The stupidest thing your state high school association allows to happen

Starting next year, Missouri will let everyone into the football playoffs in all six classes. Districts will be just the portion of the bracket a school is assigned to. Eight teams in a region will be grouped in the same quarter of the bracket. And none of them are obligated to play each other during the regular season.

 

Indiana allows all 315 of its football-playing schools into the playoffs. 5 classes, 63 teams each, 6-week tournament that's in its third week this week.

Each class is divided into eight eight-team sectionals grouped geographically (one of the eight is actually seven teams) and instead of seeding, each sectional uses a totally blind draw, so you could have (and have had the last couple of years) the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the state meet in the first round. The rest of the field is pretty static -- the champions of the same two sectionals play each other in the regional every year.

Despite its flaws, it's pretty darned popular.

 

Central Section CIF has allowed any school that wants to be in the playoffs to compete. Virtually every district has a rule saying a team must be .500 in league or on the year to compete, however.

Reading back through the thread about some track meet woes, however, reminds me of a situation about 20 years ago when the held the trials on Friday, but it rained overnight, so CIF cancelled the Saturday finals. No makeup date set, just a sign at the gates announcing the postponements. As you can guess, that decision didn't last long ... finals rescheduled, after many protests throughout the state, for two weeks later, and, with few exceptions (one pole vaulter skipped out for the Keebler meet in Chicago), all made it back.

 

Not football related, but a cross country regional a couple weeks ago advanced 54 of 59 runners to sectionals in the boys' and girls' races.

 

Unlike many of the IHSAA's other playoff formats, the football tournament works pretty well. The playoff structure allows teams to play local rivals during the regular season and keep travel down, and every so often you get a small classification team (Indy Scecina in the old days) that played a killer schedule for most of the year winning the state title despite a losing record.

 

SC has 32 teams in 4A make it, 32 in 3A, all 48 in 2A, and 32 in 1A. 144 teams out of about 200 make the playoffs just in the public schools.

SCISA, the private school division, lets even more teams in. 24 teams in 11-man football, 8 in 8-man. SCISA volleyball can be ridiculous. They hold lower and upper state championships at the same location in Sumter, with many of the games during school hours.

 

Iowa and Illinois both have the genius idea of ignoring seeds after a set number of rounds. In Illinois, for example, we have a pair of 2A schools playing each other this week. One was seeded No. 1 in its quarter, the other was seeded No. 5. The No. 5 seed gets to host because it traveled last game and the No. 1 seed did not. If you're going to do that, why seed the field at all? Just pull the names out of a hat and set the bracket that way. Makes just as much sense.

 

Allowing 2-9 football teams in the state playoffs. But that's what the coaches voted for, so they get the blame.

 

Question here: The CIF-Southern Section is talking about having every baseball playoff matchup be a best-of-3 series instead of one-and-done.
Are they doing this anywhere else?

 

They did that in Florida for a while. Great idea to keep the teams with the one stud pitcher from winning the state title just on the strength of one overused pitching arm. Not sure about cost, etc.

 

Completely agreed. I enjoy the IHSA playoffs, but I'm still not a fan of having eight classes. Six was much better.

An even bigger joke is cross country. The regional I covered last week had nine teams. Seven of them advanced to sectionals.

 

Georgia is best of three in baseball also. First day is a doubleheader.