Varsity Kansas - The Blog

This is from David:

Far from perfect? You’re being mighty kind. Pathetic is a better word, but I can’t really say how I feel on these boards.

C’mon, David. I hate the system, too. If it were up to me, there would be only three classes and only the district winner would make it to the playoffs. What makes this week interesting is the fact that so many teams don’t know whether they’re in our out.

As far as the current system goes, I’d blow the whole thing up and start over. First-round playoff games are especially brutal. Nothing says playoffs like a 49-6 first-round game, right? Be prepared for quite a few of those.

But this system isn’t changing any time soon, so enjoy the highlights when you can. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Dodge City’s football team is still in the hunt for a 6A playoff spot, no matter what we say.

In Sunday’s paper, our district standings listed Hutchinson, Goddard and Garden City as all being alive in 6A-District 8. And that’s true. We also listed Dodge City (0-2 in districts with a -26 points differential) as being eliminated.

And that’s false.

Here’s how Dodge City can get in: The Red Demons must defeat Goddard by at least 13 points. Hutchinson must defeat Garden City by at least 13 points.

That would make Hutch the first District 8 qualifier at 3-0. Second place would be a three-way tie between Garden, Dodge and Goddard at 1-1. They would all have point differentials of -13.

First three-way tiebreaker is head to head among the three schools. All were 1-1 against one another.

The next tiebreaker is victories against teams in your class and higher. So in 6A, Goddard and Dodge would each have three wins over 6A teams (Goddard beat Campus, Derby and Garden City; Dodge beat Wichita South, Wichita North and Goddard under this scenario). Garden City would have beaten only two 6A teams (Derby and Dodge) and would be eliminated.

So, with only two teams remaining in the tie, the next tiebreaker becomes head-to-head meeting, and Dodge would’ve beaten Goddard and would be in the playoffs.

Whew. So it’s possible.

Give our statistical guru Gary Karr some slack, though. From the moment we put the paper to bed on Friday night, he’s working feverishly on getting district standings in the Sunday paper. For years, he had to worry only about one team reaching the playoffs from each district. With two, the final-week scenarios aren’t so clear-cut.

– Kirk Seminoff, sports editor and infrequent poster

This week has a whole lot of stuff to watch for.

There’s golf regionals today, Heights soccer plays at Maize on Tuesday and Andover Central soccer plays Bishop Carroll on Tuesday. Derby volleyball plays host to Goddard and Hutchinson, while Maize volleyball plays host to the Salina schools. Circle and Clearwater volleyball will meet at Buhler, Heights and Kapaun at Southeast.

Southeast soccer plays at Maize on Thursday, and the City League cross country meet is Saturday. We can’t forget state tennis this weekend — 6A is at Shawnee Mission East, 5A at Topeka’s Kossover Center, 4A’s at Pratt and 3-2-1A is at Riverside Tennis Center.

Now on to football. District play begins this week, so you could be 0-6 and still have a shot at the playoffs. Ain’t Kansas great? There’s even a possibility that you could go 1-2 in your district and STILL qualify for the playoffs because two teams qualify out of each district — feel free to comment on Kansas’ playoff system.

One game that looked to be a biggie has lost a little luster — Goddard at Hutchinson. Goddard’s overtime loss to Maize last Friday took away our hopes of two 6-0 teams meeting. It also brings out the predictors who point to Hutchinson’s 78-14 walloping of Maize in Week 5.

Wellington at Mulvane: I like this game. I like the tradition of Wellington in the playoffs going up against those undefeated Wildcats. And it’s always fun to try to figure out exactly what Huldon Tharp will do. He already 1,069 rushing yards.

Andover Central at Rose Hill: This is always a good game, and Rose Hill needs another win. I just don’t know if it can come against the Jaguars.

City League: Ugh. Not much interesting here. OK, Emporia (4-2) at Heights (4-2) should be good, but then there’s West (0-6) vs. Kapaun (3-3), Carroll (5-1) at Ark City (2-4), North (1-5) at Maize (2-4), Campus (0-6) at Northwest (4-2), East (5-1) at Derby (2-4). Not exactly a high-interest night.

Kristin Mehler, one of our correspondents, was in Sterling covering Class 3-2-1A sub-state tennis on Saturday. For an 11:30 a.m. start, the tournament didn’t get over until 10 p.m.

My first response to that is — glad it was her and not me.

My second is, that’s just too dang long.

Collegiate tennis coach Dave Hawley agreed.

“It was just so bizarre,” Hawley said. “The weird thing is, I don’t know how they could have run it any quicker. They had only four courts, there were 16 matches and a lot went long. It was kind of crazy.”

Another part of the issue is that the move to regionals and sub-states for Class 4A and 3-2-1A was supposed to shorten the day for all those teams.
With the way the regional system worked in the past, 10-11 teams would be at one site, so it took for-ever and some kids ended up playing five matches in one day.
With regionals this year, there were 5-6 teams at each site on Thursday, and then the individuals and doubles teams advanced to Saturday’s sub-states.

“There are two problems,” Hawley said. “Unless you have a lot of courts, you still have a long day. The bigger conflict is you wind up playing some of the same people you played on Thursday.”

