Alright, so what are the flaws with this? (sorry, it is about football, not politics....)

Teetime wrote:Why assign schools to classes before the season?

What if only three "6A' teams (as classified before the season) end up with 7 to 9 wins, but 91 teams classified as "5A" preseason end up with 7 to 9 wins? What would the brackets look like?

Teetime wrote:Why assign schools to classes before the season?

What if only three "6A' teams (as classified before the season) end up with 7 to 9 wins, but 91 teams classified as "5A" preseason end up with 7 to 9 wins? What would the brackets look like?

Huck wrote:Classify teams as 1-6A before the season. On pairings night, seed the top tier as it has always been done, evening out the number of teams in each division. Lower two tiers are populated according to their preseason classification.

Huck wrote:This is really just off the top of my head, based on a post from Ramblinman over on Edgy's.  Maybe it has been proposed before.....

What are the flaws in having three separate playoff series, similar to how there is the NCAA, NIT, and CIT for basketball?

1st, condense down to 6 classes.  Then:
7, 8 and 9 wins goes in the top tier.  (or maybe 6-9)
4, 5 and 6 wins in the middle tier.  (or maybe 3-5)
0, 1, 2, and 3 wins in the bottom tier.  (or maybe 0-2)

Classify teams as 1-6A before the season.  On pairings night, seed the top tier as it has always been done, evening out the number of teams in each division.  Lower two tiers are populated according to their preseason classification.
Use byes or raid the best 6 (or 5) win teams to even out the top tier.  Byes to even out the bottom two tiers.
Top tier is scheduled as it currently is, with the best 9-0 according to playoff points playing the lowest seeded team.
Middle and lower could be done the same, but if it is too much work, do it geographically.  That is probably the best way to get a good gate with lower tiered teams anyway.  If a team wins a couple and generates some excitement in the school and community, then maybe they will travel better for a later game to help the gate.

IHSA does the organizing and provides some awards so they can still claim the gate.  Only the top tier is considered 1-6A State Champs and needs a state championship site.  Middle and lower tier winners are 1-6A Playoff Champs.  Don't allow Lower tier games to play on State Championship Game dates to keep the focus (and attendance) on those games

IHSA needs money.  They get their wish.
Fans who think all teams should make the playoffs get their wish.
Fans who think only the best teams should compete for a state title and would like to see the first round mismatches eliminated get their wish.
As a coach, I thought the biggest advantage in having a team that could make a deep push was all of the extra practice time it afforded the younger players in preparation for doing it again the next year.  This allows more teams the chance to do that.  
Every player gets to end their season with a (potentially) competitive game, whereas now some of the worse teams have their best shot at a win early in their schedule and play the last 6 weeks knowing they are outmatched every Friday night.  This gives them something tangible to look forward to and prepare for instead of just absorbing beatings.

Maybe you get a few more players out due to this and maybe you bring some teams back from 8 man to 11 man football.
Maybe with the focus off of getting to 5 wins the conference shuffling situation becomes more stable.

Teams opt in or out every 5 years.  Have a traditionally bad team that just looks forward to the season getting over and basketball starting?  If you opted out, you don't have to play, but when your team is 2-7 the next season, and a threat to win that lower tier, you are still out.

I am sure there is a lot wrong with this (for example, I have not done the math, so I do not know how many teams will end up in each tier, how many weeks it would take, etc), but I wonder just how feasible it is.  So, what do you see wrong with it, and is what you see something that could be fixed?

dusty7 wrote:I guess I just don't see the problem with basing classes on enrollment.  Are you suggesting that a successful team in the lower classes will be forced to play up and unsuccessful teams in the higher classes will play down?  This would be punishing success and rewarding mediocrity.  

Enrollment is a simple way to determine classes, start adding in a human element to determining classes and seeding and it will get political really quick.

ramblinman wrote:

dusty7 wrote:I guess I just don't see the problem with basing classes on enrollment.  Are you suggesting that a successful team in the lower classes will be forced to play up and unsuccessful teams in the higher classes will play down?  This would be punishing success and rewarding mediocrity.  

Enrollment is a simple way to determine classes, start adding in a human element to determining classes and seeding and it will get political really quick.

