New Rochelle-1

BY JOHN MORIELLO

(Editors note: John Moriello covered high school sports for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester in the late 1980s and has long been active in the New York State Sportswriters Association, serving as vice president beginning in 1987and president since 1999. The material below constitutes his own thoughts and does not necessarily reflect the views of the NYSSWA or its members.)

(October 29, 2005) -- The recent informal dialogue on Long Island about whether Sections 8 and 11 should join the NYSPHSAA playoffs in football has raised hopes that New York might soon have something more closely resembling a true state tournament. However, there are problems that need to be worked out – not the least of which is that nine or 10 teams per class is a messy proposition; too many teams for a three-week tournament and too few for a four-week event.

That being the case, I put together a sketch of a plan – quick and dirty to say the least – for how a larger field might be accommodated in future state tourneys.

I used the 2004 season as the model for my plan, which would expand New York’s playoffs to 46 teams in the short term and eventually 48. The basic premise is that New York’s classes can and should be rather fluid, with tournament draws not finalized until the day after sectional finals.

I promise to not be offended if you find flaws in what’s described below. Heck, even I don’t like the way some of the details look. But what’s important now is that we start a conversation and get started on figuring out how to make this a better state tournament, culminating each year with two tripleheaders at the Carrier Dome.

That being said, here we go:

*** PHASE ONE – A COUPLE OF GROUND RULES

The existing format locks teams into classifications before the season starts. For the most part, each of the participating sections crowns five champions – AA, A, B, C and D – who advance to quarterfinals against teams from predetermined regions. But the addition of two more sections would result in at least nine and usually 10 teams per class, making it unworkable. Other states, including Illinois, handle the issue by re-classifying state tournament qualifiers the day after the local playoffs conclude.

Therefore, here comes radical change No. 1:

Applying the Illinois model to New York, the eight sectional champions with the largest enrollment would go in Division One, the next eight into Division Two and so on. (Aside: I’m calling these classes “divisions” rather than “Class AA,” etc., to minimize confusion as I sometimes bounce back and fourth between the present and proposed tournament structures.) In the scenario presented here, however, there are only 46 participants until we figure out some restructuring, so Divisions Five and Six will each have only seven teams. We can clean up that problem at a later date.

The first thing you will notice is that it’s possible – likely, in fact – that two teams from the same section can end up in the same division. Thankfully, it appears virtually impossible to have three schools from one section land in the same division even though I’ve thrown in a provision that would bump up enrollment figures for Catholic and private schools by 60 percent to appease those who insist upon “leveling the playing field.” As a graduate of Aquinas Institute, a three-time NYSPHSAA champ, I don’t support such a rule but I’m putting it in here to counterbalance radical change No. 2:

Schools such as Syracuse CBA would no longer be forced to move up in class for sectional competition. Local classification would be based strictly on actual enrollment unless a school petitions to move up.

Why am I proposing this, other than to generate some spirited discussion on the Syracuse.com football forum? Quite simply, the current state classifications do not work. Section 11 has 14 schools with larger enrollments than the biggest school in Section 4. And while Section 11 had no Class C schools last season, Section 4 had 15.

Sections should be allowed some latitude in jiggling enrollment cutoffs for their own sectional tournaments. Section 1 would be allowed to push four of its AA schools down a class, setting off a chain reaction that could lead to having seven schools in Class D instead of three. Similarly, Section 5 could reduce the sizes of its AA and D brackets by three teams apiece in order to beef up the middle three classes. Controversial? Possibly. But don’t confuse “controversial” with “unfair.” What’s really unfair right now is that Section 4 has only five Class AA schools and Section 1 has 22, yet we give those regions equal representation in the state quarterfinals.

*** PHASE TWO – CREATING BRACKETS

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve chosen to use results from 2004 to show how this system might work. About 10 of the 40 matchups that take place below actually happened in 2004, so I used results from those games. Everything else is conjecture, with no disrespect intended toward any of New York’s scholastic programs.

