Links to final Missouri Boy's and Girl's class 1-6 basketball ratings.

March 19, 2022

I think I am about done again for this basketball season. I don't know how many scores I have entered into my Missouri Boy's and Girl's rating model but it is a bunch. If you take the 530 or so girls teams and the 550 or so boys teams and each team has 25 or 30 games, that means that there have been 15,000 games in the state this winter (30 times 500 teams is 15,000 but they play someone else so it is divided by two).

So, at my age, you can get a little bleary-eyed entering that many scores into the spreadsheets. Besides those entries, I had to keep Sort tables for every class and keep all of those formulae correct. Occasionally, I would get a question about a team and find out I had a mistake in one formula or another. That can be a little embarrassing, but considering that are only about 2000 formulae in one spreadsheet for boys and another 2000 formulae in the girl's spreadsheet, a couple of typos or misplaced data is not bad for this old man.

It was a good year. Covid did not get in the way of most teams' schedules and the Gramp's Braggin' Rights model gets better every year. I have not tallied up the predictions of winners for the state and district tournaments but it is well above 85% which tells me the model is working well. I got some flack from one reader who thinks I should not put spreads out there but the fact of rating teams, with the difference in rating being the spread, sort of negates the criticism. The real problem is that some teams don't like their rating and are sensitive about losing by 40 points when I posted a 37 point spread. Tough luck, boys and girls. Go improve your feeder program and stop whining about how badly you are getting beaten. The really good programs have a culture that starts with 3rd, 4th, or 5th graders, in some cases.

I really like the feedback I get from most of my readers. I have about 300 coaches, ADs, and sports organizations following my Twitter handle and many of them just gush about the accuracy. Of course, I get that occasional complaint from someone out in the hinterland and no amount of explaining or statistical massaging can bring them around to my rating of their team. No matter how many losses they might have, if they beat the yahoos in the next town over, then they expect to be ranked better than what I gave them, and at least better than the one team they did beat. But I am trying to not be so sensitive to the few critics and focus on the "bouquets" I get from positive readers. A "bouquet" is a term we used in food research when someone wrote to exclaim about the merits of your product, rather than dump on it and ask for a refund.

I will take any "bouquets" you want to send my way. The Complaints Department is down the hall, out the exit, and across the swamp. And if anyone wants to take this over in a couple of years, let me know. The job doesn't pay much but the benefits suck too. Just kidding... I love this "job".

Here are the links to all of the final Missouri boys and girls basketball ratings:

Boys All Boys Teams (by rank) All Boys Teams (alphabetical)

Class One Class Two Class Three Class Four Class Five Class Six

Girls All Girls Teams (by rank) All Girls Teams (alphabetical)

Class One Class Two Class Three Class Four Class Five Class Six