How's your high school football season going?

The two states I'm most familiar with, Alabama and Mississippi, play home sites until the finals, which are all in one place at a neutral site.

 

Indiana and Missouri are almost all hosted by one team or another up until the state finals (Lucas Oil in the case of IHSAA, Edward Jones Dome in the case of MSHSAA). One of our teams had to play at a local D-II college recently because they had turf and their field was a muddy mess thanks to a couple of days of rain.

In Michigan all semifinals are at neutral sites, often small colleges or big high schools, the the state picking 16 host sites and assigning teams to a place once they get that far in the bracket. Most UP teams also play at the Superior Dome in the early rounds.

 

Not ever going to happen in Montana because of small schools and travel. Would love to see the Cat-Griz stadium not used for the big game host six classes over three days, but that's also a logistical flustercluck.

 

Gidal, I wrote a column in 2011 advocating exactly that. Helena was playing at Bozeman in the state title game this season and it made absolutely no sense to me why they couldn't play it at Bobcat Stadium at Montana State.

I talked with the suits at the MHSAA and they gave me a somewhat logical argument about the smaller schools needing to play at a home sites because no one wanted to staff a stadium for a game between two schools hundreds of miles away that might draw 50 out of town fans. I understood that for the smaller schools, but I felt the big schools could be reasonably accommodated at a university stadium, and maybe piggyback one or two more classifications on to justify the expenses. And, yeah, of course everything done in Montana is ass-backwards to begin with. Which is ashame, because both Missoula and Bozeman --- and even Billings --- had reasonably nice stadiums with turf available.

 

Some places up north --- Washington and Oregon come to mind immediately and I suspect there are others --- mandate that after a certain date or round, all games must be played on artificial turf.

The reason is that the grass starts to die and gets in real bad shape and, of course, schools can't be expected to spends thousands of dollars on grass maintenance. So playing on turf seemed the fairest way to do it and there were more than enough stadiums in the larger cities that had turf fields.

So you'd get a lot of tripleheader Saturdays that started with an 8-man game, had a small school and finished with the big schools at the end. And, of course, the fields could take the wear and tear, too.

 

Ohio has the top seeds host the lower seeds (1-8 host 16-9 in Division I; 1-4 host 5-8 in Divisions II through VII) in the regional quarterfinals. Division I has two regions while Divisions II through VII each have four regions.
All games after the regional quarterfinals are at neutral sites.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association prefers all games from the regional semifinals on to be played on fields with turf, but sometimes a grass field will be used in the regional semifinals.

 

The main reason you won't see every single state championship football game held in a central location is because of logistics. You're talking about games that can take as much as three hours to complete and trying to schedule them all on the same day is tough.

If you have six classifications and you allot three hours for each game, that means you need 18 hours of time blocked off to get those games played. Not gonna happen.

I can certainly see the argument for holding the largest classifications in a central location, because then it's easier to schedule games and you will get the classes that are likely to command the most attention from fans. Do three classes and you can get things done in nine to 10 hours.

Eight-man and six-man games, though, are never going to get pulled into a large stadium, not just because the fan turnout isn't going to be high, but because they are played on a field with smaller dimensions to begin with.

Best thing to do is to push for the bigger classes to play at a central location and let the smaller classes continue to have one school host. Maybe you could find a larger high school who is willing to host a game for smaller classes, but making sure the location is within a reasonable distance from most of the schools that are in the class.

 

Mississippi makes this work just fine. Six classes. Three play on Friday, at 11 a.m. (1A), 3 p.m. (2A), and 7 p.m. (6A). Classes 3A, 4A and 5A play Saturday at the same times. All six play at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium in Jackson, capacity 60,000 (it's maybe half full for the 5A and 6A games).
Louisiana has NINE classes that play all of their championship games in the Superdome on a Thursday-Friday-Saturday setup, following roughly the same time schedule.

I know places like Florida and Texas would have a much tougher time with this setup. They'd probably have to spread it across two weekends. Most states, though, it's probably doable. Especially if you have a field with turf.

 

Texas started playing all 11-man finals at JerryWorld a couple of years ago. This year, the six-man finals will be played there as well.

The two six-man brackets are five rounds with state finals on Dec. 14. The 10 11-man brackets are six rounds with finals over three days (Dec. 19-21). For whatever reason, they're playing four games on Thursday (10 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m., 8 p.m.) and three each on Friday and Saturday (noon, 4 p.m., 8 p.m.) instead of four on Sarturday. Thursday will be all Class 1A and Class 2A, which hyothetically won't pass as much as the Class 4A and Class 5A schools.

All 12 games will be shown on FoxSports Southwest.

For everything except the championship games, the schools involved have the choice to flip for home field (they may designate another nearby big high school/college/pro stadium as "home") or agree to a neutral site. Almost everyone goes for a neutral field, but with more than half the schools in the state now qualifying for the playoffs, there are a lot more home-and-home flips in the early rounds.

If two teams that flipped home-and-home meet again within four years, the visitor from the first meeting automatically has choice of site for the rematch (I used to joke with one coach that he needed to choose the dark side of the moon if his team ran into a certain powerhouse program for the third or fourth year in a row).

Up until the UIL finally got enough money out of the deal to go to a central site, even championship game sites were determined by the schools involved. No matter what round, you get some odd matchups of teams and stadiums, sometimes causing teams to go hundreds of miles out of their way. Sometimes there's not a suitable location between the schools (especially out in West Texas). Sometimes the site that makes sense is already booked. Sometimes a coach simply won't go back to a place where he got his butt kicked however many years ago.

Then there's New Mexico, which seems to go out of its way to not be like Texas in any way, shape or form. All playoff games, including championships, are home-and-home. The team that hosted the last postseason meeting must travel the next time the schools match up. If two schools have not met in the playoffs, a coin flip determines the host.

The problem with this setup is it can produce (and has) a first-round matchup between a school from the southeast corner of the state against one from the Four Corners area in the northwest. I remember one team having to travel more than 500 miles one way for a game it was going to win by 60.

 

The only real problem with this setup is that Memorial Stadium is a crumbling dump, located in a sketchy neighborhood in one of the more dangerous cities in the U.S. And by the time the 5As play on Saturday night, the grass field (which isn't that well-maintained to begin with) gets pretty chewed up.

I'd like to see the MHSAA do a two-year trial run at alternating the championships between Ole Miss and Southern Miss, both of which have turf fields, to see how it would go. The only real issue I could see is the travel may be a bitch for teams at either end of the state to drive up to Oxford or down to Hattiesburg.

 

Michigan, with eight divisions, does this just fine with the odd numbered divisions on the day after Thanksgiving and the evens the next day (or maybe that's vice-versa). That does mean 10 a.m. kickoffs both days.

 

Objection, Albert77.
I would not call the area surrounding Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium a sketchy area. It is one block from Millsaps College, across the street from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and two blocks from Fondren, a thriving arts district with several of the best restaurants and bars in Jackson. I think the turf at the field is in excellent condition. The stadium itself is old and pretty dumpy, and the press box makes you feel like you stepped back into 1974, but the restrooms and concession stands were updated in the last 10 years and new locker rooms were built about six years ago.