We are having trouble with this ranking.
Mostly we're having trouble with the 11-through-25 group. To be honest, it's been a problem for the entire season. As you know, several school teams, chiefly in Southern California, Northern California, and North Carolina, finish their play in late February and then move on to club play. We keep those ranked teams in the rankings but often they drift down.
But that moving-down requires some other teams to produce the results. If they don't, or do for some of them (which is the story throughout the Northeast and parts of the Midwest), those early-season teams might hang around. So we have moved St. Xavier up after beating St. Edward and then hanging tough with St. Ignatius. It's an interesting situation because the St. X team itself acknowledges that they wouldn't have the depth to play through HS Nationals. But this ranking isn't about HS Nationals. We use that tournament, but really what we try to do is say "if these two teams played each other tomorrow, who would win?"
And we use their season record to help us with that. Could it be that Sacramento Jesuit would beat several of the teams ranked above them? Yes, it could be. Could it be that Cathedral Catholic would? Yes, and in fact, combined with the results of the last few weeks, we felt we had to move them back close to Torrey Pines, a team they lost to 15-13. That, in the end, made more sense than anything else.
Could teams that don't travel a ton such as Marquette HS or Dallas Jesuit be ranked higher? Yes, but we'd need them to play more out of their region. (To be fair, Marquette did, but in the end their matchups told us some stuff, but not enough; Dallas Jesuit didn't play out of Texas at all.)
Staples, McQuaid Jesuit, and Detroit Central Catholic all move up. New Trier moves up because we actually ranked them based on a mistake—we had them losing to Notre Dame de la Salette ... our fault ... and they won that game.
But the message today is this: At the very least 14-30 are roughly equal. What we are not seeing is too many teams making that jump to the higher echelons. BC High seemed to do it this year.
