Ramblin-
I do agree with much of what you say
As I do you.
I agree blowouts are not fun to watch or play in and safety is often a concern. Quality coaches can assess a situation and get their backups in as soon as possible which gives those kids an opportunity to play some significant minutes in a playoff game. Maybe the opponent is just starting to climb that mountain to respectability and sometimes the first step is showing up to the fight and getting your you know what kicked. Maybe those juniors get a taste and have an experience to show them how far they need to go and understand the work they need to put in to get to the next level of competitiveness in the playoffs. The expectations may change and the program starts to become one that expects to be 'there" every year. Is there anything that compares to football in terms of building excitement in a school building? Is it so bad for teammates to get together 10 years later and re-live their senior season and talk about making the playoffs for the first time in X amount of years and then getting slobberknocked by Loyola? Doesn't make them worse people because they lost, heck maybe the journey just getting there inspired them to great things as adults. They dealt with success and failure and those are pretty great life lessons. We get to wrapped up on this board about how good someone is and when someone isn't as good, well....it seems the answer is simply..."they must work harder". It may very well be the case in limited situations but I would beg to differ that is the difference. Trust me I am the farthest thing from give everyone a trophy person. That is why we keep score and that is why they award one 1st place trophy in each class. A 1A trophy is just as "cool" as the 8A trophy. Yes I know that 8A team just whoops the crap out of that 1A team, but that isn't the point now is it?
You make a compelling argument. Seriously, I really like your approach.
My difficulty with it lies in my being unable to quantify the positive value that you and others seemingly place in playoff blowouts. I suggest that you would have a hard time quantifying that, too. As can be seen in the first post in this thread, it is easy to quantify the volume of blowouts in one year and the recurrence of them year after year.
Regardless of trying to quantify this or that, it all boils down to what each person's unique opinion of what football playoffs should be like. In my case, my opinion is based, more than anything else, on the context of my interest and passion for high school football, and that context is influenced primarily by history. I have been following Illinois football playoffs since they started back in the mid-70s when there were five classes and substantially more exclusive playoff fields.
If you look at the 1974 playoffs, there were 40 first round games. Of those 40, FOUR were decided by margins of 30 pts or more. That's 10% of the 1974 first round games, compared with 41% of the first round games in both 2016 and 2017 being decided by margins of 30 pts or more. That level of first round games competitiveness is representative of the context/history of what has formed my current opinion.
I certainly understand how fans who began following high school playoff football
after the various class and playoff field expansions might not be of the same opinion as I am that playoff football should be "special" in the sense that they should NOT be for most schools and certainly not for all. What has happened is that schools and fans want in on that specialness, even if those schools are uncompetitive relative to the majority of other playoff qualifiers. The result has been that, over the years, we have expanded from playoff fields of 16 in each class to 32 in each class, and we have expanded from five classes to six to eight. Now, some people are saying that almost all schools should have (and, in some cases,
deserve) a taste of that specialness, even if some of them don't win a single game all year and if the majority of them finish the regular season with a record of 4-5 or worse.
If you are familiar with the concept of mission creep, what has happened with football playoffs is textbook mission creep.
Some do it better than others but let's not look down on the programs just because they are not as good as some others.
If the playoffs are anything at all, they are to determine who is the best. My position is that I want the playoffs to determine the best of the best, and it seems like you and others want the playoffs to determine who is the best of them all. Playoffs are also a time to look up at, and celebrate, programs that experience regular season success. Doing so does not necessarily mean that anyone is looking down at those programs that are not as successful.
In this age of everyone getting a participation trophy, I have no problem giving those out to all schools and kids who play a nine game regular season. Seriously. All those great points you have made about the value of just participating in football and in supporting the sport apply equally well to the regular season and to simply participating in football in the first place.
All I am saying is that we should give a different and yes, more special, participation trophy to those schools that have done better than most in the nine game regular season. That playoff trophy doesn't have to be a physical trophy. It can simply be the knowledge that, through nine games, a playoff qualifier generated a won-loss record better than most other schools and is rewarded for doing so by the ability to play on.