With the new districts released, we’ve found out that Heights and Carroll finally will be able to have seven City League games on their schedule. It’s a nice change for two of the league’s top teams because it makes it just a little easier to win the league title, which is based on winning percentage.

Still, not everyone is happy. Check out Mark’s comment:

The problem with unequal scheduling in City League can be reduced with the new districts. Now all the 6A schools in City League have exactly one non-league opponent in their district. Assuming that each of the six plays another non-league foe in the first six weeks of the season, each of them will have seven league games. Carroll and West will be in a district together, meaning they each have two non-league games in district. If they each play only league opponents the first six weeks, they would each also have seven league games. The only team out of luck in this scenario is Kapaun, which has three non-league district games, so can get only six league games. This is clearly unfair to Kapaun. Has any thought been given to a league schedule that designates six league games for every school, with the option that each school (other than Kapaun) schedule either an extra non-league game or a game with a league opponent that doesn’t count in the league standings? There is really no perfect solution when you have nine teams in a league and unequal numbers of district games, but the current setup really has a fairness problem.

Mark’s right, there’s no perfect situation. But it is better than it has been. This year Carroll, Heights and Kapaun only have six league games. It’s so tough to go undefeated in league, which is imperative when there’s only six games.

Heights coach Rick Wheeler and Carroll coach Alan Schuckman, whose teams have been league title contenders, winning two of the past three, just had to accept the difficulty.

Is it fair? No. But it’s the way it goes because this is a nine-team league.

The KSHSAA released its football classifications for the 2008 and 2009 seasons — click here — and there aren’t many surprises.

Heights has to be pleased with its situation. It moves out of its district with Emporia, Junction City and Manhattan and into the same district with East, Derby and Southeast.

This puts Heights into a situation where it’s not relegated to only six City League games, as it has been in recent years. That’s been a pain for the Falcons — just as Carroll and Kapaun have been — because lose one game in the CL and the title is so much tougher to win. But a team like East, which has seven league games, has an advantage because the title is based on winning percentage. So East can go 6-1 and still win out over a 5-1 team.

Hutchinson moves into a pretty tough district with Great Bend, Hays and McPherson. I would imagine the Salt Hawks are fine with the move, but those other teams must be hating life.

Wichita Trinity gets hosed in its first-year of non-club football with its district of Andover Central, Rose Hill and Mulvane. Ugh. (A disclaimer, I’m not questioning the state. Based on how the KSHSAA does things, this is no surprise. It still stinks for this fledgling program, though.)

Any surprises that you see? Comment on them here.

– joanna

It’s great to see all the comments we’re getting on this blog. Interaction is what we’re looking for, so keep it coming.

Thought I’d just respond to a couple comments.

This from Mark on East’s loss to Kapaun:

One point I’d make on the Bryce Brown fumbles. Those were mostly botched pitches, not balls he had in possession, then lost. He was obviously overeager to start running with the ball before he secured it, and the pitches were not on target. I’m guessing there will be lots of reps at practice on these plays, because, lacking any kind of reliable passing game, East will need to run them well to beat Heights.

I’m going to disagree with you, Mark, on the pitches being off target. I’m not saying they were perfect, but Brown should have been able to make the plays without fumbling. I’m pretty hard on quarterbacks when I keep stats, and I did think these were the fault of Brown. On that point, I can’t imagine him having the same problems this week against Heights.

From mulvanefan:

its about time mulvane has gotten some recognition, but i dont understand how you dont have them in the top 5, but hayden and holton still are, you might talk about schedule strength, but mulvane hasnt had any really easy games, except for maybe el dorado, MULVANE IS A TOP 5 TEAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mulvane’s schedule does hurt. Yes the Wildcats are an impressive 5-0 and they definitely helped themselves with a victory over Rose Hill. But three of Mulvane’s opponents have losing records. That doesn’t help.

From Mark:

Aren’t the 6A districts for the western part of the state pretty clear?

Dodge City, Garden City, Maize, Goddard
Northwest, North, South, Campus (pretty easy group for the Grizzlies!)
East, Derby, Heights, Southeast

Could you explain this? Is there another way the teams could be grouped according to KSHSAA policies? Having exactly 12 teams in the western area will help City League provide more league games too, since Heights will have two CL district foes (rather than none).

Sounds good to me. But we’ll find out this week when district alignments come out.

And from Nadine:

We heard this was “new”. Think it is a nice addition. We’ll be checking it out.

Glad to hear it. A reminder that the Q&A forum will be replaced by the blog, so keep your comments and questions coming.

– joanna

The Kansas State High School Activities Association released its new classifications for the 2007-08 school year. Click here for those classifications. There’s not a whole lot new locally for this year’s classifications.

But the football classifications, which are for the 2008 and 2009 football seasons, are interesting, particularly because Hutchinson does move down from 6A to 5A as was expected. Hutch, the three-time defending 6A champ, will still be in 6A this year — and probably win it all again — but next year it will take over 5A.

It was also interesting to see that Wichita Trinity will be a 4A school in its first year of 11-man football. Trinity has been a club, 8-man team for the past five years. It won’t be an easy road for Trinity, but at least the Knights now have football.

Now I can’t wait until districts come out — that should be released next week.

— Joanna