La. power point system causing ire among coaches

South Terrebonne football coach Richard Curlin took one quick peek at the scoreboard, then made the long walk from midfield to under the goal post to address his team.

The Gators had just dropped a 41-28 contest to Assumption to close out their regular season, but all wasn’t lost just yet for Curlin.

Because after all, the loss was just the Gators’ third of the season and a 7-3 football team will always make the playoffs in Class 5A, right?

Wrong.

The Gators were seeded No. 33 in the final power rankings of the season and as a result were the final team left out of the playoffs.

“We’d never seen a team fall that far in just one week,” Curlin said. “Very rarely does that happen. But in this case, I guess it did.”

The Gators’ misfortune has sparked a long debate about the process that determines playoff teams n Louisiana’s power ranking system.

The system, which has been in place for the past decade is a mathematically based formula that rewards teams for wins, strength of schedule and playing up in classification.

Some local coaches say the system also has some obvious flaws that need to be addressed as soon as possible.

“I hate it,” South Lafourche coach Terry Farmer said of the system.

Former Thibodaux coach Dennis Lorio agreed and said he, too, would like a change from the norms.

“The power point system has some definite fallacies in it,” he said.

The first thing coaches don’t like about the current format is the way district games are limited or “watered down.”

With the mathematical system, each district champion is guaranteed a spot in the playoffs. But outside of that, everyone else is fair game, which means some districts could send six teams to the playoffs and some districts could send just one.

That imbalance, Farmer and Lorio tout, make district play no longer as important as it used to be when three teams from every district received an at-large berth to the playoffs.

“I’m fixing to do a whole proposal to the LHSAA to try and correct some things,” Farmer said. “Because I just don’t think kids should be penalized for district play. I just think district should mean something. And I think the first three out of each district needs to go. Period. Because without that system, then it defeats the purpose of having the districts in the first place. Power points would be fine, but only if they are for seeding purposes. They just shouldn’t decide who gets to go.

“It’s truly not a matter of who’s going to win a state championship. It’s really not. There’s 32 teams who will make the playoffs, but guess what, 31 of them are going to go home. … Are we trying to penalize 31 other teams to try and find that one Cinderella? Or are we trying to extend the season a little bit so these kids can keep playing valuable games past the fifth ballgame? What do teams do when they look after the fifth game and figure out they’re not even in the picture? They’ll think, ‘I don’t have a chance at the district championship, I don’t have a chance to make the playoffs, I don’t have a chance to play my rival at the end of the year and have it actually mean something,’ and that’s not fair, because that’s what I think high school football is all about. Those three or four teams or five teams who have a legitimate chance to win the state championship, they’ll end up making it there anyway, so why penalize everyone else?”

Lorio agreed and said he can see a big difference in the importance of rivalry games from his first stint at Thibodaux in the 1990s to now.

“The big district rivalry games are really of no more value now than the non-district games,” Lorio said. “Yeah, the champion gets the guaranteed bid to get in, but I think those games should carry more weight in the seeding process.”

The next reason some are opposed to the process is because of the strength of schedule factor that is in the mathematical formula.

Prep football schedules are usually made two years in advance of when the actual game takes place, which makes it virtually impossible for a coach to determine if an opponent they scheduled will or will not be a successful team.

Aside from that, injuries and other things that happen during the season sometimes serve as an anchor to a team’s score.

That was what ultimately cost South Terrebonne a spot, as their four non-district opponents had a combined 9-31 record.

“The way it is now, all of the opponents you play, how their season goes affects you,” Lorio said. “So sometimes that’s not quite right. The misfortune of another team affects your own power rating, and I don’t think that’s a fair measure … South Terrebonne is a prime example. They’re a good football, had a 7-3 record, but because of some other teams having a tougher year, it penalized them. I just don’t know how that’s fair.”

Despite the system’s critics, some local coaches do think the current format is the most accurate way to decide the playoff teams.

And surprisingly enough, Curlin is one of those people. Even after being snake bitten this year, the coach said he’s a fan of the current system over the regional system used in years past.

“It just so happened to fall where we got the short end of the stick this year,” Curlin said. “That’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it is. We ultimately had control of our own destiny in the last game of the year against Assumption and we lost. Someone will always be left out, but we didn’t really like the old system too much, either, so we were excited when this was put in place.”

Vandebilt Catholic coach Laury Dupont agrees. Dupont has seen the in’s and out’s of plenty playoff formulas in his more than 20 years as a coach he, too, thinks this one is the best the state has ever had.

“The power ranking system works,” Dupont said. “It’s the best system we’ve seen since I’ve been in coaching.”

Dupont said it’s not fair for every district to have the same number of playoff representatives because some districts have far stronger competition than others, meaning placing fourth in a tougher district just might be a bigger accomplishment than placing second in another district.

Patterson coach Tommy Minton agreed. In the Lumberjacks’ case, they are a Class 3A school and receive bonus points from playing 4A and 5A competition.

“To me, it gives you the best representation from 1-32 of separating the better teams from the middle of the pack,” Minton said. “Everybody’s going to want to point to records. How can a team be 9-1 and be a No. 12 seed or something like that? But the reason why they’re 9-1 is probably because they’ve played a pretty weak schedule. I think this system benefits those teams who play a tougher schedule. And that’s how it should be.”

The current system is here, and will likely be here for at least the next couple seasons.

Dupont’s been in the game for 20 years and he said he would trust the current format for however long it remains in place.

“If there was an idea out there that was better, than we’d already be using it,” he said. “This is the best that we could do.”