About Prepline
A paper sportsbook for high school football. The schools are real. Every game, score and price is generated. This page is about why it had to be built that way, which is more interesting than it sounds.
Why the games are invented
Not for convenience. There was no lawful way to do otherwise.
Before any of this was built, all fifty-one state athletic associations were surveyed — every state plus the District of Columbia — by reading what each one publishes and what its robots.txt permits.
Exactly one publishes game-level results in a form a program can read: Missouri. Its robots.txt disallows this crawler across the whole site, in a second wildcard group that a naive parser silently ignores. Ours does not ignore it, so Missouri is off the table — the one association with the data is the one that says no.
The other fifty publish season calendars, playoff brackets, district alignments, or pages built by scripts that serve nothing to a reader without a browser. None of that is a schedule of games with scores.
So the choice was never between real results and invented ones. It was between invented results and no product. Everything downstream — the ratings, the lines, the ledger — follows from that.
What is real
The parts that are public facts, and are treated as facts.
Names, states and classifications are public facts, written down rather than scraped, because no association publishes a roster this project may read.
School colours are read from Wikipedia article pages — the path that site’s robots.txt permits. The first version of that table was written from memory and was wrong about four of the ten programmes anyone checked, so the recollections were deleted rather than corrected. A school with no colour on file gets a generated one, which claims nothing. Where two schools in a state share a name and there is no way to tell them apart, both stay generated rather than one wearing the other’s colours.
What is not
Stated plainly, because the whole thing looks like a sportsbook.
- Every fixture, kickoff, score and result. No game shown here was played.
- Every spread, total and moneyline. 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.
- Standings, streaks and ratings, all of which are computed from games that did not happen.
What it will not do
Constraints the code enforces, not intentions.
- 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.
- Publish a line anyone could act on. Wagering on high school sport is prohibited or restricted in most jurisdictions.
How the simulation works
The short version. The long version is the front page.
Football margins are lumpy — three and seven are common in a way that four and five are not — and a model that smooths them prices 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 about 40% a 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.
The project
Who, and what is open.
Built by one person as a working piece of sports modelling rather than a business. Nothing here is for sale, there is no advertising, and no account is required to read any of it.
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.