A new way to rank Nebraska high school football
In January 2026, Hurrdat Sports launched NebPreps Computer Ratings—a tool to help coaches, media, and fans evaluate Nebraska high school basketball.
This fall, Hurrdat Sports is relaunching a new and version called NebPreps Power Ratings and applying it to Nebraska high school football—ranking every team in every NSAA class, with updates every Monday. Other sports ratings will follow in the future.
What NebPreps Power Ratings Is
The new NebPreps Power Ratings is built on a Glicko system, a modern refinement of Elo—the same rating math used for decades in chess and professional sports rankings. Glicko’s advantage is it tracks how confident it is about a rating. For example, a win over a team we have seen 20 times moves your rating more than a win over a team that’s less well-known.
Here’s how it will work, according to Hurrdat Sports ML Engineer, Sergio Reyes:
Two teams can both be 7-2 and one can be a lot better than the other. It comes down to who you actually played, and how much we already know about them. If we have seen your opponent 20 times, we trust what beating them says about you. If we have barely seen them, your rating won’t shift as much.
NebPreps Power Ratings go from 0 to 100—the higher the number, the higher your score. Every team in Classes A through D6 will get a Power Rating and a rank within its class. Every Monday—the day after the Coaches Poll—new ratings will drop, showing you where the numbers and the voters agree and disagree. The Power Ratings know the difference between a 7-2 team and an 8-1 team with different schedules.
What NebPreps Power Ratings Is Not
Acknowledging the limits of a system is part of establishing its credibility, so here they are upfront:
- We rank teams. We don’t predict games. You’ll never see a win probability or a point spread here. On any given Friday, a lower-rated team always has the chance to win—that’s why we watch.
- Regular season only. The ratings measure the regular season and stop there. State titles are settled on the field, not in a spreadsheet.
We Didn’t Just Build It—We Tested It
Before we published a single number, we ran the system against every NSAA football game back to 2003—that’s more than 27,000 games across 23 seasons.
Then, we tested it on a holdout sample: we locked the system’s settings using older seasons only, and measured it on the two most recent seasons, which it had never seen. On those games, the higher-rated team won 83% of the time. Win-loss record alone gets you 73%.
Hurrdat Sports Senior Strategist, Jeff Swanson, emphasizes:
The interesting part isn’t that [the Power Ratings] did well. It’s that the edge held in every season we tested, and in every sport we tried it on.
Our system’s strength and consistency showed us that we’re ready to represent more Nebraska sports teams by rolling out NebPreps Power Ratings.
What To Expect
Power Ratings will be live from the second week of the season. Until the games start, the math has nothing new to go on—so every team will open with last year’s rating, pulled back toward the middle of the pack.
These opening ratings will move fast. After two or three weeks of real results, this season will take over from last season. Teams don’t enter their class’s official rankings until they’ve played three games—so if your team looks too low (or too high) on opening day, give it three Fridays. The math is listening.
What’s Next for NebPreps Power Ratings
- Team pages: Every school gets its own page schedule, results, rating history, and stats you won’t find anywhere else—from strength of schedule to how a team fares in one-score games.
- Every Monday: New ratings for every class, plus the week’s biggest risers, and the upset the numbers least saw coming.
- This winter: Power Ratings return for basketball—where 23 years of history is already waiting.
The first NebPreps Power Ratings of the 2026 season will drop on September 7, 2026. Starting this fall, we’ll tell you what the games really say.