What you call punishing success and rewarding mediocrity I call appropriate competitive placement.  If we didn't have almost 50 years of classification by enrollment behind us, that would not be your frame of reference in this discussion and you might be thinking differently.  

Right now, a school can move up or down if their enrollment remains constant from one year to the next, but the way the classes break out might see them change classes.  If they were competitive in 3A in one year, why move them down to 2A the next year even though their enrollment is roughly constant?  In one year, a school was a finalist in 8A with 2454 students and a 7A finalist the next year with 2469 students!

Enrollment may be a simple way to classify schools, but it is not a good enough single determinant of competitive level.   The problem is that our 8 enrollment based classes with 32 qualifiers per class result in similarly sized schools competing against each other, and that produces too many games (in my opinion) between schools that are very dissimilar from the standpoint of competitive level.  Did you see what happened to CPS teams this past weekend?  And I'm not just talking #1 vs #16 here.

Classification by enrollment was okay when we had five classes and fewer qualifiers per class. Back then, the frequency of playoff gross mismatches was far less than today.  Last weekend, we had 44% of first round playoff games games decided by margins of 30 points or more.  If that doesn't cause you to question the competitive mismatches in our enrollment based classes, what would?  What is your pain threshold?  50%?  75%?  Back when we had five classes and fewer qualifiers per class, the 30+ point margins were achieved in roughly 10% of first round games.

Why is the onus on extraordinarily competitive schools to move up voluntarily?  Wouldn't it make more sense if they were appropriately placed in a similarly competitive class to begin with and take that decision (or non-decision as the case may be) out of their hands?  That way, you avoid certain schools winning the same class year after year after year and never petitioning to play up.

I think that classification that is enrollment influenced, as opposed to enrollment based, is the way to go.  There are other state athletic associations that use objective success measures beyond enrollment to determine classes.

dusty7 wrote:I get your point but it still looks like you are forcing programs to play up just because they are good.  

dusty7 wrote:Also, what determines if a team should be placed in a more competitive class?  I think football enrollment was an attempt at this but that wasn't successful.  Are you going to use Championships? Wins? Massey Ratings? What? Does historical success mean anything?  

dusty7 wrote:If there was a solid process that did not include a human/biased element to it, then maybe this is something I could get behind. But if you use championships then you are basically creating a success factor, which in recent years would only affect Rochester, LWE, and a few privates.  

dusty7 wrote:Also, I think you are seeing more blowouts and whatnot due to the lack of parity in several areas of the state.  The quality of football being played around Illinois is not what it used to be. The perennial powerhouse programs are usually still near the top of their classes and the polls with a down year every so often but the middle tier teams are getting worse and are not as competitive as they once were.  The lower tier teams are struggling to even field teams much less being competitive.  Changing the entire system may exacerbate a few blowouts but regardless of what you do, blowouts will still occur.  Especially with including CPS across all 8 classes. Do you completely eliminate them or place them into a class they would be competitive in?  If that is the case 1A would consist of mostly CPS schools. We beat a CPS school handily last week but after that, each game is going to be extremely competitive. If we were to get bumped up, our first game would have still have drawn a CPS school and the result would have likely been the same. Bump us up to 4A and again, likely a CPS school.

Huck wrote:I actually addressed that in the original post.

Huck wrote:Classify teams as 1-6A before the season.  On pairings night, seed the top tier as it has always been done, evening out the number of teams in each division.  Lower two tiers are populated according to their preseason classification.

All the top tier brackets are done as they are now, just with the 6 (or 7) win and better teams.  The preseason classifications is only for the bottom two tiers.  My reasoning for that is that it simplifies things for the bottom tiers.  It would take a tremendous amount of time to seed things like it is currently done for all three tiers.

ramblinman wrote: Some will be moved up or down one class from where they were originally classified.  On rare occasions, a school might be bumped up or down two classees.

dusty7 wrote:

ramblinman wrote: Some will be moved up or down one class from where they were originally classified.  On rare occasions, a school might be bumped up or down two classes.

dusty7 wrote:This is where I have a bit of a problem with the system you are suggesting. Any 5-4 schools that gets bumped down 2 classes (5A to 3A for example) is going to have a pretty good advantage over any school.  I know you are saying get away from thinking about enrollment but in some cases, this system will screw the little guys.  For example, imagine Nazareth Academy (5-4 in 5A) taking on Byron, Princeton, or Du Pec.  Yes you are getting your goal of getting a competitive game but in most years, these smaller schools don't stand a chance against Naz. This would be a bigger issue with some 4A, 5A, and 6A schools dropping down classes.  

