Football!

The Friday Night Lights start shining as we kick off football season.

The air is starting to get a little bit crisp, which means it's time to break out your hoodies and kick off the fall sports season!

If you're new here, the Model starts with last year's final rankings (well, a fraction of last year's rankings) as good teams tend to stay good and bad teams tend to stay bad. This does a couple of things. First, it allows the Model to make a prediction on Opening Day. Second, it helps ensure the Model doesn't overreact to the first game. This is a bigger issue in basketball. If, say, the Falmouth boys lose their first game of the year, the Model assumes that they'll probably be ok. Now, if they start 0-3, that's a pattern.

Anyway, Leavitt starts the year in first place.

If you're interested in the math at all, I made a not-small change in how the Model calculates playoff games. There was a situation where if you got smoked in the playoffs--like really smoked--the Model would punish you to the extent that it was possible to fare worse than the team you beat in the previous round. The fix for that ended up shuffling some teams around in the final rankings.

One other note on football: a couple of teams play games against teams "from away". This happens every year, except this year there's a cool matchup between Brewer and Salem, Mass--the two schools with a Witch mascot (note to self: maybe worth a road trip to Brewer?). I really don't want to build an entire model for one team from Mass to play one game against Brewer or for the handful of New Hampshire teams that play southern Maine teams every year, so I just bunch them all together as a team called "New Hampshire". Is it a great fix? No. But it works for now.

On the latest episode of the podcast, I talked to Andrew Hart of the incredibly valuable MaineHighSchoolFootball.com to preview the football season.

We talked about the rise (and fall?) of 8-man football, Leavitt's dominance, the impact of enrollment, the contenders in each region, and which Maine coach would make the best candidate for Vice President.

You can listen to the full conversation at the YouTube link above, on Facebook, or your standard podcast platforms.

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

If you enjoy the podcasts, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice and leave a nice review. It helps with algorithms and all that fun stuff and makes it easier to do more of them. It really does go a long way!

If soccer and field hockey are more your vibe, there's rankings for that as well.

This also starts with last season's final rankings.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Oceanside middle schooler Olivia Breen announced her transfer to Montverde, followed a couple of days later by her sister Bailey.

This has been long-rumored, but is now official.

Bailey Breen was very likely going to win Miss Basketball. The door is now open for other contenders.

The early word on Olivia Breen is that she would dominate in B South, perhaps even more than her sister has, so the move to Montverde makes a lot of sense and it'll be awesome to see two Mainers playing on the biggest stage.

This also creates a wide-open Class B girls. Oceanside should still be in the mix in B South, but one can now imagine any number of teams representing the region in the Gold Ball game.

Make your picks in the comments!

Some scary news from Orono.

Edward Little great John Shea is stepping away from basketball and the University of Maine men’s basketball team because of a heart condition called dysautonomia. pic.twitter.com/Lbnu4iC8dv
— Adam Robinson (@FunkFlashyRob) August 28, 2024

The fall schedules are all loaded and hopefully accurate. I've found the usual mistakes (one team entered their JV games as varsity games...again). You can find the day's games at the scoreboard.

If you've got a score, feel free to enter it! And if you know a postponement, please put that in the PPD? column. If you happen to know the new date, putting that in the column is a massive help.

If you find yourself stuck with NFHS Network broadcasts (I'm so sorry), it turns out they have an affiliate program where NFHS will get less money. It's a thing you apply for. I have no idea how hard it is to get approved, but they approved me, so this NFHS link will do the trick.

But you might be able to get your booster group approved and then some of that money could stay in your community. Just saying.

Over Labor Day Weekend, Ryan Metiver repeated at the Last Man Standing Ultramarathon, setting a new course record with 39 laps.

Last Man Standing is a "backyard ultra", where you run a ~4.2 mile lap and every hour, if you can get back to the starting line, you run it again. Whoever lasts the longest wins.

It's one of the more difficult running formats around.

Mark Haskell of the Courier-Gazette weighs in on the Cooper Flagg craze, as does the NBA.

If @Cooper_Flagg is in the paint, forget about it 🙅‍♂️#NBADefenseWeek pic.twitter.com/bJEcRq1eUv
— NBA Future Starts Now (@nbafuturenow) September 2, 2024

I'll hold off on any Game of the Day stuff until next week.

Expect a weekly newsletter for the fall and then we'll be back on the daily schedule for basketball season.

The Model's picks for all of today's games (which are 100% based on last season) are after the jump.