High School Sports

SoonerPollRankings Methodology and Voting Guidelines

Who is eligible to vote in the SoonerPollRankings: Head coaches of high school football programs are eligible to rank high school football teams in their respective class. So, for example, class “A” coaches rank only on class “A” teams, class “6A” coaches rank only teams in class “6A.” Sports writers and sportscasters who cover high school football can vote in any classes they report on or cover for their media outlet. Eligible reporters were drawn from the daily newspapers, local television stations, and major sports talk radio stations covering Oklahoma high school sports.

Guideline for Ranking: Participants are asked to base their ballot rankings on team performance, rather than on team reputation or speculation of future performance. Only the most recent ballot cast by each participant will be calculated to avoid individual participants ‘flooding’ the results.

Product: A top-16 ranking is produced for each class, A through 6A, every week for 11 weeks as well as individual team reports for the top-16 teams in each class that include ranking occurrences, a frequency of first place rankings and time series changes.

Voting Period: Every potential poll participant has been pre-selected, screened and provided a unique, confidential login to go to our secured website and post their rankings, starting at noon on Friday and ending at midnight on the following Monday. On that Monday morning, the staff of SoonerPollRankings will follow up via telephone with participants who have not yet returned their ballot, in order to secure rankings. Results are released every Tuesday morning.

Team Rank Scores: Scoring of teams is determined using a Borda Count system. Under the Borda system, a team gets points based upon the rankings it receives, with decreasing points for each position from 1st place down to 16th. Using our Top-16 model, a team ranked 1st on an individual ballot receives 16 points, a team ranked 2nd receives 15 points, down to a 16th-place team which receives 1 point. The points from all ballots in a class are then summed for each team to produce a score.

Take note that it is possible for a team to have the most first-place votes yet not be ranked first in the poll and that if two or more teams receives the same score they will share that ranking but be listed in order of the most first place votes. Only the top 16 teams will be reported even if there are ties. (This scoring system is used for collegiate rankings by the Associated Press, the USAToday Coaches’ Poll, and the Harris Interactive Poll).

Representativeness of Responses: These rankings represent an expert evaluation of high school coaches and sports reporters in the state of Oklahoma. As such, they are representative only of the sentiments of those who participate in the poll. The results of this poll do not represent a random sample of any population, and are therefore not subject to the constraints of sampling error, sample size, weighting or generalization associated with opinion samples of the general population. These expert evaluations are assumed to have greater validity than a random sample of a larger population because of the familiarity of the coaches and reporters with the teams.

Confidentiality: Participant ballots are strictly confidential and will not be made public by SoonerPollRankings. The site through which expert poll participants cast their ballots is secured and encoded.