09/19/22 – Initial RPI Rankings Released for Football

September 19, 2022 2022-2023 News Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: SEPT. 19, 2022

The first official KHSAA Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) rankings for the 2022 football season have been posted for all classes at KHSAA.org.

Due to the limited number of contests for football compared to the other sports and the application of RPI data on a much more extensive basis, as the KHSAA office maintains the district standings, and the fact that football is divided into classes, there are additional clarifications and operations in football that are not necessary for other sports, as follows:

• A team is eligible to play 10 contests during the 11-week season.
• All games played, including forfeits, count as normal with RPI.
• A seeded district game unable to be played without forfeit attribution will be decided by comparative RPI following the last regular-season game.
• Any calculation involving an out-of-state team will be assigned a .51060 winning percentage, which is the average value of opponents’ opponents’ winning percentages for the previous season prior to COVID-19, a standard that fairly represents the odds of winning without having to track the hundreds of out-of-state contests played by schools.
• The particular nuances of the football calculation should be reviewed at this link: https://khsaa.org/rpi-calculation-steps/.

The RPI rankings are updated on an hourly basis but are not calculated for teams missing one or more scores from the previous day or earlier. At the end of the season, there are 1,000 games involved in the calculation of each team’s RPI and therefore, the impact of a single specific game and its result is not consequential.

The RPI (https://khsaa.org/rpi-ratings-percentage-index/) is a tool developed for all team sports by using the official KHSAA/Riherds Scoreboard data. It is provided for a variety of reasons, including district tiebreaking and bracketing in specific sports, as well as a means to increase publicity, interest and promotion. 

RPI measures a team’s strength relative to other teams, based largely on the strength of their schedules (margin of victory is not a factor). RPI is calculated from the team’s Winning Percentage (WP), the Opponent’s Winning Percentage (OWP) and the Opponents’ Opponents’ Winning Percentage (OOWP). These three components are combined to produce the RPI using the following formula: RPI = (WP * WPVAL) + (OWP * OWPVAL) + (OOWP * OOWPVAL).

The RPI uses the following final calculation:

• WPVAL shall be .35 (35%)
• OWPVAL shall be .35 (35%)
• OOWPVAL shall be .30 (30%)

The 2022 RPI rankings for football can be found at this link: https://khsaa.org/rpi_details/?event_id=1197

Detailed background on RPI and examples can be found at this link: https://khsaa.org/rpi-calculation-steps/

– KHSAA –

About the Kentucky High School Athletic Association

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association was organized in 1917 and is the agency designated by the Kentucky Department of Education to manage high school athletics in the Commonwealth. The Association is a voluntary nonprofit 501(c)3 organization made up of 284 member schools, both public and non-public. The KHSAA awards 215 state championships to 51 teams and 164 individuals in 13 sports and six sport-activities, funds catastrophic insurance coverage for its more than 106,000 rostered member school student-athletes, provides coaching education and sports safety programs for more than 12,000 coaches and licenses and facilitates the distribution of training material for over 4,000 contest officials.