St. Joe's Prep Predicted To Go Undefeated
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — St. Joseph's Prep will go 8-0 during the regular season, score 267 points, averaging 33.3 points a game, and surrender a mere 87 points, giving up an average of 10.8 points a game.
If it were only that easy to project.
Apparently, a very unique and interesting website,Calpreps.com, which enables fans to pit any two high school teams in the country against each other, thinks it is. The site projects a final score from a neutral site for each high school football team in the country.
"The first thing we do is collect all of the scores nationally, and it's a process of comparing scores and it's all comparatives," said Ned Freeman, the owner and co-founder of the site, which has been in existence since 2001 and has been covering high school football nationally since 2003. "It's a passion of mine. Everyone knows their area and who can beat who, but we know how good these teams are. There's enough big-time games that go across state lines and based on one scale nationally, we can put everyone on one big scale. The scores are based on how good they were last year and what they have back this year."
Each team receives a rating, based on what that team did the previous season. The site was 82.6-percent accurate last year, predicting the winner of games involving every game nationally. But the site predicts the probability of the Hawks going undefeated is 79-percent.
So we thought we'd have a little fun and match up St. Joe Prep's opponents against the Hawks and this is what the website came up with: 8-0 record, one shutout, giving up more than 20 points just once and scoring over 30 in six of their eight regular-season games.
What is intriguing is matching up this year's Hawks against great teams from as far back as 2001, which the site also allows. For example, when matching up this version of St. Joe's Prep against the Class AAA state champion 2011 Archbishop Wood team, Calpreps.com gives the Hawks a 28-14 victory. Yet, this year, the site gives 2014 Wood a 22-21 win over the 2014 Hawks, which is, consequently, a game we won't actually see this year because the teams won't play each other.
The site also projected the 2014 Hawks dismantling the great Prep team of 2003, 35-6. That '03 Prep team went 12-0, which included a 14-0 shutout of Baltimore's Gilman School and had an all-time city winning streak of 35-straight games.
The site offers a disclaimer for those matchups of past teams versus present teams:
IMPORTANT NOTE: Projected scores involving teams from different years should be taken with a very large grain of salt. While it can be fun to see, for example, how your school this year would have done against your school's 2004 team...obviously, there just isn't a way to know that. Our system works on a scale where a team rated a 0 is the average team nationwide. So, a team rated a 21 is 3 TDs better than an average team, but there's absolutely no way to say whether a team rated a 21 in 2014 is better or worse than a team rated a 19 in 2005, mainly because (needless to say!) no teams from 2014 have played any teams from 2005. In other words, there's no way to determine if the entire scale (the country as a whole) is up a bit or down a bit in particular season.
2014 St. Joe's Prep season (according to Calpreps.com)
Sun 8/31 Mount Carmel (IL): 28-12
Sat 9/6 Don Bosco Prep (NJ): 31-13
Sat 9/13 St. Ignatius (OH): 31-7
Fri/Sat 9/19-20 BYE
Sat 9/27 St. Joseph's Regional (Montvale, NJ): 27-21
Sat 10/4 Malvern Prep: 35-14
Sat 10/11 LaSalle: 34-14
Sat 10/18 Father Judge: 35-3
Sat 10/25 Roman Catholic: 46-3
PF: 267 (33.3 ave.); PA: 87 (10.8 ave.)
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