New playoff format cheats district winners

Whatever problems the Missouri State High School Association has that need to be addressed, the high school football playoff system wasn't one of them.

Nonetheless, the membership voted in the annual spring ballot to double the number of teams that will qualify for postseason play by allowing district runners-up into the playoffs.

Nearly half the football teams in Missouri will now move into the bracket to pursue the six different state championships.

The season will begin earlier, with practices before the first scrimmages cut from 14 to nine. But thanks to a 169-91 vote of football-playing schools, twice as many coaches will be able to claim a playoff berth from 2008 through 2011.

After that four-year period, the proposal will be reviewed.

The proposal was similar to one that the state's football coaches association endorsed last year as well, but the proposal failed to make it through a committee and onto the April ballot.

I've not spoken with too many football coaches in the area that seem to like it.

The playoff tinkering is the latest in the slippery slope for the state's high school sports that began with tennis.

In that sport, an extra round was added to the playoff bracket for the third- and fourth-place teams from each district because of the potential for one or two standout players to dominate a district championship.

If the MSHSAA membership wants to fix a playoff system because of that, how about track? The current system makes it possible for one athlete -- although probably not a distance runner -- to capture a state championship. How about a team meet for the state championship with berths for the top two teams from each sectional?

Same in wrestling. Why not a dual tournament like Illinois that tests total team depth rather than allowing three or four exceptional wrestlers to rack up points?

What did the football coaches get with the change? It's now a double-elimination tournament for some teams but not all of them.

The state tournament really begins in district play in Week 8, as it has for decades since the district playoff system was instituted. If a team is worthy of being in the bracket to play for a state championship, that team ought to be able to win three games when it controls its destiny in weeks 8 through 10.

Now, a district champion has a 50-50 chance of having a rematch with the runner-up on its hands two weeks into the playoffs.

And if the district champion loses that second meeting, the season is over.

"I don't believe in mulligans," Jackson coach Carl Gross said Friday night. "It's a do-over, and I think athletics should be about rising to the challenge, not do-overs."

He talked about his 2000 Indians, who finished 9-1 with an upset loss to Poplar Bluff in the district finale. That's one of the many teams that would have had a second chance, and yet Gross still believes the fairer system is the current one, in which groups of four teams are placed in districts for round-robin play to determine a champion, which is the sole playoff qualifier.

Presumably, the change was brought in because of the MSHSAA problem that draws complaints in all sports: strange geography.

In St. Louis County, in particular, some shifting district assignments can overload one district for a two-year period and leave a neighboring school 5 miles down the road in a district barely worthy of a playoff berth.

That problem goes beyond football, but you can bet some schools up north have snickered for years about the Class 4 district with Cape Central, Sikeston, Poplar Bluff and West Plains. The grouping has produced sectional champions over the last three years with a combined record of 16-14. Throw in the 0-3 playoff record and the district's best teams have a combined 16-17 record from 2004 through 2006.

Meanwhile, some 9-1 teams somewhere were sitting home.

But the new playoff proposal merely will show that some districts are better than others while at the same time increasing the number of teams with losing records that get in the bracket.

It's not a fix, and it's not fair to the teams that have demonstrated they were worthy to be district champions in weeks 8 through 10.

Toby Carrig is the sports editor of the Southeast Missourian and Semoball.com.