The 2024 Kentucky high school football season begins tonight

ZGeogheganKSR

Photo by Steven Peake | Kentucky Sports Radio

Tonight, stadium lights all across the Bluegrass will illuminate high school fields as the football season is officially upon us. Over 100 games featuring Kentucky-based schools will be in action Friday night with another 16 scheduled for Saturday, including KSR’s Game of the Week between a pair of Top 5 programs.

Throughout the week, we here at KSR have been rolling out preseason preview content for all six classes, including a statewide Top 25 rankings list and score predictions for the best games set to take place over the weekend. Consider this your one-stop shop for all of it.

We’ll start with class-by-class previews. KSR’s Daniel Hager and Phoenix Stevens did excellent work on these by digging deep into the numbers from last season and roster changes that happened during the offseason. Daniel took Classes 4A, 5A, and 6A while Phoenix handled Classes 1A, 2A, and 3A. They provide their favorites to win each District within each class along with Player/Coach of the Year predictions and the top choice to win each class.

Once you dive into those previews, see how they match up with KSR’s Preseason Top 25 Rankings. For the first time ever this year, we’ve expanded our rankings by adding several new voices to our panel of voters. Still led by KSR’s Troy Howell, we now have 10 total voters on our weekly Top 25 updates, including people from the central, eastern, and western regions of the Commonwealth. With this, our goal is to make our statewide rankings as reliable and accurate as possible — bringing in voices from different parts of the state will help us achieve that.

You can check out our entire Preseason Top 25 (which includes 10 additional teams that are receiving votes but came up short of the Top 25) by clicking the link here. Or, you can just check out the graphic below for a quick look.

But that’s not the only thing we’ve tweaked going into 2024. Our parent company, On3, has partnered with statistician Kenneth Massey, who created the Massey Ratings.

As a quick explanation, the Massey Ratings are computer ratings based on historical trends and current-year stats. With that in mind, it will need a few weeks’ worth of games before the numbers begin to hit their stride. However, you won’t find a more reliable system to use in terms of predicting scores in the preseason and throughout the first couple of weeks of the regular season.

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With the Massey Ratings, we can figure out score predictions for every single game on tap for this weekend (and all season long). You can click the link here to see predictive Week 1 scores for every team in the Top 25 (plus those receiving votes). If your school was not included in the prediction sheet, click here to find your school’s team page. There, you’ll be able to see predictive scores for the entire season along with updated results.

The graphic below is just a taste of what the Massey Ratings can show us.

We’ll end this recap article with the KSR Game of the Week, which will continue this season for the fifth consecutive year. Top open up 2024, we picked No. 3 Frederick Douglass vs. No. 4 Bowling Green in a primetime doubleheader over at Western Kentucky University. KSR’s Piper McCoun, who attends WKU and aids in our coverage out west, will be on-site for what is arguably the best matchup this week.

Keep in mind that kickoff between the Broncos and Purples is set for Saturday night — not Friday — and is the second of two games at WKU’s Houchens L.T. Smith Stadium. Known as the Rafferty’s Bowl, No. 1 Boyle County and No. 20 Lexington Christian Academy will get the night rolling at 5:00 p.m. EST with Frederick Douglass vs. Bowling Green expected to begin around 8:00 p.m. EST.

For a full preview from Piper on Saturday night’s KSR Game of the Week showdown, click here. We’ll see you over on KSBoard throughout the weekend as we provide live updates on every game we’re attending. It’s officially football season in the Bluegrass.

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