CHSAA Board Establishes Margin-of-Victory Caps for Rankings - Colorado High School Activities Association

AURORA – The CHSAA Board of Directors has established margin-of-victory caps for the CHSAA Rankings, powered by MaxPreps, beginning with the 2026-27 season.

MaxPreps’ rankings are based on the teams’ strength of schedule and scores. If the scoring cap is exceeded in a particular game, the margin of victory is recognized only as the cap. As an example, if a basketball game’s final margin of victory is 30 points, it is considered a 20-point win because the cap is 20.

Here are the 2026-27 caps for sports using MaxPreps rankings:

Baseball: 10 runs

Basketball: 20 points

Field hockey: 5 goals

Flag football: 28 points

Football: 28 points

Ice hockey: 5 goals

Lacrosse: 10 goals

Soccer: 5 goals

Softball: 10 runs

Volleyball: 3 sets

A detailed description of the CHSAA Rankings can be found here.

In general, the accuracy of MaxPreps’ rankings can be attributed to the large volume of data collected nationwide that goes into the rankings. The previous ranking system, RPI, went just three layers deep in analyzing data for rankings: a team’s winning percentage, their opponents’ winning percentage, and the winning percentage of their opponents’ opponents. With national data used in the MaxPreps system, the data analysis is greater on an exponential scale.

The MaxPreps system also uses margin of victory as a component in the ranking.

Prior season history and school sizes are not considered in the MaxPreps rankings.

The rankings are run internally by the CHSAA office. During the regular season, this happens typically twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. As the postseason nears, oftentimes, the rankings are updated on a more frequent basis.

Because CHSAA runs the rankings internally at different times that MaxPreps runs them — and because CHSAA includes forfeits in the calculation, while MaxPreps does not — the data shown on MaxPreps.com may differ from what is being used to seed CHSAA’s postseason brackets.

Rankings will not be released until there are enough teams who have met the game minimum to justify posting a ranking. Typically, this happens a few weeks after the start of the regular season.