High school rankings are inherently controversial. Every coach, parent, and fan has an opinion — and they're often shaped by the teams they've seen play. The "eye test" is real, but it's also subjective.
We wanted something different: a system that looks only at game results and lets the math speak for itself. No voting, no bias, no preseason hype. Just outcomes.
The result is a model built on one core question:
That number is called the Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM), and it's the foundation of every ranking on this site.
AdjEM stands for Adjusted Efficiency Margin. Think of it as a team's "true strength" score, measured in points per set.
A team with an AdjEM of +12.5 is expected to beat a perfectly average team by about 12 or 13 points per set. A team at -4.0 would lose to that same average team by about 4.
The key word is adjusted. Raw point differential doesn't cut it — beating a weak team by a wide margin shouldn't count the same as beating the #1 team by a slim one. AdjEM accounts for who you played and how you performed relative to expectation.
Home teams have a built-in edge — familiar surroundings, crowd support, no travel fatigue. The model accounts for this by first computing the average per-set point margin across all sets, then subtracting a fixed home-advantage value from that margin.
For Boys Volleyball, we subtract 1.5 points per set from the home team's score. So if a home team averages a 4.0-point-per-set margin, the model treats the effective margin as 2.5 points per set rather than 4.0.
This ensures that a dominant home performance and a dominant road performance are evaluated fairly, and teams aren't rewarded simply for playing more games at home.
Here's where it gets interesting. Every team's rating depends on the strength of the teams they've played — but those teams' strengths depend on their opponents, and so on. It's an interconnected web.
To untangle it, the model runs 50 iterations. In the first pass, every team starts at zero and ratings are based on raw results. In the second pass, those initial ratings inform a better picture of opponent strength. By the 50th pass, the ratings have stabilized into something meaningful.
This is why schedule matters so much. A team that beats three Top 20 opponents earns more credit than a team that runs up the score against weaker competition — even if their raw record looks identical.
Winning big matters — but only up to a point. The model limits how much credit a blowout is worth so that teams can't game the rankings by running up the score.
For Boys Volleyball, the model uses a logarithmic decay system. The first 8 points per set of margin count at full value. Beyond that, additional points per set are worth progressively less — the curve flattens logarithmically with a decay factor of 4.
A 15-point-per-set margin earns noticeably more than an 8-point-per-set margin, but not twice as much. And a 20-point-per-set margin barely earns more than 15.
This means the model rewards convincing victories without letting teams inflate their rating by pouring it on late in a lopsided game.
The Contender's win is worth far more because the model recognizes the difficulty of the opponent. That's the power of combining strength of schedule with margin controls.