How's your high school football season going?

It's a great idea. But how the heck do you keep stats, maybe short photos, take notes and have time to tweet or text while the game is in progress?

 

Not to sound flippant, but you learn. It's hard to do it while shooting photos, too, but I tweet scoring plays during the minute or so it takes to kick the PAT and line up for the kickoff. Usually at the end of each quarter, too, plus maybe a game nugget at halftime after I've added up stats. There's enough time in there to bang out a quick tweet without missing anything. I also keep a full play by play.

One thing that might help, is we have our paper's Twitter account set up so we can post via text message. Saves a few precious seconds firing up Twitter on the phone. I'll check the actual Twitter app every once in a while for other scores, usually at halftime or during a lull in my own game.

 

We're hitting the playoffs this week. 18 of our 30 teams have qualified for postseason play. It's been a pretty routine football season even though we were down a writer for the last seven weeks or so. No major glitches. Helps to have a desker that somehow manages to produce really good sections amid the mayhem. We devote four of our six or eight pages to high school football each Saturday.
The worst part of the playoffs is that about 50 percent of our playoff teams will be outside our normal coverage area, and some of our correspondents aren't going to travel 3 hours or so for what we can pay. I have other papers that will trade with me, but it can be more work rewriting their gamer to tailor it to my market and it can be pretty time consuming. God news is we'll lose probably 40 percent of our teams the first week.

 

I don't shoot photos. I used to be a sideline walker, but now that I have all the live updates responsibility, I sit in the press box until about the middle of the fourth quarter and then head down. Any updates after that I do via the Twitter app on my phone (and my company pays for a WiFi hotspot, which I have tethered to my laptop in the press box and keep in my pocket on the sideline.

The tech folks at our company have worked up a Twitter widget that send everything I tweet out into a post on the website. I gets quite a few hits on game night from people who don't have a Twitter account for whatever reason.

 

We have 24 teams in our coverage area and 19 of them will probably make the playoffs. A couple haven't officially clinched yet, but should do so this week. Most of them will be gone the first week of postseason, but we have 2-3 that are expected to make deep playoff runs.

For me, personally, it's been busier than ever, with blogs, tweets, plus all of the minutiae (standings, preview capsules, predictions, etc.) that goes with prep football. I also have a couple of juco powers to deal with. And basketball season opens this coming weekend and soccer starts the following week.

 

I don't even have a Twitter account and really have no desire to do so. I find that I'm plenty busy during games between taking notes, doing my own stats, etc. I've done radio before and, obviously, that kept me hopping as well.

As I've gotten older I'm less able to multi-task without making a mess of things (or spilling my soda), so I don't really have any desire to do in-game tweets. I think they can be valuable, but there's a limit to what one person and two hands can do at the same time. Maybe between quarters or at halftime, but certainly not a running play-by-play. That's what radio is for.

 

Season is going as usual. No big surprises. Twitter is great..etc.

BUT the quality of play is just abysmal across the board. Even the good teams are shit. Someone always will tell us that it's cyclical, but the product on the field seems like it gets worse every year.

 

We're entering the final week of the regular season and our nine-team Class 5A district has four teams tied for fourth place and the final playoff spot. None are facing a win-and-in situation.

AHS at MHS is the only game matching two tied teams and the winner could wind up all alone in fourth if OHS and PHS both lose. OHS and PHS can get in only by winning and finishing in a tie with the right team(s). There are two possible three-way ties.

The district tibreaking procedure is (a) head-to-head results, (b) point differential of the games between the tied teams with a max of 15 points per game, and (c) coin flip.

OHS beat PHS by three and beat MHS by five. PHS beat AHS by 10. MHS beat PHS by nine. AHS beat OHS by 21. If AHS, OHS and PHS tie, PHS (+7 point differential) advances. If MHS, OHS and PHS tie, OHS (2-0 head-to-head) advances. Any two-way ties are broken by the head-to-head result.

To get in, all four tied teams must win AND have the right team lose. The scenarios:

a) AHS must win and have PHS lose at home to the district's last-place team.

b) PHS must win and have AHS beat MHS.

c) MHS must win and have OHS lose on the road at the district's next-to-last-place team.

d) OHS must win and have MHS beat AHS.

A PHS win eliminates AHS no matter what else happens. An AHS win eliminates OHS and MHS. An OHS win eliminates MHS. An MHS win eliminates PHS and AHS.

The next-to-last-place team somehow beat the district's top-ranked team by three TDs a few weeks ago, but managed just a two-point win over the last-place team on Friday.

The last-place team is 0-fer-district, but it's last three games were 56-49, 63-55 and 47-45. Beating an extremely inconsistent PHS team is not out of the question.

 

We still don't have the full picture of our playoff load - the largest and smallest schools have one more week to play.

But we have a 1-10 team that qualified for the playoffs - and that is absurd.

 

Ehh. We have an 0-10 team in the playoffs in our area, and several more around the state. The 0-10 team had several injuries (lost entire starting backfield by week 2) and other circumstances (top back moved 2 weeks into season, several others quit). It has a 3-hour trek this Friday just to get running clocked (down by at least 36 points).

Two years ago, Independent High in our area went 0-11 (tying state record for most actual on-field losses in a season since a team could finish 0-15 if it made the state final but had to forfeit every game after that). 0-10 in regular season, ousted in playoffs.

In Kentucky, Class 1-A (smallest) and Class 6-A (largest) guarantees all 32 teams in the class make the playoffs. Which means you could have some 0-10 teams in the playoffs in those two classes but have 3-7 teams miss the playoffs in other classes (if that 3-7 team just happens to be in a 7-team district, which one of our schools was/is). Of course, in those other four classes, there can be some four-team districts. And since the top-four teams in the district make the playoffs, you can have 0-10, 1-9, 2-8 teams in the postseason, too.

 

New York into quarterfinals in five classes Saturday.

Twitter very strong in Capital Region/north.

 

Friday is the last week of the regular season. Four high schools in my coverage area. One will finish 3-7, its worst season in a while. Another will finish 4-6, its best season in a while.

Friday marks the rivalry game between the old city school and the new city school, in its third varsity season. The old guard in town hates the new school with a passion. The new school's coaches and administration love using the various slights (real and perceived) and trash talk as motivation. The old school dropped last Friday's game to fall to 5-4, and needs to win the rivalry game to make the playoffs, since 5-5 probably isn't good enough. There's really no reason why the new school (6-3) shouldn't beat its rival for the first time -- it has the much better QB and receivers, better RB, and the defenses are about even. It will be interesting to watch the old guard lose its shit, about both the rivalry game and the playoffs.