Oct. 15--Are the football playoffs broken?
You'd sure think so, given the number of attempts to fix them. Every year, we get proposals tinkering with the selection process. Some want to lower the bar for entry so three wins will get you in; a few have pitched allowing virtually every football-playing school in the state into the postseason.
The argument goes that the current standard (five wins you're probably in, six wins you definitely are) puts too much pressure on teams to get to that magic number. And that leads to the perpetual conference shuffling and chronic scheduling headaches we're getting now.
To fix that last issue, we had another proposal that would do away with conferences and put scheduling in the hands of the IHSA. Like all the other playoff tweaks, it went nowhere.
If we've learned anything through all these debates, it's that football people can't agree on much more than that the playoffs need to be improved. The devil, as usual, is in the details.
That said, it's curious that so much attention has been paid to the number of teams qualifying and so little to how they're matched up.
There has been one significant change this fall, with the move to 1-32 seeding for the two largest classes and the elimination of the much-despised quadrants. That should produce more equitable matchups.
But problems remain.
The biggest flaw in the current setup is that every win carries the same weight. A forfeit victory over McHenry because of that school's teachers strike means as much in the IHSA playoff formula as Joliet Catholic's 38-35 thriller over Nazareth last Friday.
That leads to some goofy early matchups when teams with weak schedules but superior records get better seeds than programs that deliberately schedule up in nonconference play.
A good example this year is Maine South, which lost by a field goal to Montini and then was on the wrong end of a running clock vs. Loyola in the first two weeks. The Hawks haven't lost since -- they knocked off then-unbeaten New Trier last week -- and some of the credit goes to coach David Inserra's fearless approach to scheduling.
But those two early losses to two very good teams will hurt Maine South come seeding time. Can that be changed? Should it be?
The other bracketed team sports in Illinois have a subjective component to their postseason pairings, namely voting by coaches in an online seeding process. That wouldn't work for football, because the postseason field isn't determined until the last day of the regular season.
But there are other tools that could be used to make the process more equitable. Why not computer power rankings? If you're thinking that staple of the college and pro sports landscape couldn't be applied to the prep level, well, it already is.
Jeff Sagarin, the man behind USA Today's various power rankings, also does them for football, boys basketball and girls basketball in Indiana. And Aurora resident Charlie Essig has been compiling power rankings for Illinois big-school boys basketball for 25 years.
So it's not so far-fetched an idea, using a computer to rank football teams and make the IHSA playoffs better. Given the track record of other playoff proposals, it might have a hard time gaining traction. But it doesn't hurt to add this thread to all the other playoff conversations.
mclark@tribpub.com
@mikeclarkpreps
