Are you one of the 600?
"About 2,000 videotapes arrive in a post-office box in Kansas City, Mo., every fall, sent by coaches, sportswriters and parents from throughout the country. The people behind the return addresses are hoping to catch the attention of Jamie DeMoney, who issues one of several national rankings of high school football teams, a product that is partly arbitrary and largely popular.
“I have to have the biggest P.O. box at the post office,” said DeMoney, 36. “And now that I’m married, I can’t just leave them lying around.”
Since 1999, DeMoney has run PrepNation.com, one of the many Web sites that provide national rankings for a sport with no national champion. Whereas college football has the Bowl Championship Series, there is no structure at the high school level for determining anything beyond state champions.
High school rankings can seem even more whimsical than the often-criticized rankings in college football because they are usually the work of one person, and high school teams from different regions of the country rarely have opponents in common. College football rankings are determined by computer programs or coaches, members of the news media and other experts.
“The rankings are very subjective,” said Chris Lawlor, who since 2000 had compiled USA Today’s rankings before moving to ESPN.com this year. “You need to get a feel for schools over the years and you get a sense for how coaches talk about their teams. But you have to put a lot of trust in them and the local sportswriters.”
Yet the rankings have proliferated in recent years, primarily as a result of increased television coverage of the sport and what DeMoney calls “a hard core of maybe 600 people who follow high school football like others follow the N.F.L.”
The rankings dovetail with the marketing efforts of TV networks like ESPN, which has broadcast 16 high school games this season. When Carroll High of Southlake, Tex., played Miami Northwestern of Florida in September, ESPN billed the game as a clash between the top two teams in the country.
“From a television perspective, it’s great,” said Rashid Ghazi, a partner at Paragon Marketing, which arranges high school football games for ESPN. “If we’ve got two teams in the top 25, it provides us with a hook and some credibility to people out of that state.”
Steve Specht, who coaches St. Xavier in Cincinnati, which is ranked in the top five of several polls, said that high school football was changing in a way that may be irreversible because of the television coverage and the emphasis on rankings.
“Our fans love it, our community loves it — they live on it,” he said. “And as a coach it’s nice. But when you go through a season always focused on the polls, it puts a giant bull’s-eye on your back.
“Whether we like it or not, we’re playing a national schedule now. I’d rather call up 10 local teams here in Cincinnati, but teams look at the rankings and won’t play us anymore.”
When the rankings are compiled by one person, they are labor intensive — and especially subjective. To assemble his weekly rankings, Lawlor relies on homework he did before the season. “Once the season starts, the rankings take care of themselves because teams win and lose,” he said. “And when games start, that’s when you can make some good judgment calls.”
Lawlor said he kept his finger on the pulse of high school football by maintaining contact with a network of more than 200 local sportswriters, college recruiters and high school coaches.
MaxPreps.com takes a different approach. Jason Hickman, the executive editor, said the site’s computer-generated rankings — based entirely on data like results, margin of victory and strength of schedule — provided something closer to an objective product.
“We don’t put our rankings out there as the be all, end all of national rankings,” he said. “Our intent is not to compete with human polls. But the only way to include all 15,000 schools who play football is to computerize it.”
And just like in college football, the computer draws criticism. “Our rankings sometime struggle a little bit,” Hickman said. “But by the end of the year, it evens out and tends to reflect reality.”
High school rankings in their current incarnation can be traced back to a single man: Doug Huff, who spent 35 years as a daily newspaper sports editor in Wheeling, W.Va. He has compiled weekly national rankings for more than two decades, and his were the only ones carried by national wire services from 1987 to 1999.
Huff said national rankings of high school football teams, in some form, had been around for at least 80 years. In 1927, a high school coach and official, Art Johlfs, created the National Sports News Service and started crowning a national champion based on end-of-season polls.
But not until the past 25 years have the rankings achieved widespread recognition. In 1982, USA Today started its rankings; since then, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and Web sites like StudentSports, MaxPreps, and PrepNation have all become major players, blossoming along with companies like Rivals and Scouts Inc., that essentially serve as recruiting news services.
“It’s a mushrooming effect,” Huff said. “You create interest and you get the expanded print coverage. Then TV jumps on it with the shoe companies and the people who sponsor these games of the week. If you’d told me 20 years ago that this stuff was going to be covered so widely, I wouldn’t believe it.”
DeMoney said he was convinced that the lack of a national championship and the scarcity of interstate matchups were why fans hungered for national high school rankings. PrepNation.com received more than 1,500 hits a day during the season, he said.
“It’s all we have,” he said. “There’s no definitive answer, so people want to hear opinions and discuss it and go on message boards and argue about it.”
