Snetsrak61 said:

For 5. While surely a small number of kids fall in the 20 to 30 mile zone, that's still over a 50% reduction of area to pull students from. That seems to really be putting pressure on schools trying to keep doors open. The private school threats to break away are usually pretty hollow, but further restricting recruitment area when most are already suffering from declining enrollment is a really good selling point to leaving the IHSA I'd think. Especially since it'd presumably fall on all sports, so impact is felt widespread.

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I wonder what the reduction in current student numbers would be if this happened

King MJ said:

My thoughts on how I would fix it.

Keep in mind I know some of these aren't realistic, will never pass, just what I would do if I was in charge.

1. Move multiplier to 2.2.
2. However, schools will be classified as either 1) their multiplied enrollment or 2) the average multiple enrollment of the teams they play, whichever is bigger
3. Use Maxpreps to seed the playoffs (but keep playoff qualifications the same). Go 1-32 for all classes.
4. Add significant restrictions for public to private transfers where the family doesn't move at least 50 miles.
5. Change enrollment radius from 30 miles to 20 miles.

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From my understanding of the legal process surrounding transfers number 4 ain't gonna happen. IHSA knows they can't win anything too restrictive. I'm sure some know the finer details than me.

For 5. While surely a small number of kids fall in the 20 to 30 mile zone, that's still over a 50% reduction of area to pull students from. That seems to really be putting pressure on schools trying to keep doors open. The private school threats to break away are usually pretty hollow, but further restricting recruitment area when most are already suffering from declining enrollment is a really good selling point to leaving the IHSA I'd think. Especially since it'd presumably fall on all sports, so impact is felt widespread.

I think you could multiply private schools by 100 before restricting the radius and have abetter shot of keeping them.

My thoughts on how I would fix it.

Keep in mind I know some of these aren't realistic, will never pass, just what I would do if I was in charge.

1. Move multiplier to 2.2.
2. However, schools will be classified as either 1) their multiplied enrollment or 2) the average multiple enrollment of the teams they play, whichever is bigger
3. Use Maxpreps to seed the playoffs (but keep playoff qualifications the same). Go 1-32 for all classes.
4. Add significant restrictions for public to private transfers where the family doesn't move at least 50 miles.
5. Change enrollment radius from 30 miles to 20 miles.

Wassup13 said:

This is all fixed by just putting in a multiplier for only the average weight of your starting linemen. It would be for both public and private schools.

Lets call it the JCA multiplier.

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Thought that was the Althoff multiplier 😂

Funny story. We went to a Lineman skills competition summer going into my senior year to a competition that apparently prided itself on "No TEs". Well we got in a bind because the day of one or two guys no showed and we needed a set number to compete. One of our teammates was one of the smallest guys on our team, maybe 120 pounds. And he was neighbors with our center. So we just told him to come along because he was available and we really wanted to compete. We only had 1 or 2 guys who were big OL as-is. The rest of us looked like we were bending the "no TE" rule already. But we just confidently said this kid was one of our OL and competed 😂. We ended up scoring pretty well, no doubt helped by our awesome team 40 time which was already pretty good, but accelerated by this DB, I mean OL.

This is all fixed by just putting in a multiplier for only the average weight of your starting linemen. It would be for both public and private schools.

Lets call it the JCA multiplier.

guerinfbfan said:

@Snetsrak61 Do you have the list of non boundary public schools?

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The ones that qualified I included. Or do you mean just the entire list?

@Snetsrak61 Do you have the list of non boundary public schools?

A memory unlike any other. I asked Dean if he knew the W-L record for Carmel against another team. He instantly recited the last 25 years off the top of his head.

colin2229 said:

Date	Time	Result	Score	Opp. Score	OT	H/A	Opponent	Opp. Record	Opp. Enroll.	Other Site/Game Info
Aug 30	7:30	L	21	64		H	Barrington	8-3	2810.50
Sep 6	7:00	L	14	42		A	Batavia	12-2	1882.50
Sep 13	7:00	W	56	0		A	Elgin (Larkin)	2-7	2107.00
Sep 20	7:00	L	7	50		H	Aurora (West Aurora)	10-1	3561.00
Sep 27	7:00	W	38	21		A	West Chicago (H.S.)	6-4	1986.00
Oct 4	7:00	W	50	6		A	Streamwood	3-6	1755.50
Oct 11	7:00	W	48	25		H	Bartlett	4-5	2370.50
Oct 18	7:00	W	51	0		A	Elgin (H.S.)	2-7	2642.00
Oct 25	7:00	W	55	0		H	Aurora (East)	0-9	4050.50
Nov 1	7:00	L	13	66		A	Barrington	8-3	2810.50	Barrington

Definitely need some talent up in South Elgin 🙄

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Exactly. Not very talented by college player standards. Went out and scheduled the two toughest we could considering how bad the conference is (or did you miss my sarcasm?)

