Deep-Seeded Issue / Coaches have been unable to agree on proposal to seed football tournament

When Class 6A opens tournament play next week, the top two football teams in Sectional 8 will meet in the first round.

Columbus North (8-1), ranked No. 6 in 6A, will travel to 6A No. 7 Center Grove (6-3) in a battle of two of the state’s top teams. On the other side of the bracket will be a pair of 2-7 squads with Jeffersonville hosting Franklin Central.

So why aren’t the sectional’s best two teams on opposite sides of the bracket with a chance to meet in the final? It’s because the IHSAA, as is the case with all other team sports, uses a blind draw to match the teams within each sectional.

Columbus East coach Bob Gaddis, who is the executive director for the Indiana Football Coaches Association, said the IFCA has researched the idea the past three years, and the coaches couldn’t agree on the best way to do it.

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“Everybody says, ‘Well, why don’t you seed the tournament?’” Gaddis said. “How you do it fairly and representing everybody is pretty tough. We didn’t feel like we had a proposal that we could really support and take to the IHSAA.”

Hatching a proposal

The IHSAA is divided into six classes for football. The smallest four — Classes A through 4A — have between 62 and 64 schools with seven- and eight-team sectionals.

Class 5A has 37 schools with four- and five-team sectionals. The largest — Class 6A — has 32 teams with four-team sectionals.

One proposal called for the 6A teams to be seeded No. 1 through No. 16 in the northern half of the state and No. 1 through No. 16 in the bottom half of the state, much like the NCAA basketball tournament. Gaddis said that proposal didn’t garner much support because of the possibility of longer travel at the sectional level.

Another idea that coaches talked about for 6A and 5A looked at putting two sectionals together and seeding it, and then still having two sectional champions out of it.

“I have historically been interested in seeding,” North coach Tim Bless said. “When you see most bracketed tournaments, they are seeded. We are a little bit unique with keeping it a blind draw in Indiana.”

Ultimately, the coaches couldn’t come up with a consensus.

“For two years, we had committees that studied it, we asked our coaches opinions, and our problem was, as a coaches association, we couldn’t come to an agreement on how they wanted to seed it or if they wanted to seed it,” said Gaddis, whose 5A co-No. 3 Olympians (7-2) open defense of their Class 5A state title Friday at New Albany (5-4).

Positives and negatives

One of the positives for seeding at the sectional level is to reward teams for a strong regular season.

Another positive for athletic directors is to see that the best two teams playing in the sectional final because in the sectional, the schools keep 98 percent of the ticket revenue, with only 2 percent going to the IHSAA.

“The problem is, if I’m in a sectional where there’s two pretty good teams, and I’m in an eight-team sectional, why wouldn’t I want to take my chances at a blind draw and get those (top) two on the other bracket to play each other,” Gaddis said. “If we seeded it, obviously, those two would be opposite each other.”

If sectionals were to be seeded, one question would be what method would be used to see them. Media and coaches rankings could be subjective, and the Sagarin Ratings don’t take into account games against schools from other states.

So if coaches were going to make proposal, it would be to use the MaxPreps.com rankings. The IHSAA already has an agreement with MaxPreps and likely would be able to get information at no cost.

One snag, however, would be that instead of the tournament draw being the Sunday after the next-to-last regular-season game, teams wouldn’t find out their sectional opponent until after the regular season is finished.

“If every game really means something, and we play Game 9, and we’re going to play that first-round sectional game the next week, you’d have to wait until after 9 to make it fair if you were going to seed it by power rating,” Gaddis said. “So if you work for the IHSAA, you’re probably going to have to go in Friday night after the games and work all night and get the MaxPreps stuff and maybe tell us Saturday by noon who we’re playing the next week. Football coaches start preparing a lot of times Friday night after the game. It would have been completely a real problem to have.”

Robert Faulkens, an IHSAA assistant commisioner who oversees football, said he hasn’t seen much support for seeding the tournament.

“The coaches have talked about it,” Faulkens said. “There’s very little interest in our membership in doing it.”

The IHSAA would be unlikely to implement any type of major change such as seeding the tournament without a proposal from the coaches association. In that regard, Gaddis doesn’t see one forthcoming.

“I think it’s a dead issue with the coaches association,” Gaddis said. “I don’t think I can talk the guys into being on the committee anymore because they spent a lot of time and did a diligent job. We’re supposed to represent our coaches, and they didn’t want it, so we didn’t take it to (the IHSAA).”

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Here are this week’s sectional openers involving area teams:

(5A) Columbus East at New Albany, 7 p.m.

(4A) Jennings County at South Dearborn, 7 p.m.

(3A) Monrovia at Brown County, 7 p.m.

(A) South Decatur at Indianapolis Lutheran, 7 p.m.

(A) Edinburgh at Cambridge City Lincoln, 7:30 p.m.

Note: Columbus North is in Class 6A, which is off this week. The Bull Dogs will play at Center Grove at 7 p.m. Oct. 26.

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