I’ve refrained from writing this while the season was in progress.
It’s simply not fair to cast aspersions on anything involving kids who are going all-out, week after week, to achieve goals.
And adults who throw cold water on the positive accomplishments of the kids in their community deserve a special place down below.
But the season’s over (except for Lynn Tech’s game Thursday in the state vocational final at Nashoba Valley Tech in Westford), and that has nothing to do with what I’m about to address.
Simply put, the state playoff system is a joke, it’s dangerous, and should be abolished as soon as enough people coalesce in their outrage to do away with it.
State high school football has been broken for a long time, and the reason for it is simple. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association insists on treating football just like any other interscholastic sport. This is absurd. Football is not like any other interscholastic sport.
First of all, football players need time to rest and recover after increasingly-brutal games on Fridays and Saturdays. The sport has not become less violent over the years, it has become more. Yet we feel there’s no harm in having a team such as St. Mary’s play on a Saturday afternoon and then again four nights later on a Wednesday. I don’t feel too badly about bringing this up because the Spartans won that game against Bishop Fenwick, but you could tell that the players hadn’t recovered from playing Mashpee the previous Saturday.
I fear to contemplate what it’ll take to make the powers that be see the light on this issue. Prior to system that was adopted in 2012, you had teams going from Thanksgiving to the following Tuesday (if they won their leagues) to the Super Bowl on Saturday. Three games in 10 days. The new system didn’t really solve that problem entirely. Now it’s two games in four or five days. It’s still not enough time.
Beyond the safety aspect there’s this: It makes Thanksgiving irrelevant.
Now I understand the party line here. As long as there’s Thanksgiving football, and as long as there are rivalries that go back 100-plus years, Thanksgiving will matter in the hearts and minds of those who play the games. I totally get that, and totally respect it.
But there’s nothing like a little urgency once in a while to thicken the tension. Until 1972, there weren’t Super Bowls. But there were rankings. And as unfair as people thought they were, they were the only barometers that measured how the teams stacked up with one another. Were their controversies? Of course. But not unlike the annual debates over the AP rankings that determined the college football national champion. If anything, they increased the interest.
Even after the Super Bowls were established, teams were still ranked by a mathematical formula, which meant that other than extremely rare cases, the Thanksgiving Day game factored into the mix. Teams with nothing else to play for could count on beating their rivals and ruining their Super Bowl chances. The day, and the games, were necessary.
The next time the systems changed, they were predicated 100 percent on league champions. All that did was make Thanksgiving more relevant. If you’re going to go through all that on one of the busiest holidays of the year, it may as well be meaningful.
Now? By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, the Super Bowls are set in stone. No matter what happens. We have teams sitting out their starters on Thanksgiving so they won’t get hurt before the big game Saturday at Gillette. Or, in the case of Xaverian a few years ago, the Hawks, having clinched the Super Bowl, went up to St. John’s Prep and had at least three key players put out of action due to injuries. Some choice.
Worse, we’ve instituted a playoff system where, by the seventh week of the season (the end of October, usually) half the teams in the state are playing games strictly for show. Each week, as more teams are eliminated from these playoffs, more teams are playing strictly for show. Some of them are playing teams with which they have no history, and at locations some of them probably couldn’t find on a map without some kind of a hint.
Even worse than that, the net has been cast out so far we now have eight divisions with eight playoff teams in each — and that’s just in the North. Do the math. That’s 32 teams. There are just as many in the south, and less than that in Central and Western Mass., but that’s only because there aren’t enough schools to fill the slate.
Still, in the North alone, 17 teams entered the playoffs with sub-.500 records. Only in Division 6 did all eight teams have winning records. Can someone please explain the point of this to me?
I realize that in other sports, teams with sub-.500 records get into the tournament, but the ones who do get in on a technicality popularly called “The Sullivan Rule,” which dictates that as long as you are .500 against teams in your own division, it doesn’t matter what you do against teams at higher levels. You don’t make it just to make it.
This system has already been upheld once. I’ve heard some athletic directors and principals discuss the idea of pulling out entirely and forming their own alliances. Honestly, I wish they would.
Unless we do away with Thanksgiving games — and I doubt we’ll ever see that — we’re going to have to grow up to the fact that football is different, and should be treated differently.
Junk this system. Go back to ratings if you have to. There are too many flaws in this one.