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Not Right for Us

March 7, 2017

The proposal to utilize KPI Rankings to seed the District and Regional rounds of the MHSAA Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments should not be adopted by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.

This is no criticism of KPI Rankings per se, or of its creator who is assistant athletic director at Michigan State University; but it’s not the right thing to do for our statewide high school basketball tournaments.

The KPI rankings is one of a half-dozen means used by the NCAA to seed its Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. But the proposal before us is that KPI rankings become the one and only system for seeding the MHSAA’s tournaments. There would be no other criteria and no human judgment.

The result would be seeding that misses important details, like which teams are hot and which are not at season end, and which teams have recently lost players to injuries or ineligibilities and which have had players return.

KPI ranks teams on a game-by-game basis by assigning a value to every game played. A loss to an opponent with a poor record is considered a “bad loss” and has a negative point value. A win over an opponent with a good record is considered a “good win” and earns a positive point value. Margin of victory is a factor.

This is a nice tool for the NCAA to use, along with a variety of other tools and considerations that its billion-dollar budget can accommodate, but none of which is proposed for seeding the MHSAA tournaments. KPI Rankings is not sufficient as the one-and-only seeding criterion for MHSAA tournaments.

Moreover, dependence on a seeding system owned by a single individual, who is outside the MHSAA office, and who has the potential to move from MSU to anywhere across the USA, is a poor business strategy.

If there is to be seeding, there are more appropriate ways to do it for the high school level. But first there needs to be clearer consensus that seeding is a good thing to do, philosophically and practically. In the MHSAA we do this sport by sport, and level by level. And the jury is still out for seeding in Michigan high school basketball.

Baby Steps

April 8, 2014

Two first, small steps have been taken in the direction of making school-sponsored sports for junior high/middle school-age athletes more attractive to these students and their parents.
Next school year, MHSAA member junior high/middle schools have the option to increase the length of quarters in basketball from six minutes to a maximum of eight minutes and to increase the length of quarters in football from eight minutes to a maximum of ten minutes.
In late March, the MHSAA Representative Council approved these recommendations of the MHSAA Basketball and Football Committees which had favorable reaction also from the MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee and from the Junior High/Middle School Task Force which is meeting throughout 2014 to bring special attention to long languishing issues of policy and programming for students prior to high school.
It is hoped that the up to eight additional minutes in school-sponsored basketball and football contests will allow more students to get playing time in more games, and we fully expect that it will also mean more playing time in all games for some students. Both are needed for school sports to be competitive in the youth sports marketplace.
These may have been among the easiest decisions the Representative Council will face as the Junior High/Middle School Task Force works its way through many tougher topics during 2014 when, in many cases, societal trends will confront sacred cows.