Missouri High School football playoffs 2012 and beyond: Everybody's In!

I always liked the randomness of the draw and that the lack of a point system or particular record for cutoffs doesn't discourage teams from playing up a class during the regular season, or even playing a tough schedule within their class. When teams have to qualify, Cathedral ends its trips to Ohio and Illinois to play the best Catholic schools the Midwest have to offer and Sheridan spends the whole year pounding single A teams that it has to travel forever and a day to get too. You get a difficult draw one year, well, you play the game in front of you.

 

The bolded part is the problem, or at least it is in states with similar systems.

 

My senior year in Missouri, our football team went 9-1 and didn't make the playoffs. Went 2-1 in districts when the alpha male private school went 3-0.

Conceivably, we could've been the second best team in the state that year.

 

This plan is damn near akin to what we partially have here in Iowa. In 2008, the playoff format was expanded from 16 to 32 teams in the five classes, except 8-man. In the largest class, 4-A, it is consisted of the largest 48 schools. So as a result of the change, 32 teams gets to play in the postseason, and the 16 who don't get in ends up being the ones in the limelight because they were terrible.

In 3-A, it's the next 64 largest teams (50% gets in), 2-A and 1-A the next 96 largest each, and the rest are in Class A.

Some of the rancor behind changing it was the number of schools (particularly in 4-A) who bitched about being left out if they finished 7-2 or 6-3 in the old 16-team format. 4-A and 8-man does not have district football, but A through 3-A does.

This year, the criticism towards the new format finally came to fruition when several 4-5 and 3-6 teams got in the 4-A playoffs. One of the 3-6 teams upset the #2 seed and the #7 seed to make it into the quarterfinals and they damn near pulled off another upset before losing in the final seconds.

Personally, and I'm not alone with this thought here in Iowa, the change was more about gate receipts for the athletic association. The schools that host have to pay a hefty percentage of the profits to the association for hosting.

 

No more than half the teams from any given classification should be allowed to qualify for the playoffs. To add more minimizes the importance of the regular season.

 

It depends on the definition of playoffs, really. Most states in basketball have a district or region tournament before the state tournament. Everyone in the district usually gets to play. If a 4-21 team happens to catch fire at the right time, they'll end up in the state playoffs. But a tournament's still a tournament, at the end of the day. Doesn't really matter what you call it.

There are a fair few number of football regions in Georgia that have brought in region play-in games at the end of the regular season. Usually it's the top four teams from each subregion, though, so if you finish fifth or sixth, you don't get a chance to make the state playoffs. You just play the sixth-place team from the other side. But it's the same basic idea. It's still a knockout game; it's just not against a team from another region.

 

Texas is in a bit of flux for 2012. The UIL has proposed adding a sixth classification, but how it plans to implement it is an open question.

The talk was that that the six-man schools would become 1A and everyone else simply gets an A added to its classification. In other words, nothing really changes. But now I'm hearing that Class 3A (the class with the fewest number of schools) may be split into divisions. It all depends on how the superintendents vote, whenever that vote is held.

What I doubt we'll see is 11-man schools divided into six classes rather than the present five. Which is too bad, because there is a wide disparity in enrollments in these classes, especially at the top, where you have borderline schools with barely more than 2,000 enrollment grouped with monster schools like Allen and the Plano schools.

 

I grew up in Indiana, went to high school in Indiana and have worked my whole life in Indiana. I say that to drive home my experience to this regard:

Indiana's high school football tournament system is the biggest crock of shit this side of a sidewalk Rolex dealer.

 

The IHSA isn't perfect, as evidenced by four-class basketball. But it does run a damn fine tournament.

You need to finish 5-4 to qualify for the IHSA postseason, but you need to win six games to guarantee your spot.

 

If Kansas changed its playoff system to something similar, I think most people would hate it. People bitched about the old way when only one district team advanced and teams that were 8-1 and 7-2 were left out when 3-6 teams were getting in.

Now, although most (not all*) of the 8-1 teams and most of the 7-2 teams get in, there are also more of the 3-6 and 2-7 teams, which people hate. I can only imagine the uproar over a system that allows 0-9 teams the same chance to win state as a 9-0 team. Bad enough that there's chances for a 3-6 team to host an 8-1 team or for two 3-6/2-7 teams to face each other in the first round.

* - I cover a school that didn't make it as an 8-1 team about four years ago. It lost out on a tie-breaker when three teams finished 2-1 in the district and was placed third, losing a spot to 7-2 and 6-3 teams.

 

The biggest problem is the blind draw. It's especially problematic when you consider that schools only share money from gate receipts during the sectionals (first three games.) After that, it all goes to the IHSAA.

If they seed the teams, it helps ensure that the marquee game happens in the third week of the tournament. Those sectional championship games would presumably draw larger crowds because the players, coaches and fans of teams who were already knocked out could attend. This has competitive benefits, sure, but the economic benefits are even greater.

 

I like the Kansas system. Win and you're in. Pretty simple. If an 8-1 team doesn't make it, it happens because it:

A. lost
B. didn't beat its district opponents by enough points. (I think the cutoff is 14 points, maybe 21, so you don't get people going out of their way to win 68-0.)

You can't have a 0-9 team make the playoffs (which I'll define as the bracketed playoffs). You could, very worst case scenario have a one-win team, make it, though. They wouldn't make it over a one-loss team, but could over a two-loss team.