2A idea could lead to R.I.P. for old ways

Class 2A football teams in Idaho will be the guinea pigs for progress beginning this fall.

Thanks to a push mostly from coaches and administrators in southeastern Idaho, the 2As will go away from the usual format used by the Idaho High School Activities Association to seed state tournaments.

For years, the IHSAA has “seeded” tourneys based on how teams finished in their league/district — trying to make sure league/district champs didn’t open state against other league/district champs, and placing, say, a league/district champion on the opposite side of the bracket from a league’district runner-up.

THAT FORMAT worked out about as well as it could — except when it didn’t.

“The last couple of years we’ve had teams that are 1-7 or 0-8 making the playoffs,” St. Maries athletic director Todd Gilkey said. “And then we’ve got teams that are 5-3, 4-4, but because their league is big enough ... ”, they didn’t earn one of their league’s automatic berths.

“Some people were wondering, ‘Are we really doing justice to have teams (in the playoffs) that are 0-8, and probably really don’t want to play that ninth game?’” Gilkey said.

So officials started looking at different RPI models, which are based generally on a combination of your team’s results, your opponents’ results, and your opponents’ opponents’ results.

They settled on one used by Colorado.

At the end of the regular season, each team will have its final RPI, and that number will be used to seed the playoffs beginning with the quarterfinals.

For the first round, which includes 16 teams, 13 teams will receive automatic berths based on league finish — two teams in the Central Idaho League, which includes St. Maries, Grangeville and Orofino; four in District 3, one in District 4, three in District 5, three in District 6.

RPI will determine the three at-large teams.

The CIL is losing one of its automatic berths — since the 2A playoffs expanded to 16 teams, all three CIL teams made the playoffs. First-round games would be kept somewhat regional — the CIL teams would likely play teams from the Boise area in the first round.

Gilkey said he pushed to make sure CIL teams didn’t have to play CIL teams in the first round.

“That was my fear,” he said. “I didn’t want to play Orofino the last week of the regular season and then have to turn around and play them the first round of the playoffs. You remember the times Lake City and Coeur d’Alene had to do that (in the 5A playoffs)? That’s no fun for anybody, so that’s the one thing that we were able to keep in, so that first round we weren’t having to play somebody from our own league.”

After the first round of the playoffs is complete, the eight remaining teams will be seeded by their regular-season RPI — the remaining team with the eighth-best RPI will travel to the team with the best RPI (regardless of league affiliation) in the quarterfinals. No. 7 will travel to No. 2, No. 6 to No. 3, No. 5 to No. 4.

“I still think the best team’s going to end up being the champion,” Gilkey said. “Like last year. Declo was the best team, and I don’t care what format we would have had, Declo would have won that. But I do think it’s going to give the teams that are 5-3 in a tough league ... like us last year. We were 4-4, and we lost two really close games (in league), but our record would have been good enough to get us in. All the teams are going to be better in the tournament than what we had last year.

“Wendell hasn’t won a game in three years, and they’ve been in the playoffs (each year), and they’re getting beat 70-0 in the first round. Nobody wants that.”

Wendell is in a two-team league where both teams automatically qualified for the 16-team playoffs. Now, just one team automatically qualifies.

A COUPLE of weeks ago at the IHSAA board meeting, Gilkey was talking with Dwight Richins, IHSAA board members and one of the officials behind this push to try the RPI to seed the 2A football playoffs.

“I said, ‘We don’t know what we don’t know.’ And after a couple of years, we might be right back here saying, ‘That didn’t work, now what do we do?’ We don’t know it until we try. If it just falls flat on its face next year, we can go right back and say we’re going to go back to the way it was.”

Last fall, of its six nonleague football games, St. Maries played four teams from the 3A Intermountain League, and two teams from eastern Washington.

“My big concern was, if we all start using RPI, why would the 3As want to play me?” Gilkey said. “If losing to me is going to hurt their RPI, why would they want to play me?

But under the Colorado model, it would help St. Maries in the RPI to beat a 3A team, but it wouldn’t hurt a 3A school to lose to the Lumberjacks.

“If the 3As don’t want to play us, we have no schedule ... I have nobody to play,” he said.

And when St. Maries plays an out-of-state school, the ’Jacks get a score of .5, win or lose, regardless of how good the out-of-state school is.

NO DOUBT, schools in other divisions (and other sports) will be watching what happens in 2A football.

“I wouldn’t be surprised that if this works for the 2As, it’ll start to filter out to more of the football world,” Gilkey said, “and then it wouldn’t be long until the basketball coaches started clamoring to try to do something for basketball.”

But until then, we’ll just wait and see.

“It’s kinda fun to be part of something new in the state that hasn’t been done before,” Gilkey said. “We don’t know what we don’t know until we try it.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.