Since it looks like there are a few still watching this thread. I have a gripe with the playoff system.
Again my team is Tri-Center. We are in class A. Our non-district games were 3 1A opponents and only 1, A team. We beat the A team handily. We crushed one of the 1A teams, but lost to the other two. The two teams we lost to have a combined 3 losses between them. I’m laying this all out because there are only 6 at large playoff spots and they are auto birth by RPI, so playing good teams matters. The teams we lost to are #10 and #13 in their class in RPI, so pretty solid teams.
Now we enter district play. We lose our first game to Woodbury Central, #5 in RPI. WC is 7-1, with their only loss to a 1A school. They haven’t and won’t lose in the district and will deservingly receive the auto playoff spot for winning the district. After our loss to Tri-Center checked in at #24 RPI.
Our boys have now won three straight in the district and are about to win our fourth tonight. We will be 4-1 in the district and in 2nd place. So now it all comes down to RPI. We’ve worked our way back up the RPI rankings to #16. We are now sitting on the bubble.
Here is where I have an issue. 2 of the 3 teams we beat in district were, at the time, one loss teams (both to Woodbury Central) and the were ranked in the top 10 in RPI. Westwood Sloan was 8th. Lawton Bronson was 7th when we beat them. We Beat LB 35-12. We beat WS 28-8. Westwood Sloan, who now has 2 losses in the district to our 1, and is in third place in the district, is ranked #12 in RPI. There is a bizarre chance, depending on scores of opponents and their opponents that Westwood Sloan makes the playoffs and Tri-Center does not. So the 3rd place team in the district would get the spot over the 2nd place team, who beat them head to head by 20 points. All it would take tonight is for them to beat Lawton Bronson. They are for sure in. Lose and they could fall out. But even that’s not guaranteed because LB is ranked 20th. It’s not clear that WS would drop more than 4 spots with a loss. Even if we win tonight, since we are playing a team that is 2-6, that actually hurts our strength of schedule.
Granted, win and I still think we are in. However if the 17th or 18th ranked teams win, they could jump us solely based on their opponents schedule. It’s crazy. It would be a huge disappointment to our boys who worked their butts off in the off season and this season to turn around a program that was in the toilet for the past several years.
What I will say is this, there is absolutely no good reason to ever play a team from a higher class. It’s not worth taking a loss, and our boys got banged up with back to back games against really good, bigger, faster, stronger teams. Then we entered district play beat up.