignore the score because a team was covid depleted or it was a fluke win.  It involves some judgment and a little opinion too.  Sorry, statistics can be muddled (but not as much as a non-statistical poll).

So what does my analysis tells me below?  It tells me that Chaminade and Staley have the best raw rating with Nixa, Vashon, De Smet, and CBC just behind those two.  Of course, CBC just beat Staley by five so then we have to look at weighted ratings where Vashon is first, followed closely by Chaminade, CBC, and Nixa.  And where is Bolivar in this mess?  Not even close, so that MBCA poll with Bolivar on top of class four is a laugher.  Sorry Liberators, you guys are very, very good but not as good as these top dogs.

This is just a teaser.  There are a lot of games coming up in the next two weeks that will sort this out.  For now, you can flip a coin on the best team in the state of Missouri.  These top eight are all pretty damn good and, of course, I left out some really good ones in this analysis in Webster Groves, Westminster, and Kickapoo to name a few.