Getting it Right: Solving GHSA challenges with math, Part IX

“If you sometimes get the feeling between here and the back cover that you are coming in on the middle of a discussion, it is because you are.”

Of course James was referring to the fact that he and a handful of colleagues had for years been establishing a substantive body of baseball knowledge, much of it devoted to challenging past assumptions and certainly most of it either largely unnoticed or promptly ignored by the baseball community at the time.

The work of James and his contemporaries (along with many others since) has now been made popular by Moneyball, the story of how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Bean embraced this analytical, evidence-based approach and turned the team into one of the most competitive in Major League Baseball. Although the popularity of Moneyball ironically eroded much of Oakland's advantage as other teams adopted similar tactics, this only serves to illustrate the point that challenging past assumptions through an analytical, evidence-based approach is often the catalyst for making substantive progress.

I started this series by asserting that the greatest classification challenge facing the GHSA is Georgia’s uneven population distribution. Although interest has been renewed with the upcoming Big 44, in truth this is part of an ongoing discussion from since the creation of Class AAAAAA in 2012, if not from a few years before then. The greater the effort to separate the largest schools for the purposes of competitive fairness, the greater the difficulty in maintaining an equitable region alignment for those few geographically-isolated large schools in South Georgia.

Although I haven’t mentioned this issue since the first post, I believe this is an area where some substantive progress can also be made by challenging a past assumption with an analytical, evidence-based approach. Namely, instead of questioning which teams should go in which region, we should be challenging the notion that the GHSA needs a region structure at all, at least for the Big 44.

The region structure was introduced in 1948 at a time when it probably made perfect sense. Travel was more difficult, interest in high school activities was largely provincial, and the population was more evenly distributed across the state. However each of these factors has changed to some degree in the interceding seven decades between then and today. Interstates have turned previously overnight affairs into a one day events, AJC.com and GAVSV.com demonstrate that fans avidly follow teams from all over the state, and 90% of today’s largest schools occupy an area perhaps less than a fifth of the size of the entire state.

Adherence to the region structure aligns these pressures into an unhealthy tension for the Big 44, at least from the perspective of most South Georgia schools and fans.

But what if we were to abandon the region structure? What would replace it?

As a mental exercise, let’s ask ourselves what structure would provide the most complete measure of competitiveness if time and cost were of no consequence. An imaginary GHSA if you will.  This will serve as our ideal end state to which we’ll aspire.

The only structure that provides the most complete measure of competitiveness is round robin scheduling to allow a complete set of standings to be constructed from the results. Logically, any other structure, just like the region structure, can at best only provide a partial measure of competitiveness.

Round robin scheduling is the natural tendency as demonstrated from the schedules of Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL, where each team does in fact play every other team not only once but multiple times. This natural tendency has also exerted pressure on the NFL regular season schedule, pushing it from 10 games in 12 weeks in the 1940s to 16 games in 17 weeks starting in the 1990s.

But, as many of you already suspect, round robin scheduling is clearly impractical for 417 GHSA football teams. If nothing else, academic considerations and player fatigue reasonably fixes the regular season at around ten games, far short of our ideal end state.

But we can still advance toward our ideal end state by embracing that good ol’ analytical, evidence-based approach mentioned above. So let’s adjust our imaginary GHSA to where the results of the ten regular season games currently played by each team are extrapolated to provide the most complete measure of competiveness possible within the bounds of practicality.

In short, a GHSA where a tool such as the Extended Standings is used.

Let’s look at a specific example of how a team might behave in this instance.

If no region structure existed for the Big 44, logistics would probably dictate that Valdosta play most of the Big 44 schools in South Georgia anyway, but the Wildcats might also opt to play probable Big 44 members North Gwinnett and Grayson instead of a pair of hapless Class AA opponents in otherwise meaningless games. However, if the logistics were too great of an obstacle to travel to Gwinnett, Valdosta could still get appropriate credit for challenging solid Class AAAAA opponents, such as Northside (Warner Robins) and Ware County.

If taken a step further and the region structure abandoned for all classes, nothing would prevent Valdosta from forming a conference with Lowndes and Tift County, and perhaps also with traditional rivals Thomas County Central and Coffee County, both in lower classes but each within about an hour’s drive from Winnersville. Similarly, Camden County would be free to join their slightly smaller brethren up the road in Savannah or even strike out as an independent. Or maybe conference membership would make sense for football but not for other sports and activities.

Actually, nothing of any real substance prevents this scenario in Class A today aside from the assumption that each GHSA team must be aligned within a region. Since power ratings are already used, what harm would it do to eliminate the Class A regions and allow those teams to freely schedule and align themselves through the process of self-determination?  Schools focused on making the playoffs would naturally schedule more difficult opponents while those not emphasizing the playoffs could make the decision based more on logistics, or even commonality in school vision, religious affiliations, academic credentials, or whatever made sense from the school's perspective.

For those schools focused on making the playoffs, eliminating the region structure and utilizing the Extended Standings to provide a complete measure of competiveness will push teams into scheduling behaviors that place a greater emphasis on competiveness while also allowing each team to factor in the logistics of travel to the degree they felt appropriate for their school.

At any rate, I'm excited about the possibilities for next year, but I also recognize challenging past assumptions can be a slow process.

The NFL standings simply ignored the 256 tie games in the league's first half-century of existence, which potentially affected the championship three different times. It wasn't until 1972 before an analytical, evidence-based approach was finally adopted – the now quite ordinary practice of counting a tie as a half-win/half-loss.

Hopefully, use of the Extended Standings, or at least some other system that is transparent, objective, economical, equitable, and rigorous, will eventually come to be seen as quite ordinary as well.

I’ll close this post and the series with a thought from one of my personal heroes, Henry Ford, who observed:

“It is not easy to get away from tradition. That is why all our new operations are always directed by men who . . . have not had a chance to get on really familiar terms with the impossible.”

We've looked forward to the region standings on Sunday mornings for nearly 70 years, so we're already on really familiar terms with the impossible.  But, just as with the Oakland Athletics, we can challenge some past assumptions by embracing an analytical, evidence-based approach to make substantive progress in answering the question of "Which teams are deserving of a playoff invitation?"

The Big 44 would be better for it.

If you’ve stuck with me so far through the series, I greatly appreciate your patience. If you have any thoughts on the Extended Standings or anything else I’ve offered during the series, please don’t hesitate to reach out.  For now, please see the Extended Standings presented here on AJC.com each week!