KHSAA: Changes to Kentucky high school football playoff format will move forward
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association will move forward with the new football playoff format it adopted earlier this year despite a plea from the Kentucky Football Coaches Association to do otherwise.
KFCA President Clay Clevenger and Executive Director Jimmie Reed before the KHSAA Board of Control on Tuesday advocated a playoff system that uses sister districts instead of intradistrict play for the first two rounds of the playoffs.
The KHSAA in January approved a playoff format that uses an intradistrict format for the first two playoff rounds, moving away from the cross-bracketing format that took hold in most classes of competition during the past decade.
District championships will be awarded at the conclusion of the second-round playoff games based on the outcome of those games. District champions previously were recognized based on regular-season standings.
Concerns about cross-bracketing were addressed in January because of the cost to some programs relative to the level of competitive viability raised by school administrators.
About 90 percent of the 106 head coaches — about half of those in the state — who returned surveys of the KFCA were in favor of sister districts in the postseason rather than intradistrict match-ups. Football coaches would rather play a different opponent in the first couple of rounds instead of teams they saw during the regular season, especially in cases where only a couple of weeks might separate those match-ups, said Clevenger, who’s also the head football coach at Danville High School. He likened the first three rounds of football’s postseason to the region tournaments in sports like basketball and soccer, wherein teams from the same district can’t meet until the tournament finals.
One board member raised the point to KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett that some basketball teams played district games for seeding two weeks ago and this week had to play one another in their first postseason game (locally, Lexington Catholic and Lexington Christian fit that description, though each played two games between their regular-season meeting and postseason rematch).
“I get the fact that there’s less competition opportunities (for football), and I thought Coach Clevenger did a great job trying to articulate that,” Tackett said. “It apparently didn’t sway the administrators.”
There is not a consensus about how best to proceed with the high school football playoff format among coaches, school administrators and school district superintendents, Tackett said.
“There is not unanimity, that’s for sure,” Tackett said. “The other thing is, in many cases, the opinion of whoever you ask changes based on the team they’ve got that year. It’s a bit of a moving target.”
Tackett said the football playoff format will stay intact through at least 2022, the next realignment period. He believes there’s a negative public perception of Kentucky’s postseason format because of the many times with which it’s been tinkered over the last decade or so.
“It’s never the same long enough to get a good feel for, ‘Did it work or did it not?’” Tackett said.
Intradistrict pairings were used in the 2006 and 2007 season, and at the time were then met with derision from coaches.
“The board at the time decided to revise it back and never really gave it its full chance,” Tackett said. “I think this group as constituted now wants to see what happens. Let’s see if these objections are real.”
The board in January also voted to use a Ratings Percentage Index to seed the third and fourth rounds of the football playoffs, marking the first time that a ratings system will be used to organize a team sport’s postseason in KHSAA-sanctioned competition.
This story was originally published February 19, 2019 at 11:21 AM.
