The 2019 Texas high school football season is in the books — the champions crowned, the pads put away, the iconic Friday night lights extinguished. This moment in time provides us with a unique opportunity to look back over the better part of the last decade and attempt to answer a seemingly unknowable question: what is the best high school football program in Texas?
With data help from Jerry Forrest at PigskinPrep.com, Dave Campbell's Texas Football is proud to unveil the 2020 edition of its Texas High School Football 6-Year Program Rankings, a look at the relative strength of each UIL Texas high school football program. The goal of the project is to rank the relative strength of every program in Texas over the course of the last six seasons.
Why six seasons? A six-year sample provides a steady measure of a program as opposed to an individual squad — six years represents one-and-a-half graduation cycles, mitigating the impact of a single transcendent class of athletes. In short: good programs have great teams one or two years, but great programs have great teams spread across a larger swath of time, like six years.
The rankings are based on a formula that takes into account the following five criteria:
Games Won — The raw number of games a team won relative to the maximum number possible (96 for 11-man teams, 90 for 6-man teams); so, of the maximum number of games a team could have won, how many did it win?
Winning Percentage — Of the games a team played, how many did it win?
10-Win Seasons — Of the six seasons, how many did a team win 10 games?
State Championships — How many state titles did a team win?
State Championship Game Appearances — How many state championship games did a team play?
The criteria are set against a 100-point scale, wherein a perfect six-year run — 96-0 (or 90-0 for a six-man team) with six state championships — would result in a score of 100, and a perfectly miserable six-year run — 0-96 (or 0-90 for a six-man team) — would result in a score of zero.
This year's set of rankings reflect the 2014 through 2019 seasons; last year's rankings reflected the 2013 through 2018 seasons. Please note: a team must have played in six varsity seasons to be eligible for these rankings. So, teams like College Station join the rankings for the first time, since the Cougars first played varsity football in 2014, while teams like Alvin Shadow Creek will not be in the rankings, since the Sharks — the 5A Division I state champs — played just its second varsity football last in 2019.
Here are the 2020 Six-Year Program Rankings presented by Dave Campbell's Texas Football.