When TSSAA moved its private schools into their own bracket, it split them again by size: the larger schools into Division II-AA, the smaller into D2-A. So a fair question, and one the rankings keep raising: can the small private division actually hang with the big one? And when a perfect D2-A season out-rates a D2-AA power on this site, is the number wrong, or is it telling you something about the schedule?
Start with the plainest measure: when a D2-A team plays a D2-AA team, who wins? Over more than 1,500 meetings across both boys and girls, the answer has been lopsided and remarkably stable.
Boys and girls land within a fraction of a point of each other, both right around a 28 percent D2-A win rate. It has not meaningfully closed over the eras, either. The bigger private schools have more students to draw eleven starters from, and it shows on the field about as reliably as anything on this site.
Read the overall ranks next to the names. The D2-AA column is anchored by the programs that run the private game statewide; the D2-A column is led by a handful of exceptional teams whose ratings climb right into that same air. Which is where it gets interesting.
Twenty-eight percent is an average, and averages hide their outliers. A short list of D2-A programs have made a habit of taking down the bigger division. Their records against D2-AA, pooled across both sports:
Christian Academy of Knoxville, the highest-rated D2-A program in the history of this database (a peak of 1941 in 2016), played D2-AA to a near-even record across dozens of games. That is the ceiling case: an elite D2-A team is not a fluke against the bigger schools, it is genuinely competitive. And the upsets are real and specific, not statistical noise:
Here is the puzzle this report exists to answer. On the current boys list, Grace Christian (D2-A) sits a notch above McCallie (D2-AA), and the eye test recoils: D2-AA wins this matchup 72 percent of the time, and McCallie plays a brutal schedule of Baylor, CBHS, MBA and out-of-state powers. So how is the smaller-division team rated higher?
Two things are true at once. Grace went unbeaten and won its title, and the rating rewards exactly that: dominating everyone you actually play. But look at who it played. Its schedule topped out at Hardin Valley (a strong public school it beat 5-2) and Notre Dame; it never faced McCallie or Baylor at all. A rating can only score the games that happened. McCallie's number is lower precisely because it tested itself against the toughest teams in the state and took a few honest losses doing it.
This is not a bug, and it is not unique to soccer. It is the undefeated-mid-major problem every rating system faces: a perfect record against a good-but-not-great schedule can out-point a strong record against a brutal one. The rating measures what a team did. The 72-28 number above is the context for what it would probably do. Both belong on the same page, which is why they are. (For how the ratings are checked against reality in general, see The Validation Report.)
For the record, a dominant D2-A season out-rating a D2-AA team is not new, and not even close to the highest a D2-A program has climbed:
The divisions are not equal, and the ratings know it. D2-AA beats D2-A 72 to 28, the class means sit ~150 points apart, and that gap has held for eighteen seasons.
But the best D2-A programs are genuinely competitive: CAK to a near-even record, with signature wins over the top of D2-AA scattered through every era. When one of them goes unbeaten, the rating puts it among the best in the state, because against the teams it played, it was.
The honest read on a D2-A team ranked above a D2-AA one: treat it as "dominated a very good schedule," not "would beat the bigger schools head to head." The eye test and the number are answering two different questions, and both answers are here.