The Modern Game

The names barely changed. Alcoa Tornadoes, Baylor Red Raiders, Brentwood Academy Eagles, Christ Presbyterian Academy Lions, Ensworth Tigers, Fulton Falcons all sit in the top tier of both the historic and modern windows — Tennessee football has a remarkably stable aristocracy.

Page and Oakland ran the table, but Baylor played the brutal slate — the highest strength-of-schedule of any team in the state, against Division II competition that doesn't schedule cupcakes.

Summit, a Spring Hill school that opened as Williamson County's suburbs sprawled south, is the clearest come-up in the state. The hardest fall belongs to Maplewood — a historic Nashville program — a reminder that football fortunes track neighborhoods, enrollment, and consolidation as much as coaching.

Two decades and two Supreme Court rulings after the divisions were drawn, Division II still beats Division I 67.6% of the time cross-division — essentially unchanged from the 68.5% of the historic era. The split organized the imbalance into its own bracket. It never erased it.

One class up or down is close to a coin flip — the smaller school still wins 47.3% of the time. Stretch the gap to four classes (a 1A program against a 6A) and the upset rate collapses to 10.0%. Size is nearly irrelevant between neighbors and nearly destiny at the extremes.

The three Tennessees split the spoils differently. East Tennessee has banked the most state titles (142), powered by the Maryville–Alcoa axis. Middle Tennessee grades out strongest on the field (median peak ELO 1837) as Nashville's suburbs balloon. And West Tennessee, the poorest corner, still sends the most players to the NFL (152). That regional split is the football mirror of what the East Tennessee and regional soccer reports found — except soccer's map tilts toward wherever the money is, and football's does not.

Mostly, yes. A program's ten-year recruiting haul tracks its peak ELO at r = +0.52 — the best rosters and the best records are the same schools. But the tier of talent is what separates the contenders: schools that have landed at least one five-star carry a median peak ELO of 1997, versus 1972 for four-star ceilings and 1878 for programs topping out at three-stars. One blue-chipper is worth more than a deep class of solid ones.

And the blue-chip talent clusters in the trenches and the secondary, not under center — where Tennessee's four- and five-stars actually play: OL · 20 DB · 19 LB · 16 WR · 15 DL · 14 RB · 10 QB · 6 TE · 6

Everything above is football looking at itself. The reason it lives on a soccer site is the comparison — and that comparison gets its own report. The short version: a school being good at football barely tells you whether it is good at soccer. Soccer strength tracks school wealth at r = +0.38 while football tracks it at just r = +0.24; small schools actually spring more upsets in football (47.3%) than in soccer (39.1%); and the NFL factories that also win at soccer are, without exception, the wealthy privates. What carries over between the two sports is not skill — it is affluence.