SSL Begins: Stock Taking

The Generals' South Sequoia League schedule begins on Friday with game at Bakersfield Christian. I will have a preview of that game tomorrow. For now, I would like to revisit some statistics from before the season. In this post, I used two factors - how good a team was last year and how much of a team's scoring came from seniors - to predict how good they would be this year. It is a highly flawed process, but I figured that while the process lacked rigor, it was easy. So here are the preseason predictions and current calpreps rating (in points from the national average).

	Pred. Rating	Curr. Rating	W-L
Tehachapi	-9	2.2	10-6
Taft	-8.7	-0.9	13-5
BCHS	2.5	-4.7	4-12
Wasco	-11.5	-14.2	4-13
Arvin	-25.3	-16	5-12
Shafter	-17.4	-17.5	4-10

The current ratings are going to change and I wouldn't take the differences between Shafter, Arvin, and Wasco or the differences between Tehachapi and Taft too seriously. BCHS remains a mystery. Most of their games have been against truly outstanding teams who have predictably blown them out, so that 4 and 12 record may not be indicative of how they will fare going forward. I should also note that Wasco played most of their schedule so far without the services of Christian Rodriguez, arguably their best player from last year. He is back now and seems to be playing well. I am surprised that Arvin had as successful a pre-league season as they had. The win over South is a real feather in their cap. However, only Tehachapi has a better win than Shafter's victory over Sierra last week. In fact, Shafter has displayed a wide range, beating Sierra and narrowly missing wins against Sunnyside and Rosamond, and losing to Mira Monte, Delano, and Coalinga. This is perhaps to be expected from a young team. Here is hoping that the team's better angels win out.