There are plenty of high school football rankings around, but Drew Pasteur, who lives in Fuquay-Varina and is doing doctoral studies in applied math at N.C. State, has pretty heady credentials. For the past seven years he has been ranking every team in the state, tinkering with his program after each season.

The result is a comprehensive program he has developed, which uses calculations to not only produce power ratings for each team but also gives game predictions and rankings. It also has the probabilities for each team's chances to make the playoffs.

Pasteur has his own site, but his rankings also are linked to ncpreps.com, which is one of the state's oldest high school Web sites and is maintained by North Carolina Prep Football News editor Arnold Solomon.

"I got involved with him because I was so impressed with his program," Solomon said. "In 2005 when I went to New Orleans after Katrina, I wanted somebody to do some predictions for me because I was not going to give it the time it needed.

"Drew was my pick. He has an incredible mind."

Pasteur predicts the winner about 80 percent of the time, which is about the same as Solomon, who does all his calculations by hand, at ncpreps.com.

But picking winners is a byproduct, not the goal of Pasteur's system.

While he was working on his undergraduate degrees at the University of Florida, he saw newspaper rankings for the top 25 teams in the state regardless of classification.

"Growing up, that was something that I really liked," he said. "Could a small school beat one of the bigger ones if they played?"

Nobody was doing that in North Carolina, so he developed a computer program that did.

Pasteur said keeping the ratings updated isn't as complicated as it may seem, the program does the calculations.

What separates Pasteur's program from others are all the extras that it supplies.

This time of year, Pasteur gets a lot of e-mails. That's because he does such a good job of picking which teams will make the playoffs.

The N.C. High School Athletic Association playoff system relies on conference finish and overall records to fill its brackets. Predicting which teams will have the required number of victories and how many wins are needed to make the field is complicated.

But by running thousands -- yes thousands -- of simulations, Pasteur's program gives an accurate assessment of who will make it and who won't.

For example, if a 4-A team has four wins but has three conference wins, there is at least a 95 percent chance that team will make the playoffs. The odds fall to 39 percent with four overall wins and two conference wins.

There is no short answer to how all this works.

Pasteur's program uses matrix algebra and is similar to programs used by the NCAA for the Bowl Championship Series rankings.

One difference is that Pasteur's program has a carry-over effect from the year before.

Teams that were successful in 2006 got higher rankings entering 2007. The higher ranking was accurate for teams that returned a strong nucleus of players, but it was not as accurate for teams depleted by graduations.

By the fifth week of the season, the preseason rankings have been adjusted to be a more accurate reflection of this year's team.

The program uses all sorts of criteria (winning margin up to 21 points, home-field advantage, etc.) to assign a ranking. On Pasteur's scale, an average team should have a ranking of 100.

Each point difference in the ranking of two teams generally equates to the difference of one point if the teams were to play.

Using that formula, Garner -- the top area team in his rankings at 131.6, would beat Leesville Road (128.6) by three points on a neutral field, Athens Drive (127.3) by 4.3 points, and Wake Forest-Rolesville (124.7) by 6.9.

Rocky Mount, a 3-A power at 137.3, would beat them all as would 1-A power Warsaw Kenan (133.3).

"Of course, there are always surprises," Pasteur said. "I never would have predicted that Knightdale would beat Smithfield-Selma."

Pasteur says he loves high school football. He has been involved since his freshman year at Enloe when he was coach Ron Massey's statistics man.

He later taught math and was the athletics trainer at Fuquay-Varina High before resigning to work on his doctorate.

His life is filled with his 4-month-old son, Daniel, his class work and teaching calculus at N.C. State. But he still finds time to announce the Fuquay home games and keep his Web site humming.

"It keeps me involved in high school athletics," he said. "I really enjoy being a part of high school athletics."

Fuquay-Varina athletics director Bruce Hemphill said Pasteur is invaluable to the Bengals.

"He has a great speaking voice, but beyond that he handles the announcing in a professional manner," Hemphill said.

One thing he does at games is provide game updates from other Tri-Eight games.

"A person coming to our games not only knows who made the last tackle, but also how the other league teams are doing and the upcoming games," Hemphill said.

"Drew is a genuine lover of high school sports."