Remember to follow rodfrisco.com on Facebook and Twitter. Click the buttons below the team categories on the right side of this page.
—
I posted this below at The Ticker yesterday.
If New Jersey, which has just as many kids working at the Jersey Shore as southeastern Pennsylvania, can start the fall sports season early, why can’t Pennsylvania? From the Philadelphia Inquirer.
You’re probably wondering, “What’s the relevance?”
Well, the football fans know what the relevance is. The length of the football season is an issue that will never go away as long as it stays at 16 weeks.
The state – and the PIAA Board of Directors – seems to be split down the middle on whether football should consume 15 weeks or 16 weeks.
To review: The PIAA expanded to a 16-week season in 2006 for two reasons, (1) to allow districts to expand their playoff fields (some wanted expansion, some didn’t) and (2) as always, to keep the WPIAL happy. The 16-week expansion (a week was added at the end of the season) enabled District 7 to play a nine-game schedule and a four-week playoff. Changes in the PIAA playoff brackets originally had District 7 champions entering the state brackets in different weeks, which would have ruined the WPIAL’s championship weekend at Heinz Field.
Thus, the 16-week season was born, passing the PIAA board by a single vote.
Since then, there have been all kinds of complaints about the length of the season. Last year (and this year), the season will end about a week before Christmas. And we all remember the snowstorm that pounded the Class AAAA and Class AA games on Dec. 19 in Hershey this past season.
But let’s be honest: It can snow any time in December. And it could be in the 50s, too. So weather isn’t really the primary issue, although it is often the primary emotional issue.
The real issue is the interruption of the boys’ winter sports season. I pointed out in a Patriot-News article a few years ago that 20 percent of the state’s football programs were still practicing and playing the day that winter sports practice formally started. That’s a disruption. It not only affects that starting week, it affects the following week and the start of the winter sports season. How many basketball tip-off tournaments and wrestling tournaments are without a decent number of athletes due to football?
The PIAA has batted this thing like a shuttlecock for the last five years, always with the same result: The district reps on the board (17 of the 31 board members directly represent their districts) generally favor the 16-week season; the rest of board (principals, superintendents, school board, Dept. of Education) lean more toward 15 weeks. The last actual board vote on the matter was a two-vote margin in favor of 16 weeks.
It appears that this schism simply will not heal, even as the board changes members. The only real alternative to moving the playoffs back one week is to allow football or all fall sports to begin formal practice – and thus the season – one week early. Districts will have the option to implement this change; it will not be mandatory statewide.
This is not a new idea. It has been proposed more than once and has failed, except in a modified form for District 7 only in 2004 and 2005.
But it is the right answer, given the circumstances. Even New Jersey, which has every reason to start the fall season after Labor Day because so many high school students work at the shore and elsewhere, has had to consider an early start to its fall season (read: football) because if its own playoff issues. Currently, New Jersey schools do not begin fall sports until after Labor Day; Pa. begins a week before.
I was originally supportive of a 16-week season because it cured a lot of playoff ills across the state, including my home base of District 3. But once I saw what was happening at the end of the season, I changed my mind. And then I got a bit miffed when the PIAA board blithely cut a week off the start of the winter sports season and did nothing to change football, including its complete dismissal of an expansion to six classes. The latter would enable the state to play a 15-week schedule without changing the starting date. But the WPIAL guys would rather run their knuckles across a cheese grater than give up the four-class setup, and they fought it like a badger, right down to implying they would pull out of the PIAA playoffs.
With so many factions statewide dug into their own positions, there is really only one solution, however imperfect: Start the football season early, if you want to.
And don’t if you don’t.
