To build our statewide rankings, we log every AHSAA varsity girls flag football result in the state. For the 2025 season that came to 674 rated games, from the August openers through the state championships in December. A full-season game log answers questions that watching any one team can't, so before the 2026 season buries it, here is what the whole pile says.
The Average Game Is Not Close
If you follow one competitive team, your sense of a normal game is probably a couple of scores either way. The state as a whole plays a different sport. The median margin of victory in 2025 was 20 points. The average game produced only 33 total points, and the typical way those points were split was lopsided.
| Final Margin | Share of Decided Games |
|---|---|
| One score (6 or less) | 16% |
| 7 to 27 points | 50% |
| 28 points or more | 34% |
One game in three ended as a four-score blowout. Only one in six was a one-score game. And nearly half of all games, 47%, ended with one team shut out entirely. The single most extreme line of the season belongs to Smiths Station, who beat JAG 62–0 in September; the most extreme season-long line belongs to a team that outscored its opponents 725–14.
None of this is a knock on the sport. It's what a young sport looks like: programs that have run flag for four years sharing schedules with programs in year one. The practical takeaway for coaches is about information. A 42–0 win over an overmatched opponent tells you almost nothing about your team, and a season full of them can hide real weaknesses until the playoffs expose them. When we cap blowout margins in our ratings, this distribution is why.
Home Field Is Worth Less Than It Looks
Home teams went 396–277 in 2025, a 59% win rate, and won by an average of 5.3 points. Read those numbers naively and home field looks like nearly a touchdown of advantage.
It isn't. Better teams host more often, especially in the playoffs, where higher seeds get home games and home teams went 45–15. Once you control for which teams were actually playing, the true value of the venue comes out to just under 2 points. The rest of that 5.3 was never the crowd or the field; it was the schedule deciding who got to be the home team.
This is the cleanest example in our data of a lesson that applies to every stat a coach keeps: a raw split will happily lie to you if you don't ask who was on each side of it.
Favorites Win 4 Out of 5. That Fifth Game Is the Season.
We backtested our rating model on the full 2025 season, walking forward game by game so every prediction used only the information available before kickoff. The model's pregame favorite won 79% of decided games.
Flip that around: underdogs won more than one game in five, all season, statewide. Even in the games where the model was most confident, calling the favorite at 97–98%, the favorite actually lost about one time in ten. Some of that is scorekeeping noise, but most of it is the sport itself. A short game with a handful of possessions gives the weaker team real chances, and in 2025 they cashed them regularly.
If you coach a favorite, the message is that no opponent on the schedule is a bye week. If you coach an underdog, the message is better: the sport's structure is on your side more than the rankings imply.
The Divisions Mix More Than You'd Think
A question we hear about statewide rankings is how a 6A team and a 2A team can be compared when they never play. The 2025 schedule has the answer: 55% of all rated games crossed division lines. The most common cross-division matchup, 5A versus 6A, happened 144 times, which is more often than most divisions played within themselves.
Tournaments and non-region scheduling stitch the whole state together into one connected web. That connectivity is the entire reason a single statewide rating scale works, and it gets stronger every season as schedules fill out.
The Playoffs Are Not Closer
You might expect playoff games between qualified teams to tighten up. The opposite happened in 2025. Playoff games were higher scoring (37 total points against 33 in the regular season) and more lopsided: 45% of them were decided by 28 or more, against 34% in the regular season. The share of one-score playoff games was no better than the regular-season rate.
Early playoff rounds pair region champions with fourth seeds, and in a sport with this much spread between programs, those pairings produce routs. The competitive playoff games concentrate in the semifinals and finals, which is worth remembering the next time a quarterfinal blowout tempts you to draw a big conclusion about either team.
And the Gaps Didn't Shrink
One more thing we checked: whether games got closer as the season went on and new programs found their footing. They didn't. Average margins in October and later (22.7 points) were essentially identical to August and September (21.5). Within a single season, the gap between strong and weak programs is stable. Closing it is an offseason project, not something that happens by November.
The Short Version
The 2025 season in five numbers: the median win was by 20, a third of games were four-score blowouts, home field was worth about 2 points once you account for who was hosting, favorites won 79% of the time, and 55% of games crossed division lines. The 2026 season is underway now, and the rankings page re-rates every team in the state nightly as this year's version of these numbers accumulates.