I realize it is Week 5, but I find myself accidentally peaking ahead at Week 11. Please don’t misunderstand me. I love high school football, and I am in no way wishing it to fly by quickly; instead, I am only intrigued at how Week 1 of the regular season can play such a big role in Week 1 of the postseason.
This concept has proven to me that scheduling in football may be more important in than any other sport. I realize people are always trying to use their regular season schedule to prepare for the tournament; however, in football, not every team makes “the tournament.” If schools are not careful with how they schedule, it is possible that a pretty good football team could be on the outside looking in during Week 11.
All this brainstorming started to come to me a few weeks back. I was talking to an offensive coordinator at a good football program in southeast Ohio. I was asking him about his opinion on scheduling and one of his comments is starting to make a lot of sense to me.
“The problem is the years we beat the bigger schools on our schedule, they aren’t good enough to help us with the computers,” he said. “The years they are good enough to help us, we aren’t good enough to beat them in the first place.”
This makes complete sense! Football is 10 weeks in length and half – and in some cases 70 or 80 percent – of those weeks, coaches have no control over who they play. On top of that with today’s economic times, coaches are usually pressured to play some of the local non-league rivals which could or could not be great for racking up computer points.
What does all this mean? Probably not much to the elite programs that play in a conference with good enough competition. Probably not much to smaller schools who have the ability to play bigger schools that is equal or less in talent. What it does mean, is certain schools are going to always be a victim of the system. There are always going to be solid teams that just have no way of putting together a schedule that gives them a consistent chance to play in the postseason.
This isn’t an issue in basketball, baseball, softball, or volleyball. Sure, it can influence your seed, but you always will have a chance; whereas, in football, every year is going to bring you a list of eight and sometimes nine win teams that are on the outside looking in during Week 11.
For those teams, it is back to the drawing board in terms of scheduling. How ever many non-league games they have they will have to figure two things out: One, who are we good enough to beat, and two, are they big enough and good enough to help us. Add to this, most contract for high school football are done a few years in advance, so good luck knowing exactly how good someone is going to be or how good their league is going to be. For those teams, it comes down to the game of scheduling and the game of scheduling in high school football can sometimes be tricky.
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