It's a constant debate: what is the best program in Texas high school football? Let's throw some fuel on that fire once again.

With data help from Jerry Forrest at PigskinPrep.com, Dave Campbell's Texas Football is proud to unveil the 2023 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.

Editor's note: We altered the formula slightly for the 2023 program rankings, reweighting the criteria to value winning percentage and state championships more and 10-win seasons less. We also re-calculated the 2022 program rankings to reflect that in the one-year change column.

This year's set of rankings reflect the 2017 through 2022 seasons; last year's rankings reflected the 2016 through 2021 seasons. Please note: a team must have played in six varsity seasons to be eligible for these rankings. As a result, teams like Alvin Shadow Creek, San Antonio Harlan and Bridgeland — all of which would've ranked in the top 250 if they were eligible — will not appear in these rankings.

In total, we will rank 1,204 UIL Texas high school football programs, revealing the rankings over the next week on TexasFootball.com, with the Top 20 revealed live on Texas Football Today on Tuesday, January 24.

2023 Texas High School Football 6-Year Program Rankings
Release Schedule

Today: Nos. 1,205 through 501
Wednesday: Nos. 401-500
Thursday: Nos. 301-400
Friday: Nos. 201-300
Monday: Nos. 101-200
Tuesday: Top 100