What this is
GameDayRanks rates every high school football team in Missouri and the St. Louis metro (including the Illinois metro-east) using nothing but final scores and who played whom. There is no committee, no voting, and no reputation adjustment. A team's rating goes up when it beats good teams and down when it loses to weak ones.
How the rankings are computed
The core is a schedule-adjusted scoring margin, sometimes called an SRS. In plain terms:
- Take a team's average scoring margin.
- Adjust it by the quality of every opponent it played.
- Repeat until the whole state settles into a consistent answer.
Two deliberate choices are worth stating. Margins are capped at 28 points, so a running-clock 60-point win counts the same as a four-touchdown win. Beating a team badly proves you are better; beating them by 60 instead of 28 mostly proves the clock kept running. And strength of schedule matters a lot. A 6-5 team from a brutal league can rate above a 10-1 team that never left a weak district. That is the whole point of a power rating, and it is the number one thing people disagree with us about.
How preseason projections work
Before a season starts there are no games to rate, so a projection blends three measured things: last year's final rating, how much production actually returns (graduated seniors removed, and returning players weighted by measured development curves), and a multi-year program history that captures schools which reload every year. The weights were fitted on past seasons and checked against a season the model had never seen.
Predictions, and calling toss-ups honestly
Each game gets a projected winner and a confidence tier. Those tiers are not vibes. They are how often that exact tier actually won in 2025:
- Toss-up (within one score): won 61% of the time
- Lean (7 to 13 points): 77%
- Favored (14 to 20): 85%
- Strong (21 to 27): 92%
- Heavy (28+): 96%
About one in six Missouri games is decided by 7 points or less, and those are close to coin flips no matter who is modeling them. We label them before kickoff rather than explaining them away afterward.
Track record
Every one of those came from a walk-forward test: each week of 2025 was predicted using only the games played before it, never the full season. 1,531 games were graded.
The middle number is the one that matters most. When our ratings and the win-loss standings disagreed about which team was better, the ratings were right 239 times and wrong 98. That is the case for a power rating over a record.
The honest limits: the model is only 58% on one-score games, it cannot see injuries, transfers it has no stats for, or a team that changed completely over one offseason. We publish accuracy every week, including the bad weeks.
Who runs this
Disclosure. GameDayRanks is run by Brad Loomis, who is also the head football coach at Lutheran South. That is a conflict of interest, so it is stated plainly here rather than discovered later.
Two things keep it honest. The rankings are computed by a published formula that no one can lean on, and the founder's own team gets published wherever the math puts it. For the record, Lutheran South finished #255 of 292 in Missouri for 2025 and projects #250 of 292 for 2026.
If a ranking ever looks like it favors one program, say so publicly and we will show the math behind it.
Where the data comes from
Final scores, schedules, and rosters are public results reported by schools and compiled by area sports media. Scores are facts. Everything on this site is computed from them, not copied from anyone's rankings.
Found a mistake?
Wrong score, missing team, or a ranking that looks indefensible: tell us and we will check it and correct it publicly. Several corrections have already come from coaches pointing out problems, and that is the system working.