TXHSFB 303: Which region was best in Texas high school football?

[caption id="attachment_28766" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Photo by Hale Hughes Photo by Hale Hughes[/caption] Over the course of January, TexasFootball.com presents The TXHSFB 303, a deep dive into the hidden storylines in the 2016 Texas high school football season. Have an idea for an angle? E-mail DCTF managing editor Greg Tepper.Today: Which regions had the best high school football in Texas in 2016? Two hundred and sixty-eight thousand, five hundred and ninety-six. That’s how many square miles comprise the state of Texas. If you’re more numerical than alphabetical, that’s 268,596 square miles (give or take a dozen). You could fit Delaware, Connectifut, New Jersey, New Hampsure, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, West Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee inside the state of Texas…and still have a little less than 800 extra square miles. What I’m trying to say is that Texas is pretty big. So big, in fact, that sometimes it feels like a conglomeration of different states. Have you ever been to El Paso? It feels like a completely different state than San Antonio. Ever been to the Panhandle? It feels like a completely different state from Austin. Ever been to Houston? It feels like a completely different state from East Texas. And that tends to breed regional rivalry, especially when it comes to high school football. Every part of the state likes to claim that they play the best high school football…but who’s actually right? EDITOR’S NOTE: The following few paragraphs include detailed explanations of how we measured this study. It is definitely wonky and maybe boring. If you’re just interested in seeing the results, scroll down to the next Editor’s Note. It won’t hurt my feelings. Here at Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, we divide the state up into 16 different regions: Big Country (think greater Abilene), Centex (think Waco down to College Station), Coastal Bend (think greater Corpus Christi), Dallas-Fort Worth, East Texas (think greater Tyler and Longview), El Paso, Golden Triangle (think greater Beaumont), Hill Country (think greater Austin), Houston, North (think Wichita Falls to Sherman), Northeast (think Paris to Texarkana), Panhandle, Permian Basin (think greater Odessa and Midland), Piney Woods (think Nacogdoches to Huntsville), RGV/Laredo (think Laredo on down the Rio Grande to Brownsville) and San Antonio. Are these regions perfect? Absolutely not. What do you do with a team like Del Rio — along the Rio Grande, but far from Laredo, and nowhere near San Antonio? What about La Grange, which is seemingly equidistant from Austin, San Antonio and Houston, not to mention that it has an argument for being in greater Central Texas? And don’t get us started on six-man schools, which are inherently far from any traditional regional division. That said, imperfect as it may be, we believe that our method is the best possible way of dividing up the state into regions. And it gives us an opportunity to pit the regions against one another. For this exercise, we’ll be using our friend Jerry Forrest’s computer rankings. For those unfamiliar, Jerry utilizes a system that processes every result in the state to formulate a “rating”, which you can then sort into a ranking. Is it perfect? No, and Jerry would admit as much. But it usually falls in line with the eye test — for example, the two highest-rated teams in his final 6A rankings are Lake Travis and DeSoto, the champions. I took the rankings for each classification and averaged them to create a baseline — that is, what is the average rating for a team in each classification? Then, I compared each team to their respective classification’s baseline. We’ll call this the Team Quotient. For example: Lake Travis — the top-rated team in 6A — is rated 34.6% higher than the average 6A team; their Team Quotient is 0.346. From there, I did two things: I averaged the Team Quotient for every team in each region (that’s to say, what is the average rating of a team in each region?); and, I looked at the number of teams in each region with a positive Team Quotient (that’s to say, which region has the most above-average teams?). I’m excluding six-man teams, for two reasons. First: as I mentioned before, because of their inherent remoteness, it’s difficult to conclusively put them in regions. Secondly: Jerry Forrest would admit that his formula for rating teams is not particularly adept at rating six-man teams. EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’re only interested in the results, pick it back up here. So, let’s take a look at which region had the highest-rated teams on average.