Connecticut bill protects Thanksgiving football games
Connecticut high school football games on Thanksgiving Day are a long-standing tradition in parts of the state. Recent discussions and even proposals for a new playoff format put the dates of those rivalries in jeopardy, which has led to much public debate.
Now, a few graphs in a 254page bill will protect Thanksgiving football in the state once it receives an expected signature from Gov. Ned Lamont.
The Connecticut legislature passed a bonding package Wednesday night totaling more than $400 million for the next fiscal year. The bill included a small section for a “Ban on delegating authority to schedule Thanksgiving Day high school football games.”
The addition to the bonding package states that local and regional school boards cannot delegate the authority to schedule football games on Thanksgiving to any nonprofit organization.
It also bars local boards of education from adopting policies which would prohibit the scheduling of Thanksgiving Day football games.
In November, the Connecticut High School Football Alliance, an affiliation of conferences invested in creating competitive scheduling matchups for high school football, submitted a proposal that fundamentally would have revamped high school football scheduling. It included a suggestion to end to the regular season in early November and hold championships the weekend af
ter Thanksgiving, effectively removing the holiday as the traditional end to the Connecticut regular season.
The CIAC told Hearst Connecticut Media this winter it would not be going forward with a proposal to centralize state football schedules after an interest survey failed to show majority support for it.
The CIAC, which is a private nonprofit organization, does not schedule high school football games in Connecticut. Scheduling is left to individual schools and conferences, some of whom have worked with the Connecticut High School Football Scheduling Alliance. The CIAC does set the rules of play.
The language was inserted into the bill by Finance Committee CoChair Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, who said the issue was brought to his attention by fans and others involved in high school football who had raised concerns changes to the CIAC playoff schedule could threaten the future of Thanksgiving Day games.
“We can’t tell a nonprofit what to do,” Fonfara said, referring to the legal status of the CIAC. “But we can direct a school district. These are longtime rivalries in towns and across towns, so that’s what this was about,”
The current high school football schedule calls for 10 regular-season games over 12 weeks, ending on Thanksgiving, before six class tournaments of eight teams each compete over two weeks in playoffs.
The proposal to create centralized schedules formed the basis of a major revamp that the Alliance floated publicly in November. That proposal would cap the regular season at nine games, ending the season earlier and moving rivalry games from Thanksgiving to Columbus Day weekend and holding state finals the weekend after Thanksgiving. It also suggested expanding the playoffs to as many as 72 teams, adding four teams in each of the six divisions.
The Connecticut High School Football Alliance has scheduled interconference games for teams from six of the state’s eight football leagues since 2017.