It was the greatest game no one ever saw.

Two days after Christmas, the boys basketball team from little Wellington, Ohio, reportedly played mighty Eastlake (Wash.) High in the Surf ‘N Slam San Diego Hoop Classic.

The contest matched a school with 248 students against one with more than 2,000, and, all things considered, Wellington’s 61-53 loss in a prominent national tournament appeared a valiant effort.

There was just one small problem.

The result was news to the Dukes.

In an international case of mistaken identity, as it were, Wellington was confused for Wellington Secondary School in British Columbia — at least on MaxPreps, the national website the Ohio High School Athletic Association uses for its all-important computer rankings.

The data entry error remains unfixed.

Yep, a team from Washington and a team from Canada walk into a gym in California and the game has a direct impact on the Ohio state basketball tournament.

I wish that wasn’t the setup for a bad punchline, but it is — the joke being on the OHSAA and the ratings system of its corporate partner.

Anyone who has used MaxPreps over the years to bird-dog Ohio high school basketball scores knows the site — which relies on self reporting with minimal oversight — can be less dependable than a paper umbrella in a monsoon.

The issue is now that actually matters.

The OHSAA last season began using MaxPreps’ RPI ratings to determine playoff seedings in basketball and other sports, and still the computers are relying on inaccurate and incomplete data.

Take boys basketball this season.

In the City League alone, Bowsher, Scott, Waite, and Woodward had multiple results missing from their MaxPreps schedule when the postseason seeds locked in last Friday night.

All told, there were 81 schools with incomplete or incorrect schedules, according to Brayton Martin, a University of Toledo graduate who produces his own RPI ratings. He found that just 21 of the 56 districts statewide were seeded based on complete and accurate results.

“You are correct that there are a few errors in there,” an OHSAA spokesman said. “We believe they are less than 1 percent of the approximately 30,000 varsity games played.”

That might not sound like a big deal, and maybe it’s not.

What’s SeVEn typOs in this 700-wrold colum?

I should also say I don’t mean to highlight only what the OHSAA gets wrong, because it gets plenty right, too — and had the right idea in turning to the computers for postseason seeding.

Where there used to be a vote among coaches — not always the most impartial jurors — the RPI ratings promised a more objective draw, just like in football, which uses Harbin points to slot the top teams per region.

Good idea, in theory.

Still, sometimes the right track leads to the wrong road.

The ratings work only if the data is correct, and all the errors and omissions once again raise the question: Did the OHSAA pass the torch to MaxPreps — which has surely benefited from a rise in page views — because it truly wanted to improve its postseasons? Or because a sponsor agreed to pony up a lot of money? (The OHSAA has declined to reveal the terms of its deal with MaxPreps.)

“I think we all know the answer,” one longtime area administrator said.

Either way, it’s all a little odd.

The notion that the rankings are mostly accurate doesn’t add up, either, because every error ripples downstream.

It might make no difference to, say, Bowsher that it is missing four results from its schedule, or to Wellington that it is incorrectly listed at 3-15 instead of 3-14. I don’t blame them.

But worth remembering: A team’s RPI rating is based on its winning percentage (40 percent), its opponents’ winning percentage (40 percent), and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage (20 percent).

Every mistake impacts hundreds of teams.

The OHSAA ought to either begin implementing some hard-and-fast guidelines. (This is not on MaxPreps. Schools are responsible for updating their results.)

Or it should reconsider why it outsourced its new ratings system to a third-party site with limited supervision.

Why roll something out when you can’t properly show your work?

That might make dollars, but not a ton of sense.

First Published February 12, 2025, 8:42 p.m.