The stupidest thing your state high school association allows to happen

Waiting for a court decision in Jackson, Miss., due within the hour.

 

Does any other high school association count byes as victories in the post-season? Each regional baseball and softball tournament is set up with an 8-team bracket, regardless of how many teams there are. So when a team draws a bye, the KSHSAA counts it as a win. I don't know why a team should get credit for winning a game that wasn't played.

Many of the smaller-class tournaments have five teams, so three teams get an extra win just for being good enough to draw a bye.

 

Found in favor of the state association, against the Bruce team. No surprise, really.

 

Wow, reading this makes me glad Missouri's state association isn't as dumb as I thought it was.

In, all, I think MSHSAA runs their shit pretty well over there and they're always very helpful and accomidating at all championship events. Although, sometimes they tend to think they're the frickin' NCAA and over-run things.

For example:

-Holding the state football championship at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis. A nice experience, I suppose, for the kids, but the thing is only half full. And that's only if St. Louis-area big schools are playing (which is almost always for Classes 4, 5, and 6 so it's not that big of a deal there). But if you're a Class 1 or eight-man school from the Bootheel or Northwest Missouri? Forget playing in front of those legions of adoring fans. Especially because your game is going to start at 10 am the day after Thanksgiving.

-Having six classes for football. It's stupid, considering all other sports have either four or five Classes (more on that in a bit). There are only 32 Class 6 schools divided into eight four-team districts. Almost all the schools are in either the KC or STL metro areas, so the districts for them are easy to get to. However, there are four that AREN'T in the metro areas: Jefferson City and two in Columbia is fine, they just make a district by themselves plus one unlucky sap school from the St. Louis suburb that gets to drive an hour and 30 minutes to play district games. But that's not all that big of a deal, compared to the other team: Joplin. They are the only team from southwest Missouri in Class 6, which means that their districts opponents are all at least 130 miles away.

-Somehow both the district champions AND runners-up make the playoffs. So you have half the eligible teams making the playoffs. It's needless. In Class 6, especially: there are only 32 teams to begin with, so there are 16 teams in there. That's three games before the finals. In the other classes, it's a bit more respectable because there are 12 districts with 4 (sometimes 5) teams each. 24 tams make the playoffs and there's a complicated system of byes for district champions. Either way, it's dumb.

-The district football system itself is set up archaically. It's not like Iowa or Texas or Oklahoma, where each team has an 8 or 10 team district and district play lasts an entire season. Neither is it like Illinois or Michigan, where they have those complicated playoff point systems. Nope. Instead, teams play standard 10-game schedules, but only the last three (or four, depending on the size of your district) games count towards making the playoffs. I think you can see why this is fucking retarded. This means that district champion could conceivably make the playoffs with a record of 1-9. I've never seen that happen but last season a team did get into the Class 4 playoffs at 2-8. Basically, all you have to do is tank the entire regular season ("save your energy"!) and then hope to get lucky in a weak-ass district. Boom! You're in the playoffs with two wins!

-The Class system works, but is confusing. They divide it sport-by-sport, so depending on how many schools play the districts are drastically different. For example, football is 6 (well, 7, since they also do 8-man). Basketball is 5. Nearly everything else is 4 (baseball, softball, volleyball, wrestling, track, cross country). Except soccer, which is dominated by private schools at the smaller classes. It has three. Actually, until last year, there were only two classes of girls soccer. I understand that they do it by size but sometimes for less popular sports it makes districts a mess. Especially for smaller schools in the less popular sports. I've seen wrestling teams travel more than 200 miles just to bring 1 or 2 wrestlers to a district event.

-This is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard:

http://sgfsoccer.com/2010/05/21/nixa-eagles-advance-to-district-11-final/

(Aside, of course, from this (http://www.newspressnow.com/news/2010/may/20/national-rule-trips-local-track-athlete/), this (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/othersports/story/7171862D177DB918862577000081F42E?OpenDocument) or this http://stlhighschoolsports.com/sports/girls-track/commentary-todd-victim-of-broken-system/.)