I understand the temptation to poke holes and take an example of dropping down a 5-4 team two classes.  If you want to talk about that, just know it would be impossible that a 5-4 Nazareth would get dropped down two classes (or even one) in the system I described due to their strength of schedule and due to their success in recent playoffs.  If you want to look at realisticexamples, look more at a 5-4 Catalyst/Maria (58-0 losers to Byron in round one of 3A) dropping down one or two or a 6-3 Bogan (59-0 losers to Genoa Kingston in round one of 4A) dropping down one or two.  

dusty7 wrote:Even getting away from enrollment, what happens to the smaller enrollment schools?  Lots of 1A schools only play 1A opponents and if you give them points based on the size of the schools they play, a 5-4 1A school would get screwed out of getting into the playoffs by a 5-4 larger school.  

A somewhat reasonable point.  Keep in mind, though, that some of the most competitive 1A schools will move up a class, and it's the same number of 256 qualifiers, so most 5-4 teams are still going to qualify.  I would hate not to enact the best possible classification system because one or two schools get the short end of the stick now and then (and they are getting it now in the current classification system).  We have to be able to see the forest for the trees.

dusty7 wrote:My questions, how do you determine "strength of schedule?"  The strengths of the schedules is relative to your geographic area and the size of the schools you play.  How do you take that distortion out of the equation?  Lincoln-Way East will always have a strong strength of schedule but so does Lena-Winslow.  However, they play very different opponents and not a single opponent on Lena's schedule would even score on LWE.   

I'm not going to have good answers for all your questions.  I'm much more of a big picture person who wants to leave the details for the experts to work out.  However, I think strength of schedule can be measured a couple of different ways.  It can be how many combined wins your opponents have.  It can be how many playoff qualifiers you defeated.  Those are just two off the top of my head.  

dusty7 wrote:Also, why include any sort of metric from the previous seasons like averaging the "power points" from the previous two seasons?  That is punishing success for the sake of competition.  Take us for example.  25 years straight in the playoffs, every opponent we play is bigger than us, we won a few tight games that honestly could have went either way, and instead of playing in 2A or 3A, we are playing in 4A and potentially 5A?  That would be a big difference in the caliber of our opponents in the regular season vs. the post-season. 

Why?  Because I like the idea of taking into consideration the recent performance of the program.  Keep in mind that these things would be weighted, and a different/lower weight might be assigned to past performance than present.  Stop thinking in terms of punishing success.  You really need to block that from your thinking because it is causing you to be less open. It's about classifying similarly competitive schools appropriately.  If you think about the end result in a positive light with respect to classifying similarly competitive schools appropriately, you will be less likely to be the doubting Thomas and focusing on the individual trees instead of the overall condition of the forest.

dusty7 wrote:Take the opposite situation, and a school who is on the verge of the playoffs 4-5 or 5-4 with a ho hum schedule, say a Rich, Thornton, or even Kankakee, and they drop down a class or two and are playing a 3A, 4A, or 5A school.  I get you are improving the competition but seems like the advantage is going to the larger schools.   

How is there an advantage for ANY school if all of them are classed appropriately according to their level of competition?  We KNOW that the enrollment of a specific school does not necessarily equate to competitive level.  If it did, then Morton and Waukegan would be perennial contenders instead of doormats.  If it did, then Ottawa Marquette, the smallest school among the 1A qualifiers, wouldn't be 9-1 with wins over schools twice its size.

dusty7 wrote:There is no reason why a nonsuccessful team should drop 2 classes or a successful team go up 2 classes for any reason.  You don't reward mediocrity and you don't punish success.  

