The 2023 Texas high school football season is in the books, and with UIL Realignment on the horizon, we're already gearing up for the 2024 season. It's a long wait until August, but if we know anything about football in Texas, there's plenty to talk about.
That includes the annual Dave Campbell's Texas Football Six-Year Program Rankings, which were just released. For the sixth consecutive season, we're taking a deep dive into the strength of the 1,200+ UIL Texas high school football programs.
What are they? Here's an excerpt from the intro to the rankings:
With data help from Jerry Forrest at PigskinPrep.com, Dave Campbell's Texas Football is proud to unveil the 2024 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 2018 through 2023 seasons; last year's rankings reflected the 2017 through 2022 seasons. Please note: a team must have played in six varsity seasons for UIL honors to be eligible for these rankings. That means we'll welcome in a handful of teams into the rankings for the first time — programs like Alvin Shadow Creek, San Antonio Harlan and Bridgeland — while still others will be kept waiting for a while longer — programs like Frisco Emerson, San Antonio Davenport and Canyon West Plains. In total, we rank 1,216 UIL Texas high school football programs.