 

^^^
Ohio has six divisions for football -- I'm not complaining, by the way -- with roughly 120 teams per division.
The state uses a computer poll to rank the teams, with the top eight in each of the four regions for each division qualifying. That's 32 teams times six divisions for a total of 192 teams out of 718 this past fall.
It's a complicated computer program, but basically a team is rewarded for wins, wins over a team in a higher division and wins earned by teams they've beaten.
There are times when a .500 or below team makes the playoffs for a variety of reasons: 1) weak region, 2) beat enough higher division teams, 3) beat enough teams with good records, 4) any sort of combination.
Things get sorted out pretty well once the playoffs start, though there are always people calling for the Ohio High School Athletic Association to go back to five divisions ("Six divisions are too many") or go back to only qualifying four teams per division ("Eight teams are too many" -- this despite several 5s through 8s winning multiple playoff games). There was once a time when only the No. 1 team in each region, and this was back when there were only five divisions, made the playoffs.

 

120 per division? Holy shit. I mean, I guess Ohio is a pretty populous state, so that actually makes sense for them. Missouri doesn't have enough small schools that play football, which is unfortunate. Many of the Class 1 and 2 schools play fall baseball instead.

I'd be all for that Ohio-like system if possible. I enjoy the fact that teams can generally form their own conferences in those types of systems, and they can schedule whomever they want. Which would be lost if you did it Texas-style.

 

It's a 10-game regular season, with most conferences having seven games. That leaves the first three for non-conference foes. Granted, not every conference has a seven-game format, but that's generally what everyone shoots for.

 

That's absurd. I'd deduct that win from any record I wrote about.

 

I do. At least for the ones I know about. The other teams in the Class 2A state tourney this week, I'll have to look up to see how they did in their regionals before I know how many games they really won, because I'll have to see if they drew byes.

Byes also count as wins in 1A regional volleyball and basketball tournaments.

 

Kansas has done both these things longer than Missouri. I almost think Missouri took it's district system from Kansas, which started doing it in 1981. Kansas also started advancing district runners-up about four years before Missouri did. And because Class 2-1A had only about 50 schools the last two years, there were several three-team districts. Yep, 32 of 50 teams were making the playoffs.

The idea, at least in Kansas, was to try to get in some more of the 8-1 and 7-2 teams that drew tough districts to balance out the 3-6 teams that got in because they won a district that sucked. And, yes, you do get more of the 8-1 and 7-2 teams in. But you also risk letting in 2-7 and 1-8 teams.

In 2001, I covered the Class 4A state championship game which was the first one that had two teams that didn't win their districts.

Next season, 2-1A will be trimmed from 16 districts to eight. This is because there will be only 43 schools in that class. Three districts will have six teams, the rest five.

Eight-man football will have 107 schools the next two years (Two divisions).

 

The Mississippi situation reminds me of a wrestling team we had a few years back that was penalized for a coach's mistake.

In New York, a wrestling team can only compete in six or seven (can't remember which) tournaments per season. The leauge and Section tournaments count towards that. The coach scheduled one extra during the regular season, making the kids ineligible for the Sectional tournament, therefore they couldn't qualify for states or win a Sectional title -- which they were more than capable of doing.

It was an honest mistake, looking back I don't even think he knew about the rule, but it caused quite the ruckus up here. Two or three kids had legitimate shots at state titles and I think two were seniors. Shitty situation, but the team or individuals couldn't move on. No protest was filed but it left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

 

The dumbest thing that Mississippi's sanctioning body does is in some sports where there is little participation (slow-pitch softball), they'll have a three-team division (area or district in other states).

They take the top two in each division for the playoffs. I understand they do it because of geography, but what's the point of taking two out of a three-team area. One of our local schools made it to the first round with a 3-13 overall record. Two of those wins were over the third team in its area.

With the private schools association losing some schools (a few in this region closed or don't have enough players to play 11-man football next season), there will be some three-team districts there too. Ugh. Time for redistricting.