About Hometown Line

Hometown Line exists to make high school football more fun to follow: a free game of skill in which fans forecast their teams' games, and a public record that credits every real score to the source it came from.

What a player does here is formally denominated Forecasting Distributed Algorithmic Outcomes: a forecast of a real game's result, set against the model's algorithmic line, made alongside the forecasts of every other player, and scored only against a result with a named source. It is a contest of skill and prediction. It is not sports wagering: no money is staked, nothing is paid out, units have no monetary value, there are no prizes, and no money changes hands.

Before any of this was built, every state athletic association and the District of Columbia’s were read for what each one publishes and what its robots.txt permits.

Where an association publishes its schedule and scores in a form this site may read, and a person has checked its terms, that state’s games come straight from the association and are credited to it: that is how Arizona, D.C., Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin are live, along with the New England prep schools through NEPSAC. Where a source says no, as Missouri’s robots.txt does, it is left alone. Where nobody publishes a schedule this site may read, the weeks still to come are generated so the model has something to predict, and a generated game is never shown as a result.

Real results reach the site four ways: from the state association’s own published scores where a person has checked they may be read, from Cal-Hi Sports’ public scoreboard, which its robots.txt leaves open and which is credited beside every score it supplies, from people at the game, whose score shows once strangers agree, and from coaches who send a season. The ratings learn from those real results only. A result is shown only where its source is named; the sources are listed, with what each is allowed to be.

• —The fixtures and kickoffs for weeks still to come, in states whose schedule nobody publishes for this site to read. They are generated so the model has something to predict, and no generated game is ever shown as a result.
• —Every predicted margin, points total and win chance. They are model output, published so the model can be argued with.
• —Units. A score, not money — they cannot be bought, cashed, transferred or redeemed.
• —Ratings. The model learns them only from real results with a named source, so they are its opinion of a school, not a record, and where a state has few real results the opinion is a weak one. Standings count only results with a named source.

• —Take money. The database refuses a currency column and a test fails if that changes.
• —Use school crests. A logo is a trademark and would imply an endorsement nobody gave. Colours are a public fact and carry no mark.
• —Read anything behind a login, a paywall or a robots.txt that says no. Every source here is a page anyone can open.
• —Offer a wager, or take one. The model's line is there to be argued with and to score your call against, never to stake money on; wagering on high school sport is prohibited or restricted in most places, and nothing here is a line to act on elsewhere.

Football margins are lumpy — three and seven are common in a way that four and five are not — and a model that smooths them predicts the key numbers wrongly. The generator keeps the lumps, then adjusts for the things that make prep football its own sport: a mercy clock that compresses blowouts, rosters that turn over every year, classifications that rarely play across each other, and travel that ranges from cross-town to four hours.

The front page shows the margin distribution this produces, against the one a smooth model would.

Built by one person. The game itself is free and always will be: the same picks, the same units and the same leaderboard for everybody, and nothing in it can be bought. Supporter extras (the friendly write-ups, Your Friday, Season trajectory and Season Outlook, which is for reading ahead, not picking) are free for everyone this season. Local businesses can sponsor a league, and every sponsor is labelled as one.

Contribute lists the problems that are genuinely open — local knowledge about a state’s classifications is worth more here than code. Press kit has descriptions and marks for anyone writing about it, and contact reaches a person.

If you represent a school or an association and want the name removed, say so and it is removed. No argument, no process.