TXHSFB

People have always compared six-man football to a computer game. With its wild scores and fast-paced style, six-man football can be just as exciting, if not more so. So what if you played the entire six-man season on your Xbox? That’s why I decided to use the TrueSkill Ranking System created by Microsoft Research for Xbox Live games and apply it to the season. Microsoft uses this algorithm to track the skill of gamers in order to place them in competitive matches. On the Microsoft Research website it explains that the ranking system is characterized by two attributes: a players average skill level (ranking) and the degree of uncertainty in the gamer’s skill (this would be the variation in the players level). If you would like to read more, it can be found at the Microsoft Research website, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/ ...

It was just time to get down to it. I had been delaying the inevitable, running 100,000 simulations of each and every private school six-man state bracket. For details on how I did this, please read the earlier posts I have written about the public school brackets and other Monte Carlo simulations I have written. This was very similar…. First build the start bracket using this week’s ratings from my website (www.sixmanfootball.com). Then calculate the probability of each first round game and simulate the result. After each round I update the ratings (not 100% like my formula, but a close enough estimation) and continue…. do this 100,000 times and see what happened. ...

After 100,000 simulations, the Throckmorton Greyhounds appear to have a 29.8% chance to win the UIL D2 Six-Man State Championship. The biggest challenge it appears will be the dominance of the East bracket, which won a dominating 80.1% of the time in the simulation. Yesterday I wrote about how the Crowell Wildcats are a somewhat dominant 33.1% to repeat as the D1 UIL State Six-Man Champions. If you would like to read more details on the methods, I have several posted below. ...

I have created several Monte Carlo simulations over the past year to try and determine probabilities for various sporting events. This week I decided to tackle the Texas Six-Man state tournament. (I will publish more bracket evaluations as the week goes on) For the past 21 seasons, I have been producing rankings for six-man football. For those of you who do not know the history, I would fax my rankings to newspapers across the state and several would actually publish them. I eventually put together a newsletter, The Huntress Report, where I would add scores, game stories, stats and schedules to the rankings and mail (or fax) to subscribers. Eventually I moved to a website, where I would update the information a week behind, so that my subscribers would be getting the freshest information first. That all was scrapped in 1999 when I decided to go 100% to the website (www.sixmanfootball.com). ...

This morning the high school football season officially started with the release of the much anticipated 2014-2016 UIL Football Alignments. This usually started with the UIL servers crashing due to the high volume of traffic (it did briefly, prior to release). This year the UIL was prepared and had a back-up plan to divert traffic off their site. So at exactly 9:00 am, the Twitterverse was alive with the ramblings of everyone who cares about Texas high school football. ...