"About 2,000 videotapes arrive in a post-office box in Kansas City, Mo., every fall, sent by coaches, sportswriters and parents from throughout the country. The people behind the return addresses are hoping to catch the attention of Jamie DeMoney, who issues one of several national rankings of high school football teams, a product that is partly arbitrary and largely popular.
“I have to have the biggest P.O. box at the post office,” said DeMoney, 36. “And now that I’m married, I can’t just leave them lying around.”
Since 1999, DeMoney has run PrepNation.com, one of the many Web sites that provide national rankings for a sport with no national champion. Whereas college football has the Bowl Championship Series, there is no structure at the high school level for determining anything beyond state champions.
High school rankings can seem even more whimsical than the often-criticized rankings in college football because they are usually the work of one person, and high school teams from different regions of the country rarely have opponents in common. College football rankings are determined by computer programs or coaches, members of the news media and other experts.
“The rankings are very subjective,” said Chris Lawlor, who since 2000 had compiled USA Today’s rankings before moving to ESPN.com this year. “You need to get a feel for schools over the years and you get a sense for how coaches talk about their teams. But you have to put a lot of trust in them and the local sportswriters.”
Yet the rankings have proliferated in recent years, primarily as a result of increased television coverage of the sport and what DeMoney calls “a hard core of maybe 600 people who follow high school football like others follow the N.F.L.”
The rankings dovetail with the marketing efforts of TV networks like ESPN, which has broadcast 16 high school games this season. When Carroll High of Southlake, Tex., played Miami Northwestern of Florida in September, ESPN billed the game as a clash between the top two teams in the country.
“From a television perspective, it’s great,” said Rashid Ghazi, a partner at Paragon Marketing, which arranges high school football games for ESPN. “If we’ve got two teams in the top 25, it provides us with a hook and some credibility to people out of that state.”
Steve Specht, who coaches St. Xavier in Cincinnati, which is ranked in the top five of several polls, said that high school football was changing in a way that may be irreversible because of the television coverage and the emphasis on rankings.
“Our fans love it, our community loves it — they live on it,” he said. “And as a coach it’s nice. But when you go through a season always focused on the polls, it puts a giant bull’s-eye on your back.
“Whether we like it or not, we’re playing a national schedule now. I’d rather call up 10 local teams here in Cincinnati, but teams look at the rankings and won’t play us anymore.”
When the rankings are compiled by one person, they are labor intensive — and especially subjective. To assemble his weekly rankings, Lawlor relies on homework he did before the season. “Once the season starts, the rankings take care of themselves because teams win and lose,” he said. “And when games start, that’s when you can make some good judgment calls.”
Lawlor said he kept his finger on the pulse of high school football by maintaining contact with a network of more than 200 local sportswriters, college recruiters and high school coaches.
MaxPreps.com takes a different approach. Jason Hickman, the executive editor, said the site’s computer-generated rankings — based entirely on data like results, margin of victory and strength of schedule — provided something closer to an objective product.
“We don’t put our rankings out there as the be all, end all of national rankings,” he said. “Our intent is not to compete with human polls. But the only way to include all 15,000 schools who play football is to computerize it.”
And just like in college football, the computer draws criticism. “Our rankings sometime struggle a little bit,” Hickman said. “But by the end of the year, it evens out and tends to reflect reality.”
High school rankings in their current incarnation can be traced back to a single man: Doug Huff, who spent 35 years as a daily newspaper sports editor in Wheeling, W.Va. He has compiled weekly national rankings for more than two decades, and his were the only ones carried by national wire services from 1987 to 1999.
Huff said national rankings of high school football teams, in some form, had been around for at least 80 years. In 1927, a high school coach and official, Art Johlfs, created the National Sports News Service and started crowning a national champion based on end-of-season polls.
But not until the past 25 years have the rankings achieved widespread recognition. In 1982, USA Today started its rankings; since then, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and Web sites like StudentSports, MaxPreps, and PrepNation have all become major players, blossoming along with companies like Rivals and Scouts Inc., that essentially serve as recruiting news services.
“It’s a mushrooming effect,” Huff said. “You create interest and you get the expanded print coverage. Then TV jumps on it with the shoe companies and the people who sponsor these games of the week. If you’d told me 20 years ago that this stuff was going to be covered so widely, I wouldn’t believe it.”
DeMoney said he was convinced that the lack of a national championship and the scarcity of interstate matchups were why fans hungered for national high school rankings. PrepNation.com received more than 1,500 hits a day during the season, he said.
“It’s all we have,” he said. “There’s no definitive answer, so people want to hear opinions and discuss it and go on message boards and argue about it.”