This week's bizarre high school football score

Almost impossible to imagine. Particularly the 78 points on 22 first-half plays. A TD every other snap.

 

Sometimes I wish 11-man football had the same rule as six-man. Once the lead gets to 45 points at or after halftime, the game is over.

A running clock after 35 (which is the NFHS rule) is good, but I have a better idea: Any player on the winning team who touches the field with a lead of 45 or more (the amount is negotiable) in the second half is ineligible to play the first half of the next game. Play your scrubs.

 

I've always been of the opinion that I'd rather see leagues grouped by talent rather than student population, with consideration for travel. Yes, I know that can vary year-to-year, but there are programs that consistently punch way above their weight in every state (or the other way around).

You shouldn't be putting coaches and teams in situations where the game becomes a farce before the coin flip. I think it's pretty admirable of the losing coach to admit that the winning coach's freshmen are better than his seniors, but that doesn't make it any less lopsided.

 

It’s possible but it depends on the number of teams in a given area. My final stop had a couple of super leagues that effectively had relegation and promotion that had to do with your place in league and your projected talent the following year (teams could appeal to stay up or go down even if their record would suggest they do otherwise). But there were leagues that didn’t have enough teams to do that. I also covered a more rural league where that would have been impossible given locations.

 

I think there are some states (Louisiana is or was one) that allow schools to voluntarily play up. There are a few private schools that do it. But you can't make it mandatory or else you can put teams in a bad situation like one of our private schools in Mississippi.

Greenville Christian plays in Class 3A, the smallest 11-man division in the private school association (the MAIS), and was a perennial also-ran up until 2020. Then when COVID hit and all of the public schools in the Delta shut down their football teams, the best players from about a dozen schools transferred in and literally overnight they created an all-star team that could compete with anybody on any level. Several of those players are at D-I schools now. They lost 27-0 in Week 1 in 2020, gutted out a win in Week 2, and then in Week 3 they had all of their new players and only lost one game (to a Georgia team) out of their next 23. Only two of those 22 wins were by less than three touchdowns.
One of our local schools happened to play them the week all of the transfers started rolling in, and the coaches had some funny stories about how the shitty team they studied film on had none of the same players on the field when they showed up that Friday. Another one played them a few weeks later and it was like watching a peewee team trying to keep up with NFL players because of the difference in size and speed.

In 2021, the MAIS realigned. Greenville Christian's run to a Class 3A title was a foregone conclusion and they only had two district games to play, so they scheduled up. Way up. They played — and beat — the best 6A teams in the MAIS, as well as one of the best public school 6A teams in Mississippi.
Unfortunately for them, the realignment cycle is every two years and almost all of their all-stars graduated last spring. They might still win the 2022 Class 3A title because that division is so bad and thin, but they're back to being an average Class 3A team playing a de facto Class 6A schedule. Three of the 6A teams they beat last year have beaten them this year 48-6, 48-6 and 47-12.
Nobody is crying for them, either.

I guess the point is, you can never do mandatory classification based on talent or success because high school talent can vary so much from year to year. It's not right to penalize the next batch of kids because the ones the year or two before happened to be really good.

 

I agree. The demographics of a school often have as much to do with how competitive a school is as the enrollment. For example, a school with an affluent student body will have a good tennis and golf team. An inner city school with a large Hispanic population generally will not have a lot of kids who have been played little league football and will not be competitive. While this is not a perfect solution it certainly better than sending high school athletes out to get slaughtered every week.

 

I'd like to see a mercy rule in 11-man. I almost wonder why the subject has never been brought up in a rules meeting.

If coaches are honest, they'd rather not play the second half of such a mismatch because no one benefits. Scores like that are rare enough that the rule might come into play only four or five times a year across the entire state.

Kansas still has district play in its lower classes while 6A, 5A and 4A play open schedules. This was a 3A district game. If 3A and lower were allowed to play an open schedule, this game would never have been played.

 

Imagine trying to group 1200 schools in Texas and doing it by judging their talent level

 

I know I've posted about it before here, but I'm a huge fan of the system used in the Salinas-Monterey-Santa Cruz area in football. Four divisions, grouped by strength, promotion/relegation based on performance every couple of years. In other sports, Santa Cruz County public schools (save the Watsonville schools) stay in their own league, but the rest are in equity leagues, from basketball to tennis. Because, lets face it, geography, not competitiveness, is how leagues are formed.

 

The gap between schools that care about football and schools that don’t is widening year by year. There’s no middle class. You’re either devoting every resource possible or complete apathy.

 

When I left newspapers five years ago, local teams would cancel for particularly rainy nights - no one wanted to destroy their fields or risk the budget when no one showed up.

But now they all have turf fields.

So the team I do stats for on Friday played in what was for sure the worst conditions I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing in a regular season game. Steady rain. Constant wind, while Ian’s remains blew through central Virginia.

Luckily the good guys are a Single Wing team, very content to run run run. So 52 carries, one pass attempt, and 90 minutes later, they had a 16-0 win wrapped up.

I usually walk the sidelines, but it was nice to enjoy one from the press box for a change!

 

To be "fair" about Texas, almost anyone good seemingly ends up near a 6A school, somehow, as if by magic. Why, just this season, a California running back had a family member get a fantastic job offer in Katy! It is funny how that works out.

In Rhode Island for all sports, I believe its 60/40 - a rolling four-year winning percentage and your school population. You can petition to go up or down a division, and it's usually granted. It frankly doesn't matter for the top division though, because two schools - Bishop Hendricken and La Salle - have won something like 60 to 80 percent of the state titles in the past 30 years.