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My concern with Booker is they will be coasting for the entire regional Playoffs then hit a buzzsaw. I think booker can hold on talent wise for a little bit but idk if they will be battle tested enough to keep that game close for 4 quarters    Lakeland may beat Gaither but anything can happen in the playoffs and looking at the matchups I felt that one could be a sneaky one for Lakeland especially since Gaither qb was a mid season transfer from Lakeland and Gaither has largely flown under the radar during the season    They may make that game competitive but I definitely have to lean WBR in that matchup but I haven't made my pick in that game yet as I'll wait until we get to Thanksgiving week when I reevaluate it 

Margin of victory basically rewards teams who can schedule absolutely garbage opponents to pile on wins. If I had to guess that was what allowed Choctawhatchee to jump St Augustine a few weeks ago because Choctawhatchee ran up the score against terrible panhandle teams and since the formula isn't weighting sos enough they were rewarded for running it up  And I would argue the current formula definitely isn't valuing quality of opponents at a high enough percentage to make a difference judging by how many teams made it to the 1 seed in some regions with awful sos ratings  Plus you can always increase the weight of the percentages in an rpi to account for quality of opponents the only downside is it being too high results in teams advancing higher for losing to good teams over winning over average teams 

3A- Sarasota Booker is going to give the MC/MNW winner a serious fight.   5A- I don't see Lakeland losing to Gaither. But STA is still the toughest out.   6A- Palmetto(Manatee) is going to take WBR to the wire. Other than that, I'm fairly agreeable with your playoff views.

The RPI is a simplistic, arbitrary rating system that ignores margin of victory, ignores quality of opponents, and has no “right” balance.  What is the proper weighting of a team’s winning percentage, its opponents’ winning percentage, and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage?  25-50-25?  40-40-20?  Your “right” balance is likely different than someone else’s “right” balance, and there is no statistically valid method of assigning weights to those 3 variables; it is totally arbitrary.  And basic algebra demonstrates that one can get different results by changing the weighting of the variables when presented with the same data.  I am no fan of MaxPreps rankings, but the RPI is not the answer.  The one advantage the RPI has over MaxPreps is transparency, but that hardly makes up for its deficiencies

Hard to believe, but true.  I never thought they would compete for a championship this year but did expect much better performance with everything that has been provided to that staff.   I had my doubts about Napier early on as when he was recruiting our school he was focused on the wrong one of our 2 D1 defensive lineman in 2022.  It made no sense as it showed his poor judgement in evaluating talent, a key to top coaches that don't simply rely on rankings by so-called experts.