Kentucky High School football realignment

That was why Mississippi went from five classes to six. The largest classification (now 6A, formerly 5A) is the top 32 schools, regardless of the difference in size, so you have some schools with over 2,000 students and the smallest has around 1,000.
That's a bad enough spread, but it was worse in the middle classifications. Before the move to six classes, the largest 4A school had around 1,000 kids and the smallest was about 400. Going to six classes lessened that gap to a couple hundred.

 

Indiana has no running clock ... another idiotic thing.

 

Yeah, Bubbler beat me to it.

No running clock in Indiana. It leads to some epic bloodlettings.

 

Praise be to the clock operators with a slow trigger finger and the coaches who look the other way during a 65-0 second half.

 

And epic pain for any reporter who actually has to sit through the 48 minutes of that bullshit to get an interview afterwards.

 

Ohio has six divisions, all 11-man, with as close to 120 teams in each as possible.
Each division has four regions. The top eight teams in each region, as ranked by a computer poll, make the playoffs.

 

My brother and sister went to high school in Ohio. It's the opposite of the Indiana system. Teams that make the playoffs there are generally cream of the crop. It's very hard to make the playoffs.

I prefer something in the middle. Take about half the teams and go from there. Many states (Wisconsin and Illinois jump to mind as far one's I'm familiar with) go that route.

Indiana would actually be really easy. Take the existing sectionals, play everyone else in your sectional as your "conference" during the season -- since existing conference races in Indiana mean less than nothing -- and the top four make the playoffs.

 

a lot of states it's tougher to get to the quarters in baseball or basketball. you play one football game a week and only can play 13-14 in a hs season. baseball and basketball you can have less classes and play down to less champs.

 

Agreed, but back when Kentucky had four classes, that wasn't an issue. Only when Kentucky went to six classes (no more than 42 teams in any class, some as small as 32 teams) did that become noticable.

But 210+ basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball and 100+ wrestling and soccer programs and ONE state champ? Fine.

And I'm all for one state champ in other team sports for a state as small as Kentucky. But football needs to be somewhere in the 3-4-5 class range (including privates).

 

Texas is talking about going from five classes to six. But Texas also has 1,300 schools that play football. Making the state quarterfinals in Texas is like winning state in 32 other states.