Division I football tourney should expand to 8 teams

When the state football tournament was cut back from eight to six teams in 2009 one of the biggest publicly voiced reasons was competitive balance.

That was valid based on recent history at that time. We were just coming out of the Saint Louis-or-Kahuku-crushing-everything-in-its-path era. The top-seed vs. the bottom-seed tournament games were almost always blowouts.

But, happily, that is past. Many programs have elevated themselves and are capable of winning at the upper level of Hawaii high school football; it’s a marked difference from as recently as five years ago. And there’s nothing that indicates that trend will change in the immediate future.

Also, if we’re talking about balance, what sense does it make to allow for a system with first-round byes for the top two seeds? Even a four-team tournament would be better than six, for that reason alone.

Playoff byes are just too much of an advantage in high school football, allowing a week of injury healing and scouting while the other teams must perform with win-or-done intensity to advance.

That’s just one reason to re-inflate to eight. Another is money.

I’ve written about it in the past, so I won’t belabor it: The second-place team from the Interscholastic League of Honolulu is always one of the best five or six teams in the state, and should at least get to try to play into the state tournament as an at-large entry in an eight-team tourney.

Whether a nonchampion "deserves" in or not is debatable; of course it would never be at the expense of another league’s champion. And you can always set up the bracket guaranteeing two ILH teams don’t meet in the final if that bothers you.

But if a second-place ILH team is clearly better than several others in the state field and clearly will draw a big crowd, meeting those two conditions merits inclusion, or at least access.

There’s hope. Neighbor island athletic directors put forth a proposal to add two teams to the tournament at the ADs’ state conference and it came surprisingly close to passing Saturday. The HHSAA board doesn’t have to go by the recommendation, but it probably will.

Maybe next year.

Would a secret ballot rather than an archaic show of hands have eliminated peer-pressured, block voting by league? Enough to close the seven-vote deficit? I think yes. Too often ADs who want to do the big-picture right thing for the state are blocked by myopic league agenda and politics.

But the important thing is there is progress toward what makes sense.

And in another recommendation that will help gender equity numbers, the ADs nailed it with a proactive move.

Hawaii is already at the forefront in girls wrestling. More will be inspired to take to the mat by Clarissa Chun and Stephany Lee in the Olympics this summer. It is wise to anticipate the additional interest by adding weight classes, as the ADs voted to recommend.

I like half of the cross country classification idea that passed. Yes, it makes sense to award championship accolades to D-II programs; it is harder for these generally smaller schools to build strong teams of five to seven runners. But individually, runners are barely affected, if at all, positively or negatively by their school’s size.

But as long as D-II individual champions who win the race are also recognized as overall champions it’s not a problem.

This, however, remains a major issue: sticking with a football tournament format that includes byes and consistently denies access to one of the state’s best teams.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783.