I remember one of my cousins telling me about the horrors of academic life on a big college campus. When he arrived at his first class in one of our state's top universities, he and his fellow students were informed by a professor that he, in a sense, graded on a curve. He had already decided how many students would get A's, B's, C's, D's and F's. Even if you worked really hard and and had numeric averages that warranted that you get a passing grade, you might flunk anyway because there were only so many passing slots. Had to thin the herd out a little, he said. Because of that grossly unfair grading method, my cousin was not in the passing group. I'm almost certain it had nothing to do with spending all his time skirt chasing and drinking cheap vodka, he was the victim of a horrible system.
I was reminded of that last week when I got a look at the brand new playoff formats for Class A athletics. Currently, Class A utilizes a points system in football, but in all other sports simply takes the top four finishers from each of Class A's eight regions. I knew things would look a little different. The points system could stay intact for football, but realignment will shrink the number of teams in Class A and there will only be six regions. There is no way to evenly distribute 32 bids amongst six regions, but with fewer teams overall, I also figured there might not be a need for 32 playoff teams in each sport anymore. I figured it would be 24, with with the top eight seeds overall (or the top four in the upperstate bracket and top four in the lowerstate) getting a first-round bye and on that count I was right. What I couldn't guess was how those 24 bids would be parsed out. I mean that literally...given one million guesses, I would not have correctly forecast how the bids would be distributed. In football, the committee that put together this bracket decided that the number of bids each region will receive is pre-determined based on the number of teams in each region. Regions I, II (where Lewisville and Great Falls will reside), IV and V, all of which have five football-playing schools, get three bids apiece. Region VI, which has six football-playing members, gets four bids and Region III, which has eight schools that field football teams, gets five playoff bids. Region I-III, which will be slotted in the upperstate playoff bracket, will get one at-large team (based on their winning percentage), while Regions IV-VI receive two. On its face that might sound logical, if you have more teams you get more playoff bids. However, the point of playoffs is to match up the best teams and allow them to play one another as a means of deciding a final champion. Just because a region has more teams than another does not mean it is superior in terms of quality. Regions are drawn up based on geography. It makes sense in terms of travel and traditional rivalry for the eight teams in Region III to play one another, that's why it is constructed the way it is. Under this playoff proposal then, teams are essentially rewarded based on their location. Congratulation Denmark-Olar, there are a bunch of Class A schools near you, here's your playoff ticket, Broham!!!! This proposed format actually gets worse from there. Not only are the playoff slots slanted towards bigger regions, so is the seeding process. In the upperstate, the three region champs will be seeded one through three, based on overall winning percentage and all will receive a bye. The fourth and final bye goes to the second-place finisher in Region III, regardless of their record. To demonstrate the faultiness of this plan, you need look back no further than this past football season. The champion of Region III would have been Williston-Elko, which put together a 7-3 record. The second place finisher, and thus the automatic bye-receiving fourth overall seed, would have been Hunter-Kinard-Tyler, which went 6-4 and failed to beat any team with a winning record. Region II's second-place finisher would have been McBee, a team that went 9-1 in the regular season, beat AAA Lakewood, AA Chesterfield and five overall teams with winning records. The records wouldn't matter and the quality of wins and losses would have no effect...the 6-4 team with no quality wins gets a bye and the 9-1 team with an impressive resume doesn't. The playoff formula for other sports follows much the same tact, with the number of playoff bids directly proportional to how big a region is and the final first-round bye always guaranteed to the runner-up from the largest region. Most coaches I've talked to have never heard of (and don't like) byes in the basketball playoffs. Consider that four of the teams in what will be Region II next year made the playoffs this year, two advanced to the third round and Great Falls, which went 13-9, didn't even get in the playoffs. Under this proposal, only three would have even made the post-season, ceding their bid to a team with a losing record from a bigger region for no reason other than the other team is in a bigger region. In baseball, playoff teams will be put in three-team districts with the top seed in each (the runners-up in bigger regions are assured of one of those spots alongside region champions) getting to rest valuable pitching by advancing straight to the semis of its bracket, a huge built-in advantage. The fairest way to determine playoff spots in football is with the points system that is currently in use. It could be tweaked to guarantee that each region champion gets one of the top three spots, but there could still be points based on wins and losses, with more points awarded to victories over teams with winning records or of a higher classification. That way, each team stands on its own resume and isn't given an artificial hand-up by the size of its region or its location. It also makes every game meaningful instead of everything hinging on region games. Some regions are inherently weaker than others, but if it's a big weak region, it will still get to pack the bracket. It's difficult to do a points system for other sports, since schools don't necessarily play the same number of games, as is the case in football. In that instance, Region III in the upperstate and Region IV in the lowerstate could be given four automatic bids apiece, the other regions get three and there would two at-large bids based on overall winning percentage. That gives the bigger regions a slight advantage, but not an overwhelmingly unfair one as is the case with the proposed new plan. With a points system not being feasible in sports other than football, though, that's about as good as you can do at making a slight accommodation for bigger regions without completely hosing deserving teams in smaller ones. This plan still has to be approved by the S.C. High School League's competition committee, but I hope that will not be the case. We can do better than a format that will often put inferior teams in the post-season and we can certainly do better by Class A than to stick it with a curious proposal that no other classification is being asked to deal with. Deciding who gets in the post-season based on something as arbitrary as size of regions is a craptastic grab bag of unfairness. Even graded on the most generous curve, this plan deserves a big fat F.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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