What is Tradition Never Graduates (TNG)?

Our aim is to provide a unique and objective data-driven look at the best Texas high school football teams, games, and programs in the state’s top classification, primarily based on the widely utilized Elo rating system. Although initially developed to rate chess players, Elo has been used extensively in football at the NFL and college levels, such as in Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com NFL rankings and in Jeff Sagarin’s model, one of the original ranking systems featured in the BCS. The beauty of Elo is that it provides a way to rate opponents relative to one another, taking into account many factors including, but not limited to, strength of schedule, the probability of victory, and margin of victory, and constantly adjusts those ratings based on game outcomes. We initially tailored our Elo ratings system, incorporating metrics that we derived ourselves, using 15 seasons worth of game data (2007–2021), and developed a model that we tested live beginning with the 2022 6A football season.

Beginning in 2022, Tradition Never Graduates started as a Substack newsletter and in the four seasons since then, through the 2025 season, we tested our model with live data and expanded our coverage to include our weekly in-season podcast which can be found on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Since starting TNG, we also expanded the model’s coverage stretching back through 2004, which means the model now has 22 seasons worth of historical data, 31,709 games in total, feeding all of the ratings, projections, and analysis that you can now find here at our new home at texastng.com.

Disclaimers

Our projected game spreads are just for fun and an attempt to quantify one team’s theoretical strength relative to their opponent. They are truly for entertainment and discussion purposes only. Plus, they give us additional points of comparison for our model. With projected game spreads, we can test how our model stacks up against proven outlets like Pigskin Prep, Calpreps, and other experts that we respect and follow. Keep in mind that spreads are notoriously difficult to project accurately; even Vegas struggles, and we ain’t Vegas.

Don’t get too hung up on starting values; our model will correct itself quickly as results come in. If your team is an underdog in our model and wins, it will climb rapidly. Teams that are rated too high to start will be dropped as their results and the math dictate. We attempt to dial in the start values as much as possible since it leads to a more accurate model as the season progresses.

What we present on this site amounts to nothing more than talking points and banter. Regardless of what our model projects, the games are won by the tireless work of the incredible coaching staffs across the state and the blood, sweat, and tears of the phenomenal student athletes who give their all each week to represent their communities, supported by their families, friends, bands and color guards, drill teams, cheerleaders, administrators, and volunteers. There is nothing quite like Texas high school football, and we’re happy to do our part to promote and support it.

Contact

Questions, feedback, or think you found something off? We’d love to hear from you.

Email: txtraditionnevergraduates@gmail.com
X (Twitter): @TexasTNG