Playoff proposal would adjust schedule, remove Thanksgiving Day games
A proposal to the CIAC’s football committee starts with a suggestion that teams play most of their games against likesized schools. It could end with a revamp of the entire season for the sport in Connecticut, eliminating traditional league schedules and the traditional Thanksgiving end of the regular season.
The Connecticut High School Football Alliance, which helps schedule interleague games for teams
FOOTBALL from six of the state’s eight conferences, sent a request to the committee to “have an appointed centralized group assume the role of scheduling high school football games in the state of Connecticut.” They suggest that group should schedule based on enrollment and two years of game results.
The proposal also throws open for conversation a 2024 schedule with nine regular-season games counting toward the playoffs, ending the season earlier; moving rivalry games from Thanksgiving to Columbus Day weekend; and expanding the playoffs again, perhaps adding four teams in each of the six divisions, wrapping up with championships on Thanksgiving weekend.
“We want it to be vetted by everyone,” SCC commissioner Al Carbone said. “Our goal is a good conversation.”
It’s early in what could be a long process, but Ledyard athletic director Jim Buonocore, who serves as chairperson for football in the ECC, said the proposal was a year or two in the making and athletic directors in the Alliance’s five member leagues (CCC, ECC, FCIAC, SCC and SWC) showed support for the submission of the proposal. They have not heard feedback from the CIAC, and some parts may win approval while others don’t.
But they say their primary goal is a more equitable regular season, scheduling games almost exclusively within the CIAC’s six classes, which are based on enrollment with limited exceptions.
“We’re just trying to continue to move the sport of football forward,” Weston athletic director and SWC co-commissioner Mark Berkowitz said, and the schedule is a key part of that.
The current schedule calls for 10 regular-season games over 12 weeks, ending
on Thanksgiving, before six class tournaments of eight teams each play off over two weeks.
The Alliance put together a sample template of what the proposal might yield in 2024 for a division of 22 teams. It starts with the weekend of Sept. 6-7, basically the same weekend that began this season, with nine regular-season games running through Nov. 1-2.
The 22 teams get a ranking based on the past two years’ CIAC playoff points, taking out a layer of subjectivity, and eight of their nine games are assigned based on a matrix that sets schedules based on those rankings: The top team in a class, for example, plays teams rated No. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11 and 20 over the course of the season.
“If there are 22 teams in each class,” Carbone said, “the 22nd team should have the 22nd-toughest schedule.”
Columbus Day weekend is reserved for a Thanksgiving-style rivalry game or another game to be set up.
With a 12-team playoff, the top four get Nov. 8 off while the other eight play off. Quarterfinals and semifinals follow on the next two weekends with championships on Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving 2024 happens to be its latest possible date, Nov. 28.
That specific proposal, Buonocore said, was “kind of plug-and-play” if the CIAC wanted to adopt it as soon as 2024.
Losing a regular-season Thanksgiving, Buonocore conceded, “will be a hot topic,” and he hoped for a good discussion of the pros and cons.