Football RPI

What these numbers mean

RPI is 35% your own winning percentage, 35% your opponents’, and 30% your opponents’ opponents’. Margin of victory never counts. Beating someone by forty is worth exactly what beating them by one is worth.

Every team is rated against the whole state, whoever it plays. Splitting the table by class recalculates nothing: it shows the same ratings, narrowed to the teams a school is actually measured against in the postseason.

Under the KHSAA formula every out-of-state opponent counts as a fixed .5106 team, however good or bad they actually are. KHSAA sets that figure from how Kentucky schools have really done against outside opposition and reviews it every two years. True RPI replaces that one assumption with an adjusted out-of-state opponent winning percentage, and Δ is the difference. A positive delta means the fixed value is costing that team; a negative one means it is helping.

That adjusted percentage is the opponent’s record with only the game against this team removed, which is what the formula asks for. An opponent who played two Kentucky schools is therefore counted differently by each of them.

Everything else in True RPI is the KHSAA calculation unchanged, and the name is about that one input, not a claim to be a better rating system. We hold out-of-state opponents’ records but not their opponents’ opponents, so the last 30% of the formula still holds an out-of-state opponent’s schedule at the fixed value. True RPI is the KHSAA rating with one input corrected, not an independently calculated rating.

28 teams shown here played someone from out of state, so the assumption is actually moving their number.

A team with any missing score is not ranked at all, rather than ranked on incomplete data.