One aspect I have not seen mentioned, and I agree with the culture, good coaching, and talent being the drovers of good programs, but recruiting help for college has not been mentioned.

A private school coach has more time than a public coach, who typically teaches, to spend more time helping his kids get recruited. If a kid has aspirations to play college ball, it's probably a better move to go to a large and successful private school. I think that adds to the talent level being higher than some publics.

About facilities, go south of I80.and you will see some solid programs with really bad facilities, and some terrible programs with great facilities.

ChiTown Chuggers said:

Only top 32 overall (public and private) teams play for IHSA state championship - record, win margin, and select seeding committee weighted - with no regard to off-season residency transfers. Allow the athletes to play and transfer to wherever is the best place for them and their talents.

While not politically possible, it would fix the current challenge of loaded scholarship-bought private teams under an exaggerated or plain false academic / religious focus, dramatically reduce the nuanced and exaggerated claims of many suspect team’s on-field FB dominance, and likely return prep football to a time when public conference championships actually mattered as an achievement level. Private school dominance is still way overblown as most know regardless of 2024, but a level of fairness in how the rules apply to everyone needs to be re-established for IHSA’s credibility/integrity in football.

And the final product would be much better at every old level or region due to real rules.

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I do not like win margin on any level. This causes programs that can run up the score to do so. It also minimizes #2/#3 playing time which in many cases hinders their ability to perform when needed or lack of experience the next year. I’ve seen this effect here at MS. I hated “Maine Southing” kids. Except for New Trier
Never take the gas off on that one!

HotBeer said:

The advantages are structural for publics. They are cultural for privates.

Who is going to take better care of their vehicle:

-Someone who, when they turned 16, where gifted a brand new Mercedes SUV
-Someone who bought their first car (Toyota Corrola) at age 23 after taking the bus all through college and scrimping and saving to buy it?

Extreme example, and not meant to disparage Publics in any way. But the kids enjoying the huge scoreboard at Barrington are doing so by default. The parents of the kids practicing on that little wedge of turf out behind St. Patrick have likely had to make quite a few sacrifices for their kids to have the pleasure of commuting down Belmont Ave traffic to duke it out in the CCL.

In all facets of life, I would never underestimate the motivation of people to (often subconsciously) prove to the world their rationale in making an "inconvenient" decision.

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My ADHD just kicked in! I learned to swim at St. Pat’s.

Just as an anecdote on facilities.

As a freshman high jumper I got to practice on a true high jump pad like twice the entire season. All my other live jumps came on meet days lol. Now part of it WAS skill. My brother was much better at jumping with the same facilities as I had and stuck it out all 4 years and actually held the school record for a long time (though I did manage to score at one varsity meet yay 😅).

But damn if that wasn't discouraging factor, when I decided to give it up to focus on football. I had a better high jump practice setup at my grade school. No surprise that they didn't "just recruit" someone who could jump at a higher level. In fact there were kids walking the halls that I'm sure could have, but sometimes you just need facilties to even recruit the talent already walking your halls.

So out of curiosity, what percentage of public schools have a full track and field facility? At least around Chicago burbs it seems like most do, along with several with indoor field houses.

Those things matter on some level. Not even on a state finalist level, but there are cost of entry barriers that keep private school participation under invested to the point of even competing. Thus the ones that do compete are selected only for one's who've gotten over that hump (compared to public schools which will almost always be over that cost barrier - at least after a certain size where scale is favorable). Its deeper than just "recruiting". Recruiting is probably a trailing factor.

Cross Bones said:

How would you do it if you were the Czar of the Private Playoffs?

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Have LA and MC play a five game series to determine the champ and let everyone else play in a consolation bracket.

MC63 said:

Congratulations and best of luck to the young man.

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He’s 48, I guess “young man” is relative.

Snetsrak61 said:

I think it's disengenous to say facilities and funding don't matter. Can they be overcome? Sure. But if you're competing for practice space and faciltiies, how can it not be a detriment?

Even with the recruiting "advantage", I don't think Naz's open house was too impressive for a potential athlete before. What were they recruiting them to? A shared gym for every sport? Not only in football, but in other sports Naz has recently trophied, none of them preceded the time when they had upgraded what were really lacking faciltiies. How do you train high level athletes when you hardly have practice space?

