Carl Junction - Living the dream 1/22/2023

I had a few comments about teams down in the Southwest this past week.  @MikeKelly_ND was tweeting about Nixa's rating vs. teams that had beaten them and then Sigh... @cardinals150 chimed in about Carl Junction trouncing Nixa by 13 (According to Sigh... the lead was 22 until "garbage time").  So I decided to dig into my ratings and check out where I had erred.

As I was in the process of looking at the team ratings, I noticed that Nixa was playing Park Hill South, an excellent KC area team, and Carl Junction was playing Kickapoo in the Bill Hanson Memorial Tournament.

The two teams, Nixa and Carl Junction, seem to be heading in opposite directions right now.  Nixa lost by nineteen to Park Hill South and have lost their last three games.  Carl Junction is 15-1 and on a roll, after beating Kickapoo on two late game free throws, after having been down by something like 31-13 in the first half.  Check out the article here.  Carl Junction wins Bill Hanson Memorial Tournament Championship over Kickapoo | KSNF/KODE | FourStatesHomepage.com

But that is not the purpose of this blog.  Sigh... suggested Junction was WAY better than Nixa but that is not the case.  Junction is very good and they did blow out Nixa by 13 but if they played again, it might be as close as the Kickapoo-Junction final last night.

Below is a table of some of the teams that Mike Kelly and Sigh... were talking about.  I grabbed their records off of MSHSAA's website, which is not always reliable, and looked at MaxPreps (again not always reliable) and several area newspapers.  It is a little more difficult to assess teams like Carl Junction because they live on a border and they play a lot of Arkansas teams, which I have to rate so that I get a fair rating for CJ.  The bottom line is that CJ is maybe one rating point better than Nixa, even though they lost by 13.  ONE GAME does not make a season.  Unfortunately for us, CJ will probably not play Nixa again this season and both will go off to their respective classes (CJ in 5, Nixa and 6) and end up playing even better teams than themselves.

Here's the analysis with a couple of comments on definitions:

Raw rating - the rating vs opponents based on opponent rating and the spread for the game.  Raw rating is the average of all the game ratings in the Rating column.

Weighted rating - this is Gramps' fudge factor.  For a team like Nixa, who has a higher raw rating than teams that have beaten them (like CJ), I add additional game ratings for the games they lost which brings their rating down, and add additional game ratings to the teams they lost to, which brings those victors rating up.  

SOS - Strength of Schedule is the average rating for opponents.

Variance - The standard deviation for all game ratings.  The smaller the variance, the more consistent the team is playing.

Pythagorean win % - a formula that uses scoring differential to an exponential power to predict a winning percentage.  Used by the NBA, I have modified the exponent for HS teams.  It predicts season-winning percentage at a correlation coefficient above 90% (damn good for you non-statisticians).


Carl Junction is better than Nixa, who is better than West Plains, who is better than Ozark but Park Hill South tops them all and PHS is not even the best team in class six as both Truman and Incarnate Word are better.  As they say, "there is always a bigger fish in the sea".

The bottom line is Sigh... is right to question Nixa's and Carl Junction's ratings.  I will be moving them up above Nixa but not by much.  Just as Nixa defected West Plains by double digits and Junction defected Nixa soundly, none of these teams, ON AVERAGE, FOR THE SEASON, are that far apart.  

All great teams that could beat each other on any given night.

So Carl Junction is living the dream right now, but even Junction faces a tall order with John Burroughs,  Lutheran St. Charles, and Helias still rated ahead of them in class five.

Best of luck to all these teams.  



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