Oregon’s high school sports rankings might see some changes for the 2025-26 school year, but many of the bigger changes have been abandoned.
The rankings committee of the Oregon School Activities Association met on June 12 and the has come up with a couple of changes that it supports.
The ranking committee is supporting eliminating contests that are against a team that is more than one classification away from being in the rankings formula.
It also supports eliminating contests that are added after a certain date from the rankings formula. The dates the committee came up with are Oct. 1 for fall sports, Jan. 7 for winter sports and April 15 for spring sports. Contests that are exempt from this rule are those from bracketed tournaments, league tiebreakers and district tournaments.
Currently, the OSAA uses computer rankings to fill out the brackets for the football, soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball state tournaments. The rankings are done mathematically by computers, using a combination of a Ratings Percentage Index score and a Colley Bias Free Rating Method score. The two rankings take into account factors like winning percentage, opponents’ win percentage, and home and away win percentage, among other things.
One of the big changes that the rankings committee had discussed was adding a human element to the rankings. The rankings are often accurate when setting up the brackets — for example, the Class 6A football open state championship game in 2024 was between No. 1 Lake Oswego and No. 2 West Linn — but there are times where the rankings leave people scratching their heads.
The Clackamas girls basketball team was the No. 5 seed in the 2025 Class 6A state tournament despite going 23-2 in the 2024-25 regular season and not losing a game to an in-state opponent.
Similarly, the 2023 Central Catholic football team was undefeated and ended up winning the Class 6A state title despite being the No. 4 seed in the playoffs.
Adding a human element to the rankings would help the OSAA alleviate the abnormalities from the final rankings, but the rankings committee did not ultimately support the change. The committee did say that it wants to continue exploring the concept of having a human element when putting the playoff brackets together and wants more feedback from member schools.
The committee also decided to not support the use of a multiplier for contests against opponents from a higher classification, switching to just using the Colley rankings (which would eliminate data from games against out-of-state opponents and games against opponents from a different classification) and not counting early season contests in rankings (since teams are sometimes missing members who are still in playoffs for a sport the previous season).
The rankings committee is not able to make these changes alone, but will send the recommendations to the OSAA’s executive board. The board will likely vote on the recommendations at its summer workshop from July 21-23.
The rankings committee is scheduled to meet again throughout the 2025-26 school year. Its next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 2.
— Nik Streng covers high school sports in Oregon. Reach him at nstreng@oregonian.com or @NikStreng
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