Since Section 7/10 does not have a Class AA rep in the current format, I started with the pool of 39 quarterfinalists from last fall. Next, I dropped in what would have been the equivalent of AA, A and B reps from Sections 8 and 11 based approximately upon the Long Island bowl results. More problematic, though, was figuring out what to do with the smaller classes. Combined, Sections 8 and 11 have only seven C or D schools, and that number does not appear to be likely to grow in the near future. Arbitrarily, I lumped the seven into a single class and decided that Port Jefferson would have advanced to the state tournament.

That being said, I know I’ve created two more problems. First, Sections 7 and 10 have small fields in all classes, but we currently allow them to field a combined single rep in each of the four smallest classes. That deserves to be revisited in the interest of fairness, reducing the North Country to three (or even two) berths in the 48-team field. In a three-class scenario, smallish Class D Seton Catholic might have to take on Gouveneur, a fairly large Class C school, in order to advance. On the plus side, remember that schools get re-seeded after sectional competition. That would keep a small school from 7/10 from having to play five or six straight games against unreasonably large opponents after the conclusion of the regular season.

The second problem has to do with one of the two issues at the heart of Long Island’s decision to not participate in the state playoffs: Besides starting practice later than upstate due to weather and other considerations, Sections 8 and 11 love their Long Island bowl championships. Each section has essentially divided up its teams into four divisions, and the winners from each face off in a big weekend of football.

There’s a lot of tradition there – going way beyond the “thrill” that Sections 5 and 6 offer their participants in the Western Region championships during week one of the state tourney – and now I’m telling Long Island that I want to lump all of their C and D schools into one class. Furthermore, this proposal cannot guarantee that there will be 8 vs. 11 matchups in the larger classes. Though it’s a given that Divisions One and Two will almost always come together in a way that assures all-Long Island quarterfinals, the brackets below split Roosevelt and Babylon into different divisions.

Here’s the field of 46, with the Long Island representatives are in bold:

n Divisions Five and Six will each end up with one team getting a first-round bye. This seemed to be the fairest thing to do since smaller school districts are most likely to be adversely affected by travel expenses. I’d probably give the most geographically isolated team the bye, with a provision that no section can earn more than one bye in a class in a four-year period.

n There are six instances in which two teams from the same section land in the same division. It will be mandatory that they play each other in the quarterfinals; otherwise, travel distance is the primary consideration for setting first-round pairings.

n If two schools have equal enrollments, the school that most recently played in the state tournament plays in the higher division if necessary. Because it only applies to cases in which the eighth- and ninth-largest remaining schools at a particular point during the classification process are the same size, this rule will only come into play perhaps once a decade. But you need to create the rule now in order to prevent all heck from breaking loose when it happens.

I didn’t have my atlas handy while I was mapping this out, but I think the pairings below accurately match up teams with respect to geography and keep intact the goal of setting up Eastern and Western semifinals the following weekend. (Note: Pay attention to how Division Six plays out to see that geography does not hold up, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.)

And I’ll save you some trouble: I’m not wild about Saratoga/Binghamton or Ravena/Maine-Endwell as first-rounders either. They’re just far enough away so that even a truly neutral field makes for inconvenient travel; it might be downright unwieldy if Hartwick College’s field is unavailable.

If I spent minimal time making the quarterfinals pairings, then I spent even less time thinking about venues. Off the top of my head, however, we’ll need four locations on the east side of the state and four more on the west to accommodate the quarterfinals. In a perfect world, no facility would have to host more than three games – meaning that it could be a single-day affair on a Saturday with starting times of 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Realistically, though, there will have to be flexibility to schedule some sites for Friday/Saturday doubleheaders.

I came up with Dietz Stadium, SUNY Albany, Hofstra, St. Lawrence College, Canisius College, St. John Fisher College, Liverpool H.S. and Hartwick College as first-round hosts in the first tournament. Since I’ve already done so much other work for them in this proposal, I’ll leave it to the state football committee to put together a sensible plan for rotating hosts.

Once again, rotating venues – two on each side of the state – will be necessary. Whenever possible, on course, we should be playing semifinals in the Carrier Dome. At the very least, let’s make sure we play on Field Turf or comparable artificial surfaces.