We are data people. We have said before that a fun Friday night around here is a fresh pot of coffee and a spreadsheet that will not quit. So when we tell you we just shipped the thing we are most excited about all year, understand where that is coming from. Meet the Prism Rating: one number, 0 to 100, for every team in nine Maine sports, updated every night.
One number is a bold promise. A season is a messy, beautiful pile of blowouts, heartbreakers, snow postponements, and the occasional game where nobody can explain what happened. Flattening all of that into a single figure is exactly the kind of problem we lose sleep over, in a good way. Here is how we think about it, without handing you the secret recipe.
Five questions, not one
A team is not one thing, so the rating is not built from one thing. It reads every team through five lenses, and each answers a different question:
Power. This is your Power Index (PIR), the same opponent adjusted strength number you already know from our site, sitting right at the heart of the rating. It answers: how good are you, once we account for everyone you played?
Résumé. Not how good you look, but what you have actually banked. We compare your results to what an average team would have done against your exact schedule. Beat good teams and it rewards you. Feast on empty calories and it shrugs.
Dominance. Do you bury teams, or do you win a lot of nervous one score games? Both count in the standings. Only one of them scares people in a bracket.
Clutch. Your record when the game is genuinely on the line, measured against a coin flip. Some teams live in the close ones. Some teams would rather never be there.
Momentum. Hot or cold, right now. A team peaking in the final two weeks is a very different animal than the same record built in September.
We are not going to publish the weights or the exact math. That part is ours. Think of the five pillars as the ingredients on the label, not the recipe in the kitchen.
The disagreements are the whole point
Here is the part we nerd out on. A single rating is fine. The gaps between the pillars are where the real scouting report lives.
Take boys soccer this past fall. Greely graded near the very top in Power, a genuinely elite team on paper, yet landed only around the middle of the pack in Clutch. Translation: they were better than almost everyone, and also the kind of team whose one goal games were a coin flip. That is not an insult. It is a tell, and in a single elimination tournament, tells matter.
Or flip it. Cape Elizabeth posted a Résumé grade well above its Power grade, the signature of a team that has earned more than the eye test wants to give it. The wins are real even if the style points are modest. When Résumé outruns Power, pay attention. That team is for real in the way that counts.
Even the top of the board tells a story. The best boys soccer Prism Rating in the state belonged to a smaller class program, Piscataquis Community at 95.0, elite in nearly every pillar. Its one soft number? Momentum. Even the best team in Maine had a tell by season's end.
It does not care what class you are in
That last one is on purpose. The Prism Rating is statewide. A Class C team and a Class A team are graded on the same 0 to 100 scale, so you can finally argue the argument everyone wants to have: is the small school champion actually better than the big school runner up? Filter the board to your class if you want a tidy view, but every team keeps its true statewide rank. The number does not know how big your gym is.
Where to find it
The Prism Rating lives on its own board on our site, for all nine team sports, and it refreshes every night the games do. You will see the number on every team for free. The full five pillar breakdown, the part that turns a number into a scouting report, is part of All Access.
We built this because a rating you cannot argue with is boring, and a rating you cannot trust is worse. This one shows its ingredients, earns its number, and updates while you sleep. Go find your team. Then come tell us the pillar that surprised you.