Better football seeding would help avert championship blowouts

Last weekend could be viewed as a margin call for change with the state football playoff format.

The average margin of mismatches in the eight championship games of 28.6 points could have been even greater. Nazareth took a 42-point lead before winning 42-21 in 5A, and a consolation touchdown in the last minute by Toulon Stark County cut Arcola's winning margin to 18 in 1A.

Even though the Class 7A game lived up to expectations, with only 6 points separating champion Glenbard West and Libertyville, last weekend was still the widest average margin of title-game victories in the 42 years the IHSA has conducted a football postseason.

The previous highs were 25 in 1985 and 24.5 in 1999, which were six-class finals, and 23.9 in 2007 and 23.6 in 2002. Twelve times the average margin has been 20 or more points.

This year actually was a major reversal of a downward trend of margins (13.8 in 2011, 15.3 in 2012, 13.4 in 2013 and 12.6 in 2014). So it's not as if this is part of a long-running stretch of competitive championship imbalance.

However, while blowouts and running clocks are great to make sure everyone can tell their kids they played in a state championship game, it's not ideal for the impartial high school football fan who wants to know the time to travel to DeKalb or Champaign is well spent.

So, what can be done to get it closer to the last three years and the three most competitive title weekends based on average victory margin (7.5 in 1996, 8.2 in 1995 and 9.8 in 1992)?

Those three most competitive weekends had 192 playoff qualifiers split into six classes. While it is a subject that comes up, class contraction and 64 fewer teams in the playoffs is not going to happen.

Then there is the oft-discussed option of splitting up the public and private schools that gained a lot of momentum once again after last weekend. But let's take a closer look at the road for 8A champion Loyola and 6A champion Montini.

Loyola's 41-0 title-game rout of fellow parochial school Marist was preceded by down-to-the-wire tests against public schools of 6 points over Homewood-Flossmoor in the quarterfinals and 2 points over Palatine in the semifinals. Montini had to overcome a late first-half deficit in its title-game win over Crete-Monee and needed to rally from a two-touchdown deficit in the fourth quarter of its semifinal win over Prairie Ridge.

Splitting the public and private schools would have to be done for all sports and not just football. The guess is if the IHSA tried this, the privates would just split entirely and go do their own separate thing with their own organization and rules.

How about a change to the seeding process that has always been somewhat flawed because using playoff points - the total number of wins of a qualifier's opponents - is not an accurate reflection of a team's strength or schedule. Why not have the coaches seed each class in the manner similar to other team sports?

There are definitely some challenges with football since the playoff field isn't set until the final weekend. The IHSA would have to start by requiring everyone to play their Week 9 games by Friday night so the playoff field would be set before Saturday morning.

The coaches of the teams that qualified would then seed the teams in their class and submit them to the IHSA by noon on Saturday. That would give the IHSA a chance to review the seeds for any major discrepancies the same way it does with other sports.

The IHSA would have enough time to put together the matchups for Saturday night's announcement of the pairings. There would also be more of an NCAA basketball tournament style of intrigue and excitement with no one knowing the seeds until the pairings were released.

No one is saying this would be perfect. In the bigger classes there would likely be more complaints of bias from downstate schools against Chicago-area coaches.But those complaints would have rung hollow this year since undefeated Edwardsville was a No. 2 seed and got upset in the first round by Waubonsie Valley.

And every year there are some 9-0 Chicago Public League schools with high seeds from piling up playoff points without venturing outside their city limits. Then they got piled on by a much lower seed in a postseason opener.

Homewood-Flossmoor was regarded as one of the state's top teams all year but was upset by 1 point in its regular-season finale. It probably would have been seeded higher than eighth if the process was done by coaches instead of a mathematical formula.

And seeding the playoffs that way might reduce the need for a calculator to compute the wide margins of victory that were the rule rather than the exception last weekend in DeKalb.

marty.maciaszek@gmail.com