Olney and Paris meet Friday at Paris, and depending on which computer you ask, either one wins.

Our projection has Paris 33-29. Massey ratings, which have been rating high school teams for years, have Olney 34-32. Two systems looking at the same six weeks of football, landing on opposite sides of the same game.

That is roughly what the game deserves. Paris is 4-2 and lost to Newton last week. Olney is 3-3 and took Mt. Carmel to overtime before falling 38-30. Neither has separated from the other.

Dig into who they have played and the two look close. Both have measured themselves against Mt. Carmel, the conference’s only unbeaten, and neither backed down. Paris lost 24-20 at home on Sep 18, a four-point game. Olney pushed the Golden Aces to overtime last Friday before losing 38-30.

Beyond that, Olney has the better case. Both handled Lawrenceville comfortably. Olney marched by Marshall 53-8; Paris beat that same Lions team 34-20. Olney beat Newton 30-25; Paris lost to the Eagles 35-29.

What drags Olney down is the nonconference schedule. They opened with a 47-7 loss at Taylorville and dropped a one-point game to Salem. Our system counts every result, and a 40-point loss weighs on a team for a while. Massey’s weighs it differently, which is why it comes out on Olney’s side.

The other three games this week are less contested. We have Newton by 15 at Robinson; Massey says Newton by 6. We have Mt. Carmel by 27 at Casey-Westfield; Massey says 16. We have Marshall by 11 at Lawrenceville; Massey says 8. Same winners, and we are consistently the more confident of the two.

Last week we were the less accurate of the two on picks and the more accurate on scores. We called two of four winners to Massey’s three, but our margins missed by about eight points a game against their fourteen. On Robinson at Lawrenceville we said Robinson by a touchdown and it finished 19-16. Massey had the Maroons by 21.

We also found a mistake in our own numbers this week, and it is worth explaining because it had been wrong since the inception of our projections.

There are two Mt. Carmels playing football in Illinois. There is ours, and there is Chicago (Mt. Carmel), an 8A program with about 1,900 students. We had been matching the two by name and handing the Golden Aces the Caravan’s rating, which put Mt. Carmel fourth in the state. We assumed the rating was inflated because a good team in a small conference can look better than it is. The real reason was simpler.

Marshall had the same problem with a Chicago school of its own. Both are corrected. Mt. Carmel now rates around 133rd in Illinois, which for a 5-0 team in 3A sounds about right, and the Lions’ number dropped ten points to where it should have been.

Those corrections are also why we now like Olney more than we did a week ago, and why Friday at Paris is the game to watch.