Old Line Rankings

Static sites ranking every Maryland public high school team. A splash page at the root links to each sport: football (4A, 4A/3A, 3A, 2A, 2A/1A, 1A) at /football/, boys soccer at /boys-soccer/ and girls soccer at /girls-soccer/, boys basketball at /boys-basketball/ and girls basketball at /girls-basketball/ (1A–4A); lacrosse is listed as coming soon. Every site's footer has a sport switcher. Old soccer links (/#/boys/4A, /soccer/…) redirect to the right soccer site.

Every page has a real address: /football/rankings/, /football/rankings/3a/, /football/schedule/, /football/playoffs/4a/?view=projected, /football/how-it-works/, and each team's /football/<team>/ (?team=Linganore opens a team's drawer on any page). The build writes a static page for each (own title, description and canonical address, all in sitemap.xml); site/app.js switches between them without reloading. Old #/… links are rewritten to the new addresses.

Rating

• Win: opponent class points + opponent's season wins
  • Soccer: 1A=5, 2A=6, 3A=7, 4A=8 (modeled on football's system; MPSSAA seeds soccer by winning percentage only)
  • Football: MPSSAA playoff seeding values: 4A & 4A/3A = 8, 3A & 2A = 7, 2A/1A & 1A = 6
• Tie: half of what a win would earn
• Loss: 0
• Opponent wins count their ties as half a win. Non-public / out-of-state opponents = lowest class, 0 wins.
• Football counts only the first meeting between two teams (MPSSAA football bulletin).
• Soccer leaves out Sat Sep 5 (preseason jamborees and showcases; MPSSAA's standings don't count them), set by uncounted_dates. One game entered by each school under different dates (2 days apart, or the same day a month off) with the same score counts once.
• Soccer's Old Line Rating = total points ÷ games played, ranked within class. For football the same formula is the MPSSAA points (football's Old Line Rating is margin-based; see below).
• SOS (strength of schedule) = the rating a team would have if it had won every game.

Old Line Rating (all sports)

Every sport is ranked by the Old Line Rating (scripts/oldline.py): football on points (cap 28, ±4 win bonus), soccer on goals (cap 4, no win bonus), basketball on points (cap 40, ±3 win bonus). Football keeps MPSSAA points for seeding; soccer and basketball are seeded by winning percentage. The team drawer's "See calculation" shows every game that went into a team's rating.

• Each game counts the scoring margin capped at 28, plus 4 for a win (minus 4 for a loss).
• A team's rating is its average game value plus its opponents' average rating, solved for all teams at once, pulled toward its class average by 3 games' worth. Home edge is measured from the data (floored at 0).
• Rating differences work like point spreads; win chance = 1 / (1 + e^(−0.16 × difference)).
• Backtested on 2026 weeks 3–6 using only earlier games: 75% of winners picked vs 70% for MPSSAA points.

Basketball (early season)

• No rankings or win chances before rank_date (Dec 15) and no projected brackets or title odds before project_date (Jan 12); the pages say when they start. Today's seeds by winning percentage show from the start.
• Last season's games are dropped (season_start). While the MPSSAA basketball standings are last season's, classes and regions come from this fall's soccer standings (alignment).
• Upcoming games come from ArbiterLive (scripts/arbiter.py, school matches cached in scripts/cache/arbiter.json) until MPSSAA has the season's schedule. Results always come from MPSSAA.

Playoffs page (football, soccer and basketball)

Each sport seeds the way its MPSSAA bulletin says (playoffs in SITES):

• Football: each region's top 8 by MPSSAA points play two rounds (1v8, 4v5, 2v7, 3v6); two per region reach the Final 8.
• Soccer: every team is seeded in its region by winning percentage (fewer than 9 games divide by 9) and each region plays down to one champion; the 8 champions make the Final 8. Basketball is the same with 15 games as the minimum divisor.

The Final 8 is reseeded 1–8 by the same number. The page shows each region's mini bracket, then the state bracket:

• Current: today's seeds and first-round matchups only; later rounds and the Final 8 bracket stay empty.
• Projected: the rest of the regular season and every playoff game go to the favorite and every game is shown. Every remaining game goes to the team with the higher Old Line Rating (football also shows each team's win chance).
• Final 8 odds (football): every team makes its region playoffs (regions have at most 8 teams), so odds measure how far it goes (Final 8, semifinals, state final, title), from 2,000 simulated seasons and playoffs.

Official brackets (soccer)

Once MPSSAA posts seeds, scripts/brackets.py reads its bracket pages' data (the sports-data API's blocks/tournament-bracket block, HTML) into games: class, region or state, round, seeds, teams, scores, winner, date, time and site. Names are matched to our schools and the bracket goes in each division's data as bracket. Before seeding (every slot "TBD") nothing is added. Turned on per site by brackets=True.

With a bracket, the front page gets a Playoffs section: a tile per class (round and dates, teams still alive, the favorite left) and a find-your-team box (seed, next game or how its run ended). Each class's playoffs page opens with that class's games to watch: the closest games still to play. ?preview=playoffs shows it before seeding with a stand-in bracket from today's seeds; &played=N plays N rounds.

Watch links

scripts/nfhs.py matches schools to NFHS Network (by name, county suffix removed, city as tiebreak) and each game to a varsity broadcast by sport, gender, date (±1 day) and both schools. Games with a broadcast get a ▶ Watch button in the team drawer (live or replay). If NFHS can't be reached the build continues without watch links.

Layout

• site/ — the deployable site: splash index.html and shared app.js, flag.js, styles.css, logos/
• site/football/, site/boys-soccer/, site/girls-soccer/, site/boys-basketball/, site/girls-basketball/ — each site's index.html, data.js and cal/ team calendars
• site/soccer/ — redirect for old soccer links
• scripts/build.py — fetches results and writes each site's data.js and index.html. Sport differences (divisions, classes and points, regions, labels) live in its SITES config and are passed to app.js.
• scripts/page.html — page template for every sport; scripts/splash.html — splash template (edit these, not the generated index.html files). Add coming-soon sports to COMING in build.py.
• scripts/oldline.py — Old Line Rating and simulations; scripts/nfhs.py — watch links; scripts/icons.py — sport icons
• scripts/schools.py — downloads school logos, mascots and counties (needs Pillow: .venv)

Update

python3 scripts/build.py              # refresh results for both sites (run anytime)
.venv/bin/python scripts/schools.py   # refresh logos/school info (rarely needed)

View

Serve it: python3 -m http.server -d site 8000 → http://localhost:8000 (splash), /soccer/, /football/

Hosting

Live at https://oldlinerankings.com (Cloudflare Pages, publishes site/ on every push). Also deployed to GitHub Pages by .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which runs nightly (and on every push to main), fetches fresh results with scripts/build.py, commits the updated data for both sites, and publishes site/. Refresh on demand: gh workflow run deploy.yml.