NCS, CCS in scramble mode as popular prep football data source shuts down

SAN JOSE — Calpreps, a data resource that ranks high school football teams and that is used by the several sections around the state to help determine playoff placement and seeding, has ceased operations. 

The organization made the announcement Sunday on its website, citing issues with CBS, the parent company of calpreps’ business partner MaxPreps.

“As many fans of our site know, we are contracted to provide data (national schedules/scores/ratings/projections/league+division alignments) to MaxPreps,” calpreps stated on its website. 

“Recently, for the eighth time since acquiring MaxPreps in 2007, CBS went back into breach and is willfully refusing for some unknown reason to act in a legal fashion and honor their legal/contractual obligations in terms of paying money owed to calpreps. We are out of funds at this point and have been forced to cease operations.”

Ned Freeman, the owner of calpreps, said the “situation is very fluid and changing hourly” in an email on Monday to the Bay Area News Group. He added that the number of media requests he has received has been “overwhelming.” 

The site not only ranked teams, but projected scores for individual games throughout the state and gave programs ratings based on strength of wins, losses and schedules. 

The announcement came to the shock of many athletic directors, coaches and section commissioners in the area. 

“Everybody was blindsided by this,” Heritage athletic director Nate Smith told the Bay Area News Group on Monday. “I don’t think there was a single person that was anywhere that saw this coming.”

North Coast Section commissioner Pat Cruickshank declined to comment as he said the section was just informed of the situation Monday. 

Calpreps stated on its website that the organization intends to sue CBS in an attempt to recover losses. 

“As you’d expect, we are in the process of suing CBS to recover owed monies plus damages,” Calpreps stated on its site. 

“But that will no doubt not be resolved until many months or years after the conclusion of the 2024 playoffs, so we encourage any section/state associations who were relying on our ratings in order to run your playoffs this season to apply any pressure you may have the pull to apply to the rogue CBS accounting department, to attempt to persuade them to finally start to act in accordance with federal contract law.”

For Central Coast Section commissioner Dave Grissom, the clock has started to figure out a plan to determine a new way to rank teams come playoff time should Calpreps be shut down for the remainder of the season. 

According to Grissom, he along with the CCS football committee will be holding a meeting on Wednesday to discuss what the next steps will be going forward. 

“We have an emergency order and we can make changes if need be for playoffs,” Grissom told the Bay Area News Group on Monday. “We’ll get the committee together and we’ll get a good sense of whether they want to land with this, move forward and articulate that to our constituencies.”

Calpreps rankings played a big role in how the CCS seeded and placed teams in the past. While each of the five leagues that comprise the section received a combined 35 automatic qualifiers into the playoffs, the final 15 spots are determined by calpreps rankings. 

During seeding, all teams are given bonus points based on if they are in the Top 150 or if they played a team in the Top 150, according to Grissom.

The LA Times reported that the Southern Section has considered using Massey Ratings, another site that uses an algorithm to rank teams. 

Grissom has not ruled out overhauling the current system in favor of a new one if calpreps is not online in the near future.

“I don’t think anything is off the table right now,” he said. “Maxpreps has a rating system, is that something we can use? Southern California uses another rating system called Massey. I have not looked into that at all, but I know that has been discussed in the Southern Section today.”

Grissom is still holding out hope that calpreps and CBS can come to a resolution before playoffs roll around.

“I hope they can come to some solution for the betterment of the sections in the state that use their rankings,” he said. “I think calpreps rankings are very good metrics that are used widely.”