MORGANTOWN — The state high school football playoffs are scheduled to begin this week, but if you’re a betting man, the smart money would be on the under.
As in there is little chance any of these games are going to be played this weekend.
As to the why, it can officially be summed up, first, with a Wood County court injunction that was upheld, and, second, the number of injunctions that are sure to follow in several other counties that will do battle with Wood County, likely delaying the start of the playoffs along the way.
We will go into some details here on several developments that led to this court battle.
But, if you’re simply looking for the root cause behind it all, we can only offer you the explanation of what people perceived as being fair won out over what is actually right. In this case, fair and right are at completely different ends of the spectrum and we now have total chaos.
First, we’ll give you the details, and we’ll try to keep it simple.
Go back to last April, when the state’s Board of Control — a group of principals and athletic directors from around the state — moved to have a fourth classification (Class AAAA) added to the state for all sports, minus the sports that do not have enough participating schools like tennis, track, soccer and the likes.
Then it was up to the state’s Board of Directors — made up of five principals, an athletic director, a member of the state Board of Education and a designee from the state’s Superintendent’s office — to decide which schools were going to go in which classification.
This is where it gets interesting. A number of schools around the state objected to their classification — in football only — and filed an appeal with the state’s Board of Review, which is made up of seven members appointed by the West Virginia Superintendent of Schools.
Preston High was one of the original 11 schools who filed an appeal, citing it’s rural setting was more in line with Class AAA schools rather than AAAA, even though Preston’s enrollment of around 1,200 students makes it one of only 24 schools in the state with an enrollment with more than 1,000.
That appeal was first sent to the Board of Control and was denied. Another appeal was filed with the Board of Review, who in August just prior to the start of the football season, permitted the original 11, as well as 11 additional schools to change their classification in football only for a year.
Here’s where Wood County comes into play.
The state’s football rankings are a system devised on a team’s overall record, but bonus points also come into play.
The bonus points are calculated by the number of wins a team’s opponents finish with, but also by an opponent’s classification.
Beat a Class AAAA school, you get 15 bonus points or 12 for AAA and so on.
Parkersburg South finished ninth in AAAA with a 5-5 record. Officials at the school — located in Wood County — cried foul due to the fact that several schools on its schedule had been reclassified into AAA, meaning less bonus points for the Patriots.
An injunction was filed to have those schools count as AAAA bonus points.
The injunction by a local Wood County judge — like he was going to rule against kids or a school in his district — was un-shockingly upheld.
So now the West Virginia Secondary School Activities Commission (SSAC) had to refigure the entire playoff field among all four classes, counting additional bonus points for teams based on their original classification.
That led to four schools — Hampshire (AAA), Point Pleasant (AAA), Westside (AA) and Tolsia (A) — getting eliminated from the playoff bracket, which will be the second set of injunctions and court rulings you’ll see that will likely delay the start of the playoffs.
Whew!
The problem to all of this goes right back to the Board of Control’s original decision to move to four classifications to begin with, which is where we get into the battle between being right or being fair.
This state has 114 prep football teams across the state, hardly enough to justify four classifications. Pennsylvania has six classifications among 740 high schools. Ohio has eight among 756.
Here’s the other problem, West Virginia’s major points of population basically consist of nine counties which hold only 38 of the 114 schools, or 33%, while housing nearly 50% of the state’s population.
That is only a handful of schools who have some built-in advantages over a majority of the schools they compete against.
The majority of the rural counties in this state face bussing and transportation issues. They face situations like students who have to get up at 3 or 4 a.m. each day just to make it to school.
They face more financial strain, especially in athletics. Schools in the more urban areas have easier times raising funds, with a population base that likely earns higher wages and such.
In that sense, it’s not exactly fair to ask Preston High to compete against the Morgantown Highs of the state, or in a smaller-school case, asking the small public schools to compete against the private schools located in the cities.
What’s right is a whole other world, though.
What’s right is to stop believing we can function in an athletics world where everyone is happy and sits around the campfire while holding hands and singing songs.
That world does not exist, evident by all the court rulings being piled on top of other court rulings.
What’s right is going back to the original three classes in all sports with a school’s enrollment being the only factor for its classification.
Is that fair? Heck no, far from it, but you never once under the old rules had the threat of the state playoffs being held up because of court injunctions, either.
Let’s look at this through the eyes of the NCAA, which has spent decades upon decades adding rule after rule with the intention of creating a level playing field for all of the member schools.
Yet here we are in 2024, and Ohio State still has the same advantages over WVU, while WVU still has the same advantages over Marshall.
What’s right is to simply realize that you can make all of the rules in the world and come up with all of the complicated formulas you want to determine classification and how many classes there are, but you’ll never get it right for everyone.
Someone will always be at a disadvantage. Someone will always be ticked off.
So, it’s time for those on the Board of Control or Board of Review or whatever board finds itself in charge to understand that life isn’t exactly fair.
Trying to make it so only screws things up worse than they already were.
