We really ought to be careful about what we wish for.
Tonight, the California Interscholastic Federation will be
voting on a proposal to create a state championship for high school
football.
We really ought to be careful about what we wish for.
Tonight, the California Interscholastic Federation will be voting on a proposal to create a state championship for high school football. The new system would take divisional champions of California’s sections, of which our own Central Coast Section is one, and through a computer ranking process pit one from the southern half of the state against one from the northern half.
It’s a bad idea.
Sure, it would mean just one more game for the six football teams representing the proposed three divisions in the new state football format. But one thing high school players really don’t need right now is even more games – even one.
Gilroy High played 12 games last year, missing out on a 13th by five points in its CCS Large School quarterfinal loss to Oak Grove. Hollister did play 13 – the maximum possible in the current system – also losing to Oak Grove, in the Large School final.
Look, there’s a reason you don’t see teenagers in the NFL, the way you do in the NBA and Major League Baseball. Football is a fantastic but brutal sport. Younger bodies just aren’t physically ready to handle lots of time on the football field. Even a one-game increase in the high school football schedule represents a significant jump in the risk for injury in this hard-hitting sport.
Gilroy High football coach Darren Yafai supports the proposal, noting that they have state championship games in Texas, where he says, “Football is the best and biggest.”
We Californians know all about Texans. They gave us Enron, rolling blackouts and the worst budget deficit in this state’s history.
And now we want to import “Friday Night Lights” from these maniacs, too?
There was a time, not so long ago, when football at the high school and college level wasn’t about this incessant drive to find out who’s No. 1. It was about the Prune Bowl, the Big Game, the annual Army-Navy clash. Now those historic rivalry games that brought together whole communities take a backseat to the relentless drive to the playoffs, as we treat the NFL as the only football model worth following.
We’ve already lost something of our football heritage by embracing our current sectional playoff system. Let’s not go even further down that road. Let’s not put young football players more at risk against even tougher competition, when they’re already worn down at the end of an already too-long season.
Let’s call our section champions – who rule areas as big as many entire states – what they really are, which is pretty darn impressive. And deserving of a rest.
