Half Empty or Half Full
December 11, 2012
After an absence of decades, eight-player football has been reintroduced to Michigan high schools during recent years. When enough schools sponsored the program, the MHSAA responded with a four-week playoff in 2011. The number of schools sponsoring the sport grew in 2012, and more growth is expected for the 2013 season.
Like almost everything that occurs in life, what has benefited some schools is not seen by others to be in their own best interests.
Advocates of the eight-player game include those schools whose declining enrollments couldn’t support the eleven-player game. Football has returned to some communities and has been saved from the brink of elimination in others.
However, as two and soon three dozen Class D schools opt for the eight-player game, the remaining Class D schools that sponsor football find themselves in disrupted leagues and forced to travel further to complete eleven-player football schedules; and they must compete against larger teams in Division 8 of the eleven-player MHSAA Football Playoffs.
In fact, the growth of the eight-player game among our smallest schools has resulted in more Class D schools qualifying for the MHSAA Football Playoffs than ever before. In 2012, an all-time high 44.0 percent of Class D schools that sponsor football qualified for either the single division eight-player tournament or Division 8 of the eleven-player tournament. This compares to 42.2 percent of Class C schools, 44.9 percent of Class B schools and 41.6 percent of Class A schools that sponsor football and qualified for the 2012 playoffs.
Some see the eight-player game as the savior of the football experience in Class D schools. Others see it differently.
Travel Football
July 15, 2016
The University of Michigan will host a high school football game on Sept. 2, 2016. That would not make news, except that the game is between two out-of-state high school teams.
The teams are from New Jersey and Maryland, likely chosen to assist the Wolverines’ recruiting efforts in those states, and to help them make more waves in the college football world. Both high school teams are private schools, and each comes with heavy baggage.
Some public schools in New Jersey have boycotted playing the New Jersey school in football; the Maryland school is not a member of the MHSAA’s counterpart association in that state. One school is flaunting the rules; the other school has no rules to follow.
That major college football has been in an uncontrolled spiral of excess is not news; but its insidious damage to high school sports is finally making headlines.
NCAA rules have recently been robbing schools of winter and spring sports athletes as college coaches entice high school seniors to graduate at the end of their seventh semester and start practicing football with their future college teammates several months early. We are grateful to see Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby question the practice of enrolling players before their scheduled high school graduation.
Now, NCAA rules appear to invite universities to select high school football teams from anywhere there’s a great prospect or two, and transport the teams across the U.S. to compete in a nearly empty stadium, save for recruiting “gurus,” athletic apparel reps and a few media. We are hoping to see some college sports leaders step up to question this practice.
All of this leads to the rich getting richer – on both the college and school levels. All of which induces another updraft to the spiral of excess in what are supposed to be education-based programs.