This is what I mean about you needing to get past the rewarding and punishing thing because it is clouding your thinking.  It's not about rewarding and punishing; it's about classifying schools appropriately according to their level of competition.  Again, imagine that enrollment based classifications never existed.  Imagine being 5, 6, 7 years into a system that fairly classifies the vast majority of schools into similarly competitive classes.  Imagine the pride that a school from a small town might feel if they are bumped up into a more competitive class because they earned it through their success and because it is where they belong.

dusty7 wrote:Last question, have you taken the time to look at the playoff scores in other states?  Does this system really elminate the number of blowouts?  Do they have a system like CPS?  If not, you need to remove all of the CPS blowouts as they severly distort the number of blowouts in our system.    

How do you remove the CPS blowouts from consideration?  Pretend they don't exist?  One way to deal with them is to appropriately classify those Chicago schools according to their level of competition.  No, I haven't looked at other playoff scores in other states.

Doctor D wrote:I think it’s basically impossible to have a bracket of more than 8 teams without having blowouts.  More classes would be needed.

ramblinman wrote:

Doctor D wrote:I think it’s basically impossible to have a bracket of more than 8 teams without having blowouts.  More classes would be needed.

I'm not looking to eliminate blowouts.  But I am assuming that classes formed of similarly competitive teams would limit them.

Doctor D wrote:

ramblinman wrote:

Doctor D wrote:I think it’s basically impossible to have a bracket of more than 8 teams without having blowouts.  More classes would be needed.

I'm not looking to eliminate blowouts.  But I am assuming that classes formed of similarly competitive teams would limit them.

I’m saying that I don’t believe that is possible unless you reduce the bracket size from 32 to at least 16, if not 8.  I don’t think there are 31 other teams in state that are “similarly competitive” with Loyola.


With that said, some other scenario with CPS teams would be beneficial.  There are a few that are competitive.  The rest that make the playoffs are likely the weakest team that their opponent faces all year.

ramblinman wrote:

Doctor D wrote:

ramblinman wrote:

Doctor D wrote:I think it’s basically impossible to have a bracket of more than 8 teams without having blowouts.  More classes would be needed.

I'm not looking to eliminate blowouts.  But I am assuming that classes formed of similarly competitive teams would limit them.

I’m saying that I don’t believe that is possible unless you reduce the bracket size from 32 to at least 16, if not 8.  I don’t think there are 31 other teams in state that are “similarly competitive” with Loyola.


With that said, some other scenario with CPS teams would be beneficial.  There are a few that are competitive.  The rest that make the playoffs are likely the weakest team that their opponent faces all year.

Again, I'm not trying to eliminate blowouts.   I think you are right that it's impossible to do that in 32 team classes.  To me, blowouts are a symptom of a flawed system. Eight 32 team classes is one of the flaws.   Another one is classification by enrollment.  I'm thinking that changing the latter flaw is more likely to be accomplished than the former flaw.  

You might not find 31 teams that are similarly competitive to Loyola, but I'd be willing to bet that the average team in the top third of current 7A teams would give Loyola a better game than the average team in the bottom third of current 8A teams.

Doctor D wrote:

So you have this pseudo-perfect ranking metric which takes the best 10 7A teams and moves them up to 8A.  None of them have more than the faintest chance to win 8A.
Now the 7A champ is a much lesser team than previous.  Except you move up the best “6A” teams….
So on and so forth… I’m not sure what is being accomplished here.  You’d have teams like Byron or St. Teresa getting knocked out of the first round of 5A.  Hell, maybe even 6A.

I think it’s absolutely okay if there is a 32 team bracket with 2 or 3 front runners, 2 or 3 contenders, and a dark horse or two.  Everyone else is basically fodder with a punchers chance, just trying to gain some experience going forward.  

Maybe I’m all screwed up…

Doctor D wrote:
So you have this pseudo-perfect ranking metric which takes the best 10 7A teams and moves them up to 8A.  None of them have more than the faintest chance to win 8A.
Now the 7A champ is a much lesser team than previous.  Except you move up the best “6A” teams….
So on and so forth… I’m not sure what is being accomplished here.  You’d have teams like Byron or St. Teresa getting knocked out of the first round of 5A.  Hell, maybe even 6A.

I think it’s absolutely okay if there is a 32 team bracket with 2 or 3 front runners, 2 or 3 contenders, and a dark horse or two.  Everyone else is basically fodder with a punchers chance, just trying to gain some experience going forward.  

Maybe I’m all screwed up…

dusty7 wrote: the IHSA and most of the state don't care about anything less than 4A.