This August, for the first time, the ratings run live. Every girls match in Tennessee, rated as it happens, all season long. So before a ball is kicked, here is what the system expects: title odds for every class from ten thousand simulated postseasons, a projected statewide top 25, and the teams poised to move. It is all timestamped and it will not be edited. At the end of the season we will grade every number on this page in public.
Start from each team's current rating, the one earned across every match through the 25-26 season. Rosters turn over in the offseason, so the engine hands back part of every team's distance from average before a new season starts, and it does not do it blindly: it reads each school's 25-26 roster and regresses teams that graduated a big senior class harder than teams returning a young core. That is the same adjustment the live engine will apply in August; this page just runs it early. (The exact weights stay behind the official curtain, as always. The newsletter explains the structure.)
Then the postseason: for each class we take the sixteen strongest projected teams, seed them, and play the bracket ten thousand times, with every result drawn from the same calibrated win-probability scale the head-to-head tool uses. Two honest limits. July knows nothing about transfers, incoming freshmen, or coaching moves. And the real TSSAA draw is geographic, not seeded, so read these as strength odds, not bracket forecasts. If anything, a great team's true odds are a touch higher than shown, because the real road to a title usually runs through a region, not a gauntlet of the top sixteen.
Every class on one ladder, ordered by projected rating. The "returning core" column is the share of last season's roster that graduated, read straight from the 25-26 rosters: lower means more of the team comes back.
Regression is not even-handed, and that is the point. A team that just graduated half its starting eleven should not keep its whole rating over the summer; a team that dominated with sophomores should. These are the biggest projected rank moves among the current top 60, before anyone plays a match:
These numbers are frozen. Published July 2026, before the first practice. We will not quietly revise them when the season starts making us look silly, and some of it will.
The season runs live. Ratings update as matches are played, all fall, on this site. Follow along on the 26-27 hub.
And in November we settle up. Every favorite, every odds line, every mover on this page gets graded against what actually happened. A projection you never check back on is just a horoscope.