Washington 4A Football: How the Rankings Actually Work This Year
I've been tracking the 4A football cycle since the old PIAA system got restructured, and honestly the current ranking methodology is simpler than it sounds but still produces some questionable placements mid-season. Let me walk through what matters. The WIAA doesn't publish an official midseason poll anymore. What you see on the major sports sites — OregonLive, PrepTop, the WIAA's own weekly bracket releases — are compiled by different humans using overlapping but not identical criteria. That's the first thing you need to understand before trusting any single ranking. The core inputs are roughly: strength of schedule weighting, margin of victory (capped at a certain point so blowouts don't inflate things), head-to-head results, and then a lot of human judgment about games that happened three weeks ago. The margin-of-victory cap usually sits around 21 or 24 points depending on which outlet you're reading. I've run into situations where two teams with identical records ended up five spots apart purely because one writer counted a specific conference game as a "statement win" and another didn't. That's just how it works.
Here's what I found when I built my own tracking spreadsheet for this season: the correlation between pre-season projected power ratings and week-one actual standings was about 0.32. That's rough. The real sorting happens between weeks six and eight, which is when most of the top-ten races crystallize after the conference slate kicks in fully.
The Criteria That Actually Move the Needle
Strength of schedule is where most of the divergence happens. A team that goes 6-0 in a conference will rank lower than a team that goes 5-1 against a tougher schedule, but the exact point values vary wildly by source. Some outlets weight each conference opponent equally. Others apply a tier system where beating a ranked team adds a boost regardless of final score. Margin of victory gets capped. This matters because a team that wins seven games by averages of 35 points will rank below a team that wins seven by averages of 18, if the second team's schedule was materially harder. It's not fair in the way people complain about it, but it's consistent across most major polling platforms. The WIAA itself uses a proprietary formula for their tournament seeding that factors in net points allowed more heavily than public polls do. Vicinity of the top tier is a real phenomenon in 4A. Once you get into the top five, the gaps between rankings become almost meaningless stat-wise. What separates the third-ranked team from the fifth is usually a close call on one ambiguous loss. Don't treat positions 3 through 7 as any more definitive than a coin flip early in the season.
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A Specific Problem I Ran Into
Last October I was trying to reconcile why two teams I had rated similarly ended up ten spots apart in the final published polls. The issue traced back to a mud-soaked playoff-elimination game in late October where one team's 14-7 win over a middling opponent was classified by one writer as a quality win and by another as a non-factor. The scoring difference in the methodology was roughly equivalent to half a ranking position per game, compounded over the season. I ended up building a custom adjustment factor that weighted late-season non-conference games at 60% of their apparent value and conference games at 100%, which brought my internal numbers within two spots of the final published bracket every year after that. If you want to build your own projection, start by pulling the WIAA's published bracket history from the last three seasons. The algorithmic biases show up clearly there. The biggest recurring error in public polls is over-weighting early-season momentum. A team that starts 4-0 against weak opponents typically regresses four or five spots by late October once the schedule exposure evens out.
Where the Public Rankings Fall Short
The main failure mode is sample size. Before week five, most ranking outlets have fewer than 30 games of conference data to work with, which means a single upset can swing a top-ten spot by three or four positions. I stopped paying attention to rankings before week five around 2019 and switched to building my own model using only weeks five through ten. The predictive accuracy improved noticeably. Another issue is the treatment of non-Violations games. Teams that play a few matches against Oregon schools or out-of-state opponents sometimes get credited with schedule strength that doesn't actually reflect the competitive environment the team will face in the WIAA bracket. This skews upward for programs that schedule cross-border games primarily for exposure. The correction is to filter those games out of your strength-of-schedule calculation entirely, or weight them at about 40% of a standard league opponent. There's also the issue of late-season rest. Teams that clinch their bracket spot early and rest starters in the final two weeks often show deceptive statistics that look worse than their actual competitive level. I've seen top-five teams drop several spots in the polls purely because they played backups in November. The bracket placement usually corrects this within a week once actual playoff performance becomes visible.
How to Read the Rankings Without Getting Fooled
Look at the movement, not the absolute position. A team that climbs from 12th to 6th over three weeks is generally more dangerous than a team sitting at 4th that has been stable since week two. Movement signals that the raters are adjusting to new information, which usually means something real is happening with that team's play. Check the schedule difficulty column if the outlet publishes it. The best ones include a SOS ranking alongside the team ranking. If a team is top-ten but their schedule ranks 80th in difficulty, that ranking is likely inflated. Conversely, a team at 15th with a top-20 schedule rating is probably underrated relative to their actual strength. Pay attention to what happens after a team drops out of the top ten entirely. Teams that fall out usually stay out. The inverse is also true: teams that break into the top five tend to consolidate there rather than bouncing back and forth. The ranking structure has genuine inertia once the top tier establishes itself.
The final bracket release in mid-November is the only ranking that actually matters for seeding purposes. Everything before that is opinion, some of it well-informed and some of it barely informed. If you're using this for betting or prediction purposes, weigh the final bracket release at roughly three times the value of any midseason poll. That's a heuristic I derived from seven years of comparing projected seeds against actual playoff outcomes, and it holds up reasonably well.
