By TODD TRAUB
Leader sports editor
An old high-school football teammate of mine found our program’s records dating back to 1945 and shared them online.
Boy, did we play for a bad football team. I haven’t seen that many zeroes since the last time I watched “Tora, Tora, Tora.”
To give an example, my team’s record over my junior and senior years was 5-13, and that was the best two-year mark since 1975. To put that in perspective, it means I have to confess I graduated my little school in downstate Illinois in 1981.
Once our program records were posted, a bunch of aging, ex-gridiron greats like myself weighed in with mostly humorous commentary. Like survivors of a hurricane, we can laugh about it now.
I pointed out our opponents always had a knack for being bigger, faster and having more guys. And they excelled at running that “man-wide-open” play.
When opponents saw us on their schedule, I’m sure they lit up like my co-worker Jason King when he spies unattended loose change in the company break room.
The bottom line, of course, was that my team didn’t score enough points, which brings me to the latest Arkansas Activities Association initiative designed to improve high school football in Arkansas.
It’s all about points now.
“But it always has been,” you say.
Yes, it has always been about points on the field.
Now, however, our local large-school teams Cabot, Jacksonville and Searcy have to keep a second score on top of their Friday-night finals. To get to the postseason, it’s not enough to outscore your opponents and win more games than anyone else, the two statistics that have always mattered most.
This season, the 6A and 7A teams that are playing in the hybrid 7A/6A-Central and 7A/6A-East earn points for victories and quality of opponents in order to compile an end-of-season power rating that determines playoff seeding.
What happened to just beating guys?
True, there are geographic and student-population issues Arkansas has had to address in its high school athletics. The solution until now has been to keep adding classifications the way Cabot keeps adding strip malls.
We have seen high school football expand from a perfectly good four classifications to six, ranging from 2A to 7A. Grizzled sportswriters like myself have long decried this process on the basis that we’re giving away championships and playoff berths to teams that previously had to earn them.
Consider that Class 7A has only 16 teams, the smallest classification grouping in the nation.
Yet we still have similar-sized teams too far apart in our little state, making it hard for them to schedule a competitive and fair slate of games. And we won’t go into the AAA’s efforts to lessen disparities caused by the private- school powerhouses.
To make things geographically and competitively agreeable, the AAA created the two hybrid conferences, leaving the 7A-West full of only 7A schools and the 6A-South full of 6A schools. In those conferences it’s still about just winning games.
But for at least the next two seasons, a 7A/6A-Central team like Cabot collects 10 points for each conference victory and one point for each opponent’s conference victory. The total points are then divided by the seven conference games to determine a team’s power ranking.
A 6A team like Jacksonville or Searcy collects 10 points for any 7A/6A-East Conference victory, five for a tie and a one-point bonus for each 7A team played.
Some 6A schools are already manipulating the new system, adding non-conference, 7A opponents with an eye toward stockpiling points for the season’s end.
As it is with most compromises, the new system doesn’t please anyone, at least not around here.
Cabot coach Mike Malham objects because a 7A powerhouse like West Memphis, playing a slate of 6A teams in the 7A/6A-East, could fatten up and cruise to the No. 1 seed in the 7A while Cabot must play primarily 7A teams on its 7A/6A-Central schedule.
Searcy coach Tim Harper objects because the system hasn’t really alleviated travel concerns — schools are still scheduling whomever they want, wherever they are located, if it helps their power rankings at the end of the season.
I probably took too many blows to the head during my high school football playing days to think up a solution on my own, so I offer one I have heard discussed elsewhere — combine the largest two classifications into one, and take the top four seeds from each conference in the postseason.
It sounds simple, perhaps too simple, and the devil is always in the details.
But at least once the scoreboards are shut off on Friday nights, no one would have to do any additional math.