Of course not every public school facility is top notch either. And I'm sure there's small public schools in particular that share spaces and struggle with facilities, but I'd guess a lot of their competition has similar facilities. But as a general rule those tax funded facilities tend to be better, it seems. I'd say that is especially true from some of the places I've seen complaints originate from.

And some private schools swing big on facilities. But it's a lot harder to do.

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Where I’m from, kids go to the local school, Providence, JCA or Mac.
I don’t think facilities play a huge part, but I could see how that might be the case in the suburbs. That’s why I said it is “varied at best.”

I think it's disengenous to say facilities and funding don't matter. Can they be overcome? Sure. But if you're competing for practice space and faciltiies, how can it not be a detriment?

Even with the recruiting "advantage", I don't think Naz's open house was too impressive for a potential athlete before. What were they recruiting them to? A shared gym for every sport? Not only in football, but in other sports Naz has recently trophied, none of them preceded the time when they had upgraded what were really lacking faciltiies. How do you train high level athletes when you hardly have practice space?

Of course not every public school facility is top notch either. And I'm sure there's small public schools in particular that share spaces and struggle with facilities, but I'd guess a lot of their competition has similar facilities. But as a general rule those tax funded facilities tend to be better, it seems. I'd say that is especially true from some of the places I've seen complaints originate from.

And some private schools swing big on facilities. But it's a lot harder to do.

ramblinman said:

What did Aurora Christian ever do to you to deserve to be included in such a list?

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Knew I was gonna miss someone 😂. I swore I had done a search for "christ" but maybe I only did that among the final qualifiers.

No harm no foul. 7 private / 25 public in the final (maybe) count of excluded schools in a hypothetical 6 / 2 separate format.

Public school advantage is only that they don’t have to recruit to get male students enrolled.

Any other perceived thing such as funding, facilities, and especially demographics is varied at best. Not to mention that theses things matter little. Succrssful programs get outside funding/fubdraising, facilities are what they are, and demographics clearly are not indicators because you have schools like Rochester and East St Louis as two of the best public programs who couldn’t be any more different.

I will certainly not poo poo the value of a good coaching staff. I’ve seen it first hand where a staff took a below average public program and made it into a very respectable one with multiple state championships. Coaching equals culture.

With that said, the results of that program still ebb and flow, generally with the level of incoming talent.

Talent and coaching are no doubt the two most important things. Unless there is a fairly severe discrepancy in coaching, talent will usually win out.

Snetsrak61 said:

26 Public schools not qualifying in a 6 class all-public setup who did qualify, in order of first out
Stillman Valley
Nokomis
Carlinville
Huntley
Erie [E.-Prophetstown Coop]
Mt. Carmel
Fairbury (Prairie Central)
Rolling Meadows
Sterling (H.S.)
Red Bud
Mackinaw (Deer Creek)
Kewanee (H.S.)
Moweaqua (Central A & M)
Tinley Park (H.S.)
Aurora (Christian)
Geneseo
Deerfield (H.S.)
Summit (Argo)
Aurora (Waubonsie Valley)
Chicago (Senn)
Joliet (West)
Skokie (Niles West)
Dupo
West Frankfort (Frankfort)
Harrisburg
Chicago (Kenwood)

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What did Aurora Christian ever do to you to deserve to be included in such a list?

Doc…..I think you might get some consensus on this one. I’m a private school guy, and I think it’s too easy to get the waiver. I don’t have specific numbers in mind, but it should not be obtained as easily as it currently is.

The waiver system was *okay* in either of its first two iterations. It was 1 PO win in preceding 4 or 6 years. In a perfect world I wouldn't make it results based at all, but any other waiver method would be likely administratively burdensome.

Districts in all its failed glory really ruined two flawed systems in multiplier waiver and especially SF.

So at minimum just go to the 4 or 6 year, 1 PO win method. If you're looking for improvements I also don't think the waiver shouldn't move you down more than one class from prior enrollment (somewhat tricky to define since enrollment is done after qualifications, and what if you just don't qualify... Gotta get "placed" somewhere to implement that 1 class rule).

MC63 said:

Terrible idea. Play on a campus of one of the two teams. MC has won 15 straight playoff games - not sure how many were "away" -- but it certainly was significant .

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Just counting on MaxPreps (and I'm not infallible), it looks like they've played 9 at home and 6 away since the 21-22 season not counting finals games