Playing against a stacked deck

Editor’s note: This is the third article in a series intended to keep readers updated on where the Valley teams stand in the race for 2018 football playoff positions by examining how they are ranked weekto-week and to look back at how the playoff seeding formats and criteria have evolved over the years.

Last week we looked at Calipatria, Holtville and Imperial joining the San Diego Section in 1980 and how they appeared in 12 of 13 CIF Class 1A championship football games until 1992.

This week, we’ll look at how those teams were impacted by the 1993 realignment of schools by the SD-CIF and how resulting problems continued when Brawley, Calexico, Central and Southwest joined them in 1998.

We will also review the current 2018 power-rankings for some of the Valley teams and examine how Maxpreps.com determines those ranking for the SDCIF while introducing a more informative website, calpreps.com.

Continuing with the narrative on the evolution of playoff seeding, it should be noted that before the SD-CIF reorganized school divisions in 1993, the success the Valley school’s football teams in the CIF playoffs from 1980 through 1992 was also true for all boys and girls sports, as they captured numerous titles due to the fact the playoff seeding apparently was fair.

All that changed in ’93, when CIF went from three classes of schools to four divisions, still divided basically by school population, landing the Valley schools in Division IV. This included most of the private schools in the section, some of which moved up from eight-man football.

It was a drastic change in terms of competition as the expanded playoff brackets meant more games for the Valley schools and lower seeding.

It’s important to note that when the Valley schools joined the SD-CIF, playoff brackets were derived from a “seeding meeting” held at the conclusion of the season and where a panel of coaches voted on where teams would be bracketed.

The criteria for the seeding remains the same today and appears simple enough: A team is ranked based on its win-loss record, their strength of schedule and the margin of victory or defeat.

The problem for Valley schools came when their schedule included Southern Section or Yuma schools, which the coaches seeding committee ignored as they had no basis to judge those school’s strength and therefore the scores.

Further, because a large number San Diego area schools choose not to travel to the Valley, local teams were penalized when strong teams would not schedule them.

Lastly, while the criteria were straightforward, the decisions were being made by coaches from San Diego and an inevitable “human factor” found Valley teams at a severe disadvantage.

Hence, while the Valley schools played in almost every CIF football championship game from 1980-1992, from 1993 to 2005 when CIF added a Division V, no Valley team appeared in a title game and all Division IV championships were played between private schools.

Coinciding with the new division was that private school recruiting of players became rampant and the awarding of “need-based tuition assistance” — aka scholarships — began to have an impact on competitiveness versus public schools.

As one Valley coach has characterized it, it was like a hand of poker where one side was dealt cards but the opponent was able to pick cards. At one point, realizing perhaps the futility of playing against a stacked deck, two Imperial Tiger teams in the ‘90s voted to not participate in the Division IV playoffs at all.

In 2005, the SD-CIF added a Division V, again dividing the schools again according to population, which included Holtville and Calipatria. A growing Imperial remained in Division IV.

Next week we will deal with the results of the creation of Division V and the eventual transition to power-ranking playoff seeding.

And now a look at the 2018 CIF/Maxpreps power-rankings going into the last week of the regular season.

Earlier we recommended a website, calpreps. com, which has the same power-ranking for the Valley teams as CIF/ Maxpreps but with a wealth of stats, projections and information.

The calpreps website is easy to use, just scroll down to find the San Diego section and Valley readers can pick either the Imperial Valley or Manzanita leagues.

The power-rankings are the same because one national company, Freeman’s Rating, using algorithms based on records, strengthen of schedule and point-differential (margin of victory/loss), supplies their rankings to both websites.

CIF’s began using these rankings last year at the request of their football coaches committee, which deemed them more “fair” than the CIF’s power-ranking system used from 2013 to 2016 and that is still used for all other sports.

The Freeman rankings will determine the playoff brackets with few exceptions. Basically when two teams played head-tohead

but the losing team is ranked higher, then CIF has said the winning team will be seeded higher.

Interestingly, last week the CIF office was questioned concerning the weight that Freeman puts on margin of victory, which could encourage teams to run up scores. CIF told this paper Freeman will not disclose any information about how they determine the ranking, since it is proprietary.

Available later this week will be projections on this week’s games, which, after examining data this season, appears to factor significantly into a team’s power ranking.

For example, Central was power ranked at 23.5 last week and projected to beat Palo Verde 566. The actual score was 44-6, and the Spartans dropped to 23.0.

Similarly, Brawley was at 20.6 and projected to defeat Calexico (ranked minus-18.7) 40-0. The Wildcats won 21-0, resulting in Brawley dropping to 19.3 while Calexico is now minus-17.1.

Imperial gained after exceeding projections against Southwest, going from 9.1 to 10.3 and moving up two potential playoff spots, from No. 9 to No. 7, in the CIF/ Maxpreps Division III ranking.

A look at the Manzanita League reflects the trend, as Holtville exceeded projections by two touchdowns against Vincent Memorial. The Vikings moved up from minus-7.6 to minus-6.7 and into fourth place ahead of the fifth-ranked Scots (minus-8.8) in the CIF/Maxpreps Division V rankings.

Interesting, both Holtville and Vincent are ranked ahead of Manzanita League-leading Mt. Empire (minus-15.8) in sixth place. Mt. Empire has beaten Holtville and will host Vincent Friday a game that could result in a tri-championship if the Scots prevail.

Brawley and Central will decide who are IVL champs on Friday night at the Bell Game in Brawley. The outcome of that game will be decisive in terms of where both teams, and by extension Imperial, land in the Division III brackets.

Next week, we will examine how the Vincent-Mt. Empire and the Bell Game affects Imperial and other teams as we delve into the realm of strength of schedule.

Meanwhile, we suggest that interested readers check both Maxpreps and calpreps websites to see where the team(s) stand a week before the seeding meeting.