Friday, February 24, 2012

LHSAA needs a playoffs fix

In 2008 the LHSAA started a seeding process for its boys and girls basketball playoffs using a power rating system similar to that of football. It has worked out to be a pretty fair and good system of taking the teams that do not finish first or second in their respective district and putting them in the playoffs based on their rating.

This is all good but the one thing that hasn't changed is how they determine who the home team is each week or game. It is something that shouldn't be that hard to figure out. For instance a team that is ranked no. 1 in their classification should always be the home team. It should be as simple as that, the higher ranked team should be home regardless of all this travel business (who traveled last, who has traveled the most, ect.) That is old and should go the way of the old way the brackets used to be filled out. Why have rankings if you don't use them in that manner.

This basketball season in the girls 5A playoffs you had both the No. 1 and 2 teams playing on the road in the second round. How does that make sense? What kind of reward is it to be one the top ranked schools in your classication if you have to travel to play another school that wasn't even a home team in the earlier round. Just because that team won its game, one game, all of a sudden it deserves to be at home the next game?

This is something that the principals need to look at now that they have the power rankings set up fairly to give the schools that deserve to be in the playoffs a chance at a state title. The old way of deciding this was the way it had to be before rankings but is now antiquated. The LHSAA needs to move on to the next step and fix this and make it right.