Your state's high school football playoff system

Central and West are four-team playoffs and they play an eight-game regular season.

I think the East (North and South) should either be six teams or have a cutoff record of 3-4, with a maximum eight-team bracket, but the problem with that is nobody wants bye weeks. I'm against cutting it to a four-team playoff because fifth seeds have won state championships.

 

NJ also had an inordinate number of towns and cities, many with their own school systems.

 

In Virginia, there are 6 public school classes, 3 private school classes and a new 8-man league for smaller private schools

Public: There are six classes and something like 315 schools in the Virginia High School League. This year 185 schools made the playoffs or almost 60 percent. Who gets in and who is seeded where depends on the points system and how many teams are in regions.

Regular season: Schools play within traditional geographical districts with the makeup usually crossing several class lines (one has Class 6, 5, 4 and 3 schools in it). I haven't looked at it for a couple of years, but I think the rating system accounts for schools that have to play regular-season games against schools in lower classes.

For the playoffs, each of the six classes are split into four regions. Most have 8-team brackets, others have smaller brackets, because, I suspect, they don't have 8 schools in them. That's why there is a 1-9 team in the playoffs and 3 0-10 teams. Each of the six classes had somewhere between 53 and 55 schools split into 4 regions, which to me is pretty watered down.

Most schools have to play and win 5 games to win the state championship.

Private: There are 3 classes and each has a 4-team bracket. Semifinals are this coming weekend with the championship games the next week. All brackets are set up by a points system, but you can't figure the final rankings until the regular season is done and bonus points are added in. In all, there are 31 schools in the VISAA, plus 5 other football-playing schools that don't participate in the playoff system because of other commitments (D.C-area Catholic schools, plus Woodberry Forest andEpiscopal, who play a longstanding, traditional season-ending game that conflicts with the playoffs).

8-man: That's new this year. I think it's a 7-team league and I'm not sure how the playoffs are figured.

 

That’s weird. Arkansas also started 8-man this year with seven teams. No playoffs, just a regular season.

 

Yes every little town and boro wants its own high school and police department. The mayor and council members' kids need jobs.

The football playoffs pretty much suck, especially when NJ is the most populated state to play down to one state champion in basketball. They used to play
down to one champ in hockey also, but the private (pretty much catholic) school winner was blowing out the public school champ.

There used to be 20 "state champs" in football. The public schools were divided into four groups based on size and the state was divided into
four regions -- North 1, North 2, Central and South. The non-public schools used to be split into just two sizes based on group and two regions, North
South. In the 90s, the non-publics went to three groups based on size. A couple years ago the public schools added a 5th group, but they combined
regions. So it will be 5 group champions in three regions, instead of four group champions in four regions.

Someone posted the article Steve Politi did about how the power points
system is a mess. Instead of using the Borne Power Index, NJ should ask these guys
to help with rankings.

Gridiron New Jersey High School Football

 

The Mississippi Association of Independent Schools, the state's private school league -- which also includes schools in Arkansas and Louisiana -- started its 8-Man league about 10 years ago. It's grown to the point where they'll have two classes and about 30 teams next year. It's been a great success story.
Lots of griping among its members, though.
Some bigger schools want to play 8-Man when it was originally intended as a lifeboat for tiny rural schools that were routinely putting 15-20 players on a roster and serving as little more than cannon fodder for the bigger teams. Some of those same small teams have had a lot of success in 8-Man, which has swelled the rosters to 25-30 players since kids want to play on a winning team. So now there's a lot of people bitching that they should go back to being cannon fodder in the 11-Man league, since some of the 11-Man teams are struggling to put 20-25 kids on a team.

 

There are quite a few bigger high schools in Michigan (1200-1600 students) barely fielding 20 players on the varsity football team, and there's quite a bit of resistance against allowing bigger schools (over 600) to play 8-man.

I don't think any of the 8-man teams would be above Division 5 (of 8) in 11-man, but there are quite a few big division teams with rosters under 20.

 

Actually all the major high schools in Santa Maria (North Santa Barbara County) moved to the Central along with the SLO County schools. I work for the Santa Maria paper so it's been interesting for the sports staff this year. We also cover the Lompoc and Santa Ynez schools, so we've had to pay attention to both sections this year (for those unfamiliar with the geography, Lompoc is about 25 south of Santa Maria and their schools are now the northernmost ones in the Southern Section, save for a small Christian school (8-man) in Santa Maria that stayed in the SS.
The size of the Southern Section has always amazed me. I looked it up on the website and it has 581 schools for that section. The next highest is Sac-Joaquin Section with 174.

 

It baffled me that the section wasn't broken up into three and have other sections absorb the outer pieces. The Central Section took on some of the desert schools recently and that made sense (I didn't realize SLO moved over). I once drove from the high desert to Santa Monica for a playoff football game and that really seemed excessive.

 

We had schools FROM Santa Monica go to Big Bear or Palmdale and have to play football in snow. Some of the players had never seen snow. The capper was Crossroads of Santa Monica going to play a second-round baseball playoff game in Coleville. Coleville is up 395 near Bridgeport. Nearest bigger town is Carson City, Nevada. Coleville played on a converted little league field. The field had been converted back for Little League because they didn't think the high school would win its first playoff game. There wasn't a mound so the Crossroads coach didn't use his ace pitcher.

 

Damn I thought Lee Vining was the furthest school up 395. That's rough.

 

Might be different now. I kind of remember a bad fire in Coleville that leveled the high school a few years ago. Not sure what their story is anymore.