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The N.C. High School Athletic Association is talking to member schools about shortening the playoffs in all sports, including football and basketball.
It's a long overdue idea, and I have a few suggestions to make it happen.
Trim the football regular-season from 11 to 10 games.
Teams can play 10 straight weeks with an endowment game (an additional regular season game to raise money with a portion going back to the NCHSAA) – or play nine games with a bye week. Under this plan, the current regular season would end Friday, Oct. 23, and the playoffs would begin Friday, Oct. 30 – instead of two weeks later.
Trim the playoff fields.
Right now, too many teams qualify for the postseason (256 of 386 teams). There's nothing special about a postseason berth anymore, and first-round games are often blowouts that few people care to attend.
An Observer study showed in 2001 – when the NCHSAA offered 32-team playoff fields in 4A, 3A and 2A – that 46 percent of first-round games were blowouts. That number rose to 57 percent when the playoff fields doubled in 2002. And last year, 13 of 16 first round games in the 4AA class were lopsided.
In many cases, teams are driving long distances, and losing money, to play games where they have little chance. It's time to end that.
There are four NCHSAA classes, but for football, the classes are divided into large (AA) and small (A), yielding eight state champions. Under my plan, the NCHSAA would split the field into five or six classes and take 32 teams from each into the postseason based on some type of seeding system with conference champions guaranteed a berth.
That gives us a four-week playoff, instead of five. And with the shortened regular-season season, it would mean this year's playoffs would end Nov. 20 instead of Dec. 11.
This would also limit so much overlap with basketball season, which starts in mid-November and often causes basketball teams to start slow while they wait for key players to return from football.
The state basketball finals are scheduled for March 13. That's way too late and puts the championships up against the semifinals of the ACC Basketball tournament. The NCHSAA needs to cut a week out of the season in order to end on March 6. The easiest way to do that is to eliminate conference tournaments, which are a week of reruns from the regular season. Trimming the playoff fields would also help in basketball. I'd keep four classes but cut to 32 or 48 teams per class.
Similar moves with spring sports could help get the sports season over before graduation, which should always be the rule.
