Category: Committees

LONE TREE — Big changes are ahead for Class 5A football. Beginning with the 2016 season, the classification will move to a 16-team playoff field, a 10-game regular season, and alignment will be set by a waterfall system.

It means moving away from the current 32-team playoff field and nine-game regular season in 5A, as well as a new way of thinking about alignment, which is set right now — for the most part — by geography.

These changes were made by the CHSAA football committee, which met ahead of the start of the All-School Summit at the Denver Marriott South on Monday. They voted to approve the June recommendations of an ad-hoc 5A football committee.

“Big changes, yes,” said Mike Krueger, the chair of the football committee, “but it got unanimous support from the committee, and we got a lot of good feedback on the changes from around the state.”

“There are a lot of positives to it,” Krueger added later. “I know there are going to be hiccups, but at the foundation, it’s really good for 5A football.”

This latest meeting was the fourth the committee has held since last December. In addition, the group has conducted two direct surveys of member schools, and each committee member has served as a sounding board for input for the rest of state.

At the crux of these changes is a modified Rating Percentage Index (RPI) system, which takes into account a team’s winning percentage, the winning percentage of a team’s opponents, and the winning percentage of the opponents of a team’s opponents.

This is a change from the current Wild Card points system, which determines qualifiers in 5A. (That system will still be used for the 2015 season.)

Already, Class 4A through 6-man has adopted using an RPI to determine postseason qualifiers — and 5A did the same on Monday morning for its 16-team field in 2016. Seven league champions will get automatic bids, and the top nine remaining teams according to the RPI will make the playoffs in 2016.

The RPI is also at the heart of the move to a 16-team playoff field in 5A, as well as the waterfall system. When the football committee met in April, their aim was to standarize the playoff structures in all seven classifications. One glaring difference was the 32-team bracket in 5A.

Since 2006, 5A has been the only class where more than 16 teams made the football playoffs. The change from 32 brings 5A in line with the rest of the classes — all but 6-man, which has an eight-team field, have 16-team tournaments.

But 5A’s leagues, as currently aligned, sit unbalanced, and so simply cutting the bracket would not work.

“When we started talking about (moving to a 16-team bracket), we kept hearing, ‘We’d go to 16, but the problem is the imbalance of the leagues,’” Krueger said.

The waterfall alignment will balance the leagues, and the idea has been well received around the state.

To set the waterfall alignment, teams will be ranked based upon their two-year average in the RPI. The top seven teams in that ranking will each be placed into seven separate leagues. From there, teams will be snaked into leagues. So, No. 8 will be placed into the same league as No. 7; No. 9 will be with No. 6; No. 10 with No. 5, and so on — until all teams are placed into a league.

The expectation is that 5A will have 42 teams in the 2016-18 cycle, and so each league will have six teams.

This waterfall system was made possible due to the close geographic proximity within 5A. Once realignment for the 2016-18 cycle is finalized this November, every school in 5A will be along the I-25 corridor — making the longest drive from one school to another roughly two hours.

“You were going to travel for non-conference, anyway,” Krueger said. “So that’s just now a conference game, and I can still play my cross-town rival, but it’s just a non-conference game. So people may say, ‘Travel, travel, travel.’ The reality is that it’s the same amount of travel, and it could even possibly be less.”

On Tuesday at the All-School Summit, athletic directors will break into classifications to talk about league alignment in football for 6-man through 4A.

AURORA — The football committee met on Tuesday to discuss playoff format and alignment ahead of the 2016-18 two-year cycle.

The majority of the meeting was a general top-level discussion about ideas and proposals. In the months to come, the committee will take those and drill down into the details.

Tuesday’s meeting was the second six-hour meeting the committee has held on playoff formats and alignment since its annual December meeting. The first was in February.

The group is looking at alignment in an entirely different way this cycle. They want, by and large, the schools to take it over and put themselves in leagues, much as they do in other sports, such as basketball.

In recent years, the football committee has hammered out alignment on its own while taking input from the membership.

“We’re trying to find more ways to create more shared decision-making,” said Mike Krueger, who chairs the football committee.

The committee is also approaching league structure from a top-down approach. That is, they want to figure out playoff formats first, and then figure out the way alignment will best suit those formats.

“They need to know: This is how we qualify, now let’s decide how to format our conferences,” said CHSAA assistant commissioner Harry Waterman, who administers football.

“Whatever we decide,” said Krueger, the district athletic director of Aurora Public Schools, “it’s going to be what’s best for kids across the state in general.”

These were the main topics of the day:

• The committee wants to even out every playoff field to 16 teams. Currently, 6-man has an 8-team field, and 5A has a 32-team field, while 8-man, 1A, 2A, 3A and 4A all have 16 teams make the playoffs. However, a possibility remains that 5A would be cut from 32 to 24, instead of 32 to 16.
• They also want to move to using a modified RPI to replace the Wild Card points system to determine a team’s relative strength. The modified RPI would take the following factors into account: a team’s winning percentage, their opponents’ winning percentage, their opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage, and a modifier based upon the classification of the opponent.
• The group will give the current alignment to member schools for them to adjust and tweak as they see fit.
• Each member of the committee will continue to meet with the membership around the state to gather input on postseason format and alignment.

“When we walk into our meeting in December,” Krueger said, “we’re going to have a pretty dang good idea of what our playoff formats and alignment are going to look like.”

Additionally, the following ideas were discussed:

• The committee wants to explore bringing all seven championship games to one central location. Obviously, many logistics and hurdles would be in the way of this even becoming a possibility, but the committee decided to explore it before their next meeting this summer.
• They want to look at bringing the 8-man playoff format to all classes. 8-man puts all league champions in the postseason field, then has a seeding committee pick qualifiers from thereon using a staggered method of considering each league’s No. 2 teams, No. 3s, No. 4s and so on.

[divider]

Committee doesn’t support 6A proposal

There was one very specific outcome on Tuesday: The group decided to not support the proposal from the Union Pacific League which seeks to add a Class 6A. That proposal is headed to the Legislative Council on Thursday.

After a lengthy discussion, they came to the conclusion that the concept was good, but they saw too many holes in it. They would like to look at adding 6A at some point, but not right now, and want time to develop a polished plan.

Some committee members were told by schools that the proposal could force them to cancel their junior varsity programs, or the suspend their programs entirely.

Additionally, because the group has so many meetings and spends countless hours working on alignment, they felt it didn’t make sense to bypass the entire process, which is what the proposal did.

“It has some good ideas,” Krueger said to the group, “but there’s a lot of discussion that needs to take place. The unintended consequences and ramifications of the proposal could be far-reaching, and we need time to explore them. That is why you have a committee.”

Waterman added, “For the greater good of the whole state, we’re not ready for this right now. I do think it’s something we can look at in the future, but now’s not the time.”