No. 1-ranked teams get good news in GHSA’s historic final football coin toss
The Georgia High School Association flipped a coin Monday, signaling the end of an era.
Since 2018, the GHSA has used the toss — conducted and videoed in the lobby of its Thomaston office — to determine the home team when the teams are seeded the same in most bracket sports.
The coin toss is made for the quarterfinals and the semifinals, the only times when same-seeded teams can meet until the finals, which are played on a neutral field.
On Monday, the flip ensured that No. 1-ranked football teams Grayson, Hughes, Creekside and Worth County will be at home next week in the semifinals — if they win Friday night in the quarterfinals.
That’s because the coin landed heads, which means the teams higher on the physical bracket will be at home if they are the same seed as their opponent or higher.
The outcome applies only to classes 6A, 5A, 4A and A Division II. The other four playoff classes are seeded 1-32 based on the GHSA’s Postseason Rankings Formula, a math model, and the higher seed is always the home team.
The GHSA earlier this month adopted a 1-32 seeding format for all classifications beginning in 2026-27, with the higher seeds playing at home. No coin flips are needed.
For many years, the home team was predetermined on the bracket before the season, but schools complained that wasn’t entirely random, even if the GHSA changed the draws every year.
The GHSA then went to coin tosses, but they weren’t universal. That is, the teams had to conduct the coin tosses among themselves. That sometimes meant two coaches driving two hours to meet each other in a parking lot, flip a coin, then turnaround and drive home.
A few veteran football coaches were reminiscing about those days this week.
“We used to pick places that were well-known, like the Varsity on North Avenue,” Blessed Trinity coach Ed Dudley said. “We had to reflip with Coach Corey Jarvis when our coin got stuck in a crack (in a 2007 playoff game between Dudley’s Walton team and Jarvis’ M.L. King team). We lost the second toss but came out on top in the game.”
Gilmer’s Paul Standard had a similar coin flip malfunction in 2009 when coaching St. Pius against Peach County, then coached by Chad Campbell. They met at an abandoned gas station outside of Monticello.
“I gave him a quarter and he flipped it and called heads, and it hit the ground and started rolling on the pavement,” Standard said. “Now picture two grown men chasing a quarter rolling on the pavement, and it rolled over and it was tails. So we played the game at St. Pius X. Peach beat us in OT 21-14 in a great game.”
With video streaming catching on, even among old coaches, then-GHSA executive director Robin Hines recognized the folly in the old practice and began the tradition of universal tosses in his second year in office.
Jay Russell, the current football coordinator and assistant executive director, administered what could be the final football toss. Other tosses will take place in bracket sports such as basketball and baseball later this academic year.
