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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Extra Point: No tiebreak solution set
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With just two Fridays left in the regular season, it’s the time of year that fans start dreaming of what the playoffs will bring.
Will your team make it into the postseason? Which teams are going to see their season end next week? Who will your team match up with in the first round? It can be fun to scan the region standings and see that your team controls its own playoff fate or that maybe they’re going to need a little help to get in.
But each year, there’s a problem when looking at tight region races: No one seems to know the tiebreaking formulas for each region.
Each region has a representative who is responsible for knowing his region’s tiebreakers but, with 40 regions in the state, it’s difficult to keep track of them all.
While the Georgia High School Association has its own default tiebreakers, the GHSA allows each region to use any tiebreaking method it wishes. GHSA executive director Ralph Swearngin said a little less than half of the state’s regions use its recommended tiebreakers, meaning most of the schools and their fans are dealing with whichever method region representatives determined in a preseason meeting.
But Swearngin says the GHSA doesn’t want to wield too much control over what regions do.
“We feel very strongly that there should be a distribution of powers,” Swearngin said. “We feel like the people that are involved in the region need to make the decision that works best for their region. We like the individual autonomy.”
Roswell coach Tim McFarlin - a coach who may end up dealing with one of the more complicated tiebreaker scenarios in a couple of weeks if his Hornets tie with Chattahoochee and Centennial - said he appreciates the GHSA allowing regions to decide these matters for themselves but that something needs to be done about the wildly varying region sizes, complicating playoff scenarios while 5-5 teams go to the postseason and 8-2 teams stay home.
Swearngin said the confusion is mostly an issue of poor communication, and he agreed that posting each region’s tiebreaking formula on the GHSA Web site could be a viable option.
You make the call: What do you think? Should the GHSA decide on one uniform tiebreaking formula for each of the state’s regions? Would placing each region’s formula online be a good compromise? Is there another solution? How much worse does region size make this problem?
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