Confidence Stats

About Zow Ratings Confidence Stats

The Zow Ratings Confidence Stats page provides a daily measure of how stable—or volatile—the current ratings are across each Kentucky high-school sport tracked by the system. Confidence values reflect how closely recent game results align with the model’s expectations, helping readers understand not just where teams rank, but how reliable those rankings are at any given moment.

Higher confidence indicates that recent performances closely match predicted outcomes, while lower values suggest more upsets, inconsistencies, or unusual result patterns. These metrics update daily and offer quick context for how predictable—or surprising—a sport’s season currently appears.

Confidence tends to be lower early in a season, when teams have played fewer games and results are harder to model. As schedules progress and sample sizes increase, confidence typically rises, though sudden shifts can occur following unexpected outcomes or large deviations from predicted margins.

Confidence calculations incorporate several underlying factors, including recent prediction accuracy, day-to-day rating volatility, the number of games played, and consistency between expected and actual margins of victory. Together, these inputs highlight how settled the ratings are at a given point in time.

It’s important to note that confidence values are calculated by applying today’s ratings to past results. While this retrospective approach has inherent limitations, it still provides meaningful insight into how well the model understands each sport as the season unfolds.