Area's best large-school teams based on Pigskinprep

Which Class 5A, 4A schools over past 25 years have the highest website rankings?

I would love to tell you about how my brain works. I would love to tell you everything I publish for Red River Roundup has been mapped out for weeks.

Alas, that would be a lie. Sometimes I have feature or historic stories planned in advance. Other times, I get a message from someone about Allen beating Windthorst 72-0 in the 1950s, and it spirals into a 1,200-word story.

While driving back from Abilene after a Memorial tennis tournament over the weekend, my brain had a thought: “I wonder which of our city teams over the past couple decades would be considered the best?”

There’s no way to produce a definitive answer. I’m sure it’s a debate coaches, friends and siblings have had for years.

But thanks to Pigskinprep.com, there is a way to numerically rank them based off their end-of-season rankings.

Pigskinprep.com has been around since 1998, and among its many uses, it rates teams on a weekly basis during the season. I don’t know the formula for their ratings or how they produce their preseason ratings, although I’m sure it factors the previous year and returning starters, etc.

But what I can tell you is this. A team with a 120-point rating will be a 10-point favorite over a team with a 110 rating on a neutral field. If that 120 team wins by 20, its season rating will increase and the 110 team’s rating will go down.

Anyway, returning to the point of this column. I went back through the past 25 seasons of football on Pigskinprep.com and came up with the area’s best big-school teams (those that competed in Class 5A and 4A) based on their final rankings. I want to do this with Class 3A and 2A soon as well.

The top school is the 2007 Rider Raiders that won 12 games before falling to Everman 21-19 in the state quarterfinals. Shavodrick Beaver, Eric Ward and Jurrell Thompson were key players on that squad.