Watered down playoffs

Every team makes the playoffs here. We have 64 districts, which then split into 16 regions. District champs and runner-ups advance to region, with only the region champ going to the state tourney.

No classes and all the awful teams are out by the semifinals, barring upsets of course. Every district seeds and almost every region does.

 

I've been a frequent critic of Texas playoffs (especially in baseball and softball). But basketball is one of the few playoffs the UIL gets right.

Top 4 per district get in in 4A-5A, top 3 in 1A-3A. No postseason district tournament; regular-season play actually means something. First three rounds are played (usually on a Tuesday, a Friday and a Tuesday), then there's a four-team regional tournament on a Friday and Saturday. The winners of the four regions go to Austin, and you're done.

Oklahoma's system is nothing but a money grab. The more games teams play, the more gate money superintendents can count.

Arkansas is almost as ridiculous. They play district tournaments, and all you have to do usually is win one game to qualify for regionals (depending on the district). Then once you get to regionals, all you have to do is win one game to make state. After that one game, you play two more games for no other reason than to determine seeding in the higher level.

If you make state and reach the finals, you have to wait another week to play at a centralized site with a total of 28 teams (boys' and girls' games across seven classifications).

 

Thank goodness i don't cover preps in Oklahoma and Arkansas..and Texas, for that matter. Sounds like a cluster with some of those formats.
After seeing what some of y'all are dealing with, Louisiana's is actually a piece of cake.

 

The only bitch I have about Texas playoffs is the first 3 rounds are all spread out at neutral sites and you're sending writers scurrying all over BFE.

 

To clarify:

- Kentucky has roughly 275 teams for each gender all playing in one class.

- Teams are divided into 64 districts and all districts have between 4 and 7 teams.

- This is single-elimination district tournament week. Most of the districts do seed based on regular-season district record, but some do not (Lexington doesn't because the metro Lexington public schools refuse to schedule Lexington Catholic, so they do a blind draw)

- The 16 eight-team, single-elimination region tournaments start Monday. The two finalists from each district move on, with the runner-up in one half of the bracket and the champion in the other half (can't meet again until the region final). Regions are blind draw, but each champion is matched up with a runner-up in the first round.

- The 16 region champions advance to the single-elimination state tournament at Kentucky's Rupp Arena (Boys) or Western Kentucky's Diddle Arena (Girls).

 

Another oddity in the Oklahoma system, in all but Class 6A and 5A the brackets are exactly the same on the boys and girls side. So while they use the coaches rankings (until recently it was the rankings from the state's two largest newspapers) to determine the pairings, they have to fit both sides together.

 

f_b, I'm with you - think the uil has the basketball setup right. it really doesn't take long, and even the bi-district and area rounds aren't awful. sure, you're driving to post (home of the antelopes) to cover a first- or second-round 3A game, but you just pick your top three or four games and there ya go. after that, you're at regionals and then in austin, as you said.

(frankly, I'm ok with the other playoff setups, too - even the fourth team into the football playoffs. helps the seeding process, and the crappy teams will be bounced anyway.)

and for those shocked at the texas bracket, gola's right. it doesn't take long and with as many teams as there are, the state takes far fewer teams, percentage-wise, into the postseason than many others.

 

one of the schools we covered in football last season had a Cinderella type of year, having gone from being winless in 2007 to five wins and a state playoff berth in 2008. but Cinderella's slipper didn't fit for too long. the team's very first game was against the famed South Plaquemines High School team down in Port Sulphur; that's the school which consolidated after Hurricane Katrina and became, in fact, the subject of a book called "The Hurricanes." an incredible Class 1A program that has won state the last two years and beat the local team, 70-0 in the first round. the minute the bracket was announced and the local team we covered found out who they were playing, even the coach was prompted to say, "oh shit, what are we getting into?"
well, for one thing, a 395-mile bus trip. yep, that's how far it was for the team we cover to trek to South Plaquemines. the latter school might as well be located in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Early-mid March. They get games in like crazy. One team we cover (girl's basketball) is in the Regional Semifinal.

 

ours will end March 14.

 

Lunacy.

 

our boys' playoffs begin tonight and we've got a ton of teams ready to play.
on another post elsewhere on SportsJournalists.com, I think some of us noted that, at this time of the year, we "secretly hope" as many of our teams can start getting eliminated. one less team (s) to worry about, right? with all due respects to all the fans who follow these teams, but that approach becomes a part of those of us who have dealt with the seemingly never-ending postseason hoopla.