Today's bizarre high school football score

I can occasionally find tri-tip in upstate South Carolina at my butcher shop, and I’ll pay whatever he’s charging for it. So good.

 

The great thing about having a butcher in the family was we always got the tri-tip.

 

Bizarre score, girls' basketball version in Texas: McKinney North 78, Dallas Adams 3.

The Dallas team got a bucket in the first quarter and a free throw in the third.

Two other Dallas ISD teams didn't break double digits on Tuesday night.

 

Back to the gridiron ... Cedar Hill 10, Bryan 5.

That five-run seventh inning was a killer.

 

In my area, California's CIF Central Section: Santa Maria's Pioneer Valley beat Caruthers in OT 14-7 to advance to the semifinals.
No, the score wasn't unusual, but what was unusual was that this was Pioneer Valley's first win of the season, achieved in the second round of the playoffs. They're now 1-7 and a win away from the championship game.
The team went 0-7 in the regular season, but in the Central Section, a team can petition to be in the playoffs no matter what their record is, and PV was accepted. Then, they got put into a division that didn't have enough teams to fill out the bracket and they got a first round bye.
So that's how a team can go winless and still reach the second round of the playoffs. I personally have never seen that before.

 

I haaaate having bad teams in the playoffs. Indiana allows everybody in. Ohio expanded their playoffs to every team with a pulse.

It really takes away what was great about the playoffs: the intrigue of who would get in, the drama of the final month of the regular season and every round of the playoffs being competitive.

 

That is crazy. I'm surprised a legitimately winless team/school -- that wasn't hit with forfeits or something like that -- would actually petition to get into the playoffs. It's one thing to have sort of all-inclusive playoffs that practically everybody just gets into, but...

You'd think a bad team would just be waiting and looking for the season to end. And there are costs involved with continued play, and if it's going to happen without any real indication that there's gong to be some positive results, well...it just surprises me.

 

Not even a Scorigami.

 

I think the spirit of this rule is to provide a path for teams that play opponents in higher divisions a path to play their true competition. The closest opponent in Pioneer’s league is one division up. Pioneer is D6 (the lowest non 8-man division) and with one exception, everyone else is D4 or above.

 

Virginia has 6 classes for just over 300 schools. That's about 55 schools per class. Each class is split into four regions and almost all of them have 8 teams in the regional playoffs. That's well more than half the schools in the playoffs and why a 3-7 school became the eighth seed and lost to the top seed 77-7 the other night. Winning QB threw 9 TD passes, why he was in so late in the game in the first round of the playoffs is beyond me. He also ran for another TD, which means he was responsible for 10 TDS in a blowout from the first minute of the game.

 

The Mississippi private school league (them again) uses a power points system to set its bracket. Three or four district champions automatically qualify, and the rest of the 12-team bracket is picked as wild cards. It's actually a pretty good system because it includes a strength of schedule component that makes every game mean something to somebody, and no one is ever out of it. We've had teams start 0-5, win a couple of games in the middle of the season, and sneak in as the 12-seed or at least have something to play for until the last week. Some have gotten in because an 0-9 team they had played earlier in the season beat someone in the last week and gave them a SOS boost.
The downside is, 12 teams make it in every classification and every classification has 18 teams or less. The smallest 11-man division has 11 teams. So you wind up with some pretty bad teams making the playoffs by default.

Some years ago one of our locals won their first game, lost their next eight, and were probably going to lose the finale as well. It was a miserable season that everyone just wanted to be done with. But because of the way the power points formula is calculated, it appeared that they were going to make the playoffs as the 12-seed and be first-round cannon fodder for a juggernaut whether they won or lost the last game.
I went to do the preview story for the last game and told the coaches, who had assumed they were long out of it. One assistant's reaction was, "Shit! I have tickets to go see Mississippi State that Saturday!"

 

I think Texas has the best high school playoff system considering its sheer size, but growing enrollments are starting to skew membership. Any membership close to an exponent of 2 is ideal, and Texas is close at 256 per class. The problem is, the supersize schools are lapping the field and you have a Class 6A that is 7100 to 2200 from top to bottom. There will be a 7A classification by 2024 or 2026.