Mississippi High School Football

Welcome to

Mississippi High School Football

About the site

This website was developed to answer the question that comes up every October in Mississippi high school football: “What does our playoff picture look like?”

This website sets out to answer that question by providing scenarios for every way each region race can finish based on the MHSAA’s tiebreaker rules. This allows us to determine each team’s odds of finishing in each place and therefore in each playoff slot. From there, we look at the playoff bracket and give an outlook for each playoff game, including which teams are likely to play in which slot and which teams are most likely to play at home.

Principles

The two core principles we kept in mind when building this website were accuracy and ease of use. We never want to provide inaccurate information, and we never want any information to be confusing. Please use our feedback form if you see anything that violates either of those principles.

To reinforce the “accuracy” principle, we want to make clear that the scenarios, headlines, and numbers on this website all come from rules-based logic and math applied to completed games, the MHSAA’s tiebreaker and playoff rules, and each team’s Elo rating. No generative AI models are used to produce any metrics you see on this website.

How it works

  • When there are 5 or fewer games remaining in a given region, our logic builds the final standings for each possible combination of outcomes, breaks any ties, and counts how often each team lands in each seed. From there, it produces odds for each team and easy-to-read scenarios for every possible outcome.
  • When there are 6 to 10 remaining games in a given region, we still build out each possible outcome, but only display scenario insights for key games, since the full scenario list is generally very long at this stage. From this point on, a tie that comes down to point differential is worked out as if each remaining game were won by 7 points, so the odds in those races are close but not exact. The key-game insights are still checked against every possible margin.
  • When there are 11 to 15 remaining games in a region, we still build out each possible outcome, but do not display any scenarios, as there will be too many to reasonably display.
  • When there are more than 15 remaining games in a region, it becomes impractical to build out each possible outcome. In these cases, we simulate the rest of the schedule 50,000 times, using each team’s Elo rating to set its chance of winning each game. Toss-up odds get their own 50,000 runs with every game a coin flip. These simulated numbers are used to display each team’s odds of finishing as each seed.

Scores are sourced from AHSFHS and are updated every morning.

This website is not associated with the MHSAA or any of its member schools.

More on how the odds work

Insights we provide

Below are some explanations and examples of each insight that this website provides.

Class standings

View the standings for each region in each class, including:

  • Each team’s region record
  • Which teams have clinched playoff spots or specific seeds
  • Each team’s chance of making the playoffs
  • Each team’s chance of winning the region

Here’s Class 5A as of the latest update, starting with Region 2:

Open Class 5A

Region breakdown

Standings

View detailed standings for a given region, including:

  • A headline summing up the race
  • Each team’s region and overall records
  • Which teams have clinched playoff spots or specific seeds
  • Each team’s chance of making the playoffs
  • Each team’s chance of finishing at each seed
  • An expanded view of each team: its completed and remaining games and its playoff path odds

Here’s Region 2-5A, one of the most unsettled races in the state as of the latest update:

Open Region 2-5A

Results that settle a spot

Before full scenarios are ready, view the results that clinch a seed, clinch a playoff spot, or knock a team out, no matter what else happens.

Earlier in the season, with 9 region games left in Region 2-5A, these results would settle a spot no matter what else happened:

Open Region 2-5A

Region title scenarios

View scenarios for how each eligible team can still win the region.

Here’s what has to happen for the two likeliest champions of Region 3-6A:

Open Region 3-6A

Playoff spot scenarios

View scenarios for how each team on the bubble can still make or miss the playoffs.

Here’s what decides the last playoff spots in Region 3-6A:

Open Region 3-6A

Team seeding scenarios

View scenarios for how each eligible team can finish as a given seed.

Here’s what puts teams in Region 3-6A at a particular seed:

Open Region 3-6A

Unique region scenarios

View each unique seeding finish possible in a given region. When the playoff seeding in a finish comes down to tiebreakers, open its Explanation to see how each tie breaks, step by step.

Region 3-6A can still finish 8 ways. Here are the first two:

Open Region 3-6A

Bracket page

View each class’s playoff bracket, filled in with who is likely to land in each spot. Pick a game to see every team that could play there, how likely each matchup is, and who would host.

Here’s the Class 5A bracket, with one game opened up the way it looks after you tap it:

Open the 5A bracket