Some of the state’s best football teams — Sandy Creek, Gainesville, Hughes and Calhoun, among them — will be seeded much lower than their abilities in the playoffs this season, according to the computer Maxwell Ratings’ predictions.
The ratings, compiled by AJC Varsity/GHSF Daily contributor Loren Maxwell, predict Sandy Creek will be Class 4A’s No. 11 seed in the playoffs despite being the classification’s best team. Sandy Creek won Class 3A (now known as 4A in class renaming) in 2025.
Hughes, ranked No. 2 in Class 6A, will be seeded 10th, Maxwell predicts. Gainesville will be No. 12, though Maxwell ranks the Red Elephants as the sixth-best team. Calhoun, rated No. 2 in 4A, will be No. 7.
Maxwell also expects private schools Westminster, Greater Atlanta Christian and Pace Academy to be under-seeded because of playing Class 3A schedules while most teams in the 4A-2A Private playoff division are playing A schedules.
“Some bracket-worthy teams will miss the playoffs entirely, and others will see their chances of advancing reduced because they drew a tougher seed than their ability warrants,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell has a rosier forecast for other teams. Benefiting from the PSR, he expects, will be Cairo, Rockmart, Central of Carrollton and Monroe Area — teams he forecasts will get the No. 1 or No. 2 seed despite being second-half top-10 teams.
The GHSA began using the Post Season Ratings, or PSR, to seed teams in four of its playoff classes in 2024.
The PSR combines a team’s winning percentage, its opponents’ winning percentage and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage. Specifically, the formula is (WPx0.35)+(OWPx0.35)+(OOWPx0.30).
The formula is similar to the decades-old Rating Percentage Index, or RPI, that the NCAA often uses to help guide playoff seeding, particularly for basketball.
The RPI gets little respect in the computer ratings community.
“The RPI is known to be flawed,” said Kenneth Massey, whose computer rankings once helped choose teams for the college football championship game. “It is an ad-hoc formula based on just two steps on the schedule network graph.”
Massey further states on his website: “The major reason the RPI is a poor model for determining team strength is because it is too simplistic to reliably differentiate teams and relies completely on the assumption that winning percentage is a valid indicator of how strong a team is.”
In November, Maxwell proposed another ranking model (different from his weekly Maxwell Ratings) to seed the playoffs. The GHSA discussed it with interest but did not adopt it.
This season, the GHSA is extending the PSR’s authority to seed the 32 playoff teams in all eight classes. And unlike during the 2024 and 2025 football seasons in the four classes, region finish will not matter except to guarantee region champions a top-16 seed. Now, a sixth-place team can make the playoffs and a third-place team can miss, even from the same region.
Maxwell’s concerns can be seen in the Sandy Creek example.
The Patriots, Class 3A’s No. 1-ranked team, are playing Grayson this week and later Douglas County. Those are top-10 teams from Class 7A. Maxwell estimates Sandy Creek will finish 8-2 (or 8.1-1.9 precisely), likely losing to the 7A opponents and winning the rest.
Grayson and Douglas County also play tough schedules, meaning their winning percentages won’t be enough to offset two losses, per Maxwell’s calculations.
Maxwell predicts Sandy Creek’s opponents’ winning percentage will be .521 and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage .495. Troup, another team that Maxwell projects to finish 8-2, will benefit from .553 and .536 opponents’ records.
Maxwell also has Cairo, Monroe Area and Stephenson favored in every game while also benefiting from superior opponents’ winning percentages.
Maxwell admits his predictions of team strength could be wrong, Sandy Creek might not be 4A’s best team. But focusing on team predictions would miss the point, he said.
“Whether these specific projections (of team strength) hold up doesn’t really matter,” Maxwell said. “If it’s not these teams, it’ll be others once the season plays out. The teams change, but the PSR’s efficacy will remain the same.”
GHSA executive Tim Scott doesn’t sound worried. He says the PSR isn’t perfect and views it as a work in progress.
“We’ve made some tweaks going into this year that will strengthen it,” Scott said. “Those came from good conversations in reclass committee and the board. We’ve formed a PSR committee, which we’ve never had before. We’ll be getting more feedback from our members and continue to work on it.”
The GHSA now has a nine-member committee that Scott expects to meet monthly to monitor and suggest changes going forward. The tweaks put less weight to victories against non-GHSA opponents.
The GHSA has cleaned up its website reporting of PSR standings, adding separate rankings for the smaller private teams and keeping the rankings up at all times. In the past, they went dark once the playoff brackets were announced.
Maxwell says he’s open-minded to the PSR’s 2026 performance. He’s just not so optimistic.
“The (reclass) committee apparently felt the results were good enough (in 2024 and 2025) to extend it to future seasons and all classes,” Maxwell said. “That gives the PSR more opportunities to demonstrate its efficacy and a lot more visibility since it covers the largest programs in the state. We’ll see. Based on what the model projects, I suspect there will be more discussion.”
Maxwell’s PSR predictions can be found in these classifications forecasts or in GHSF Daily’s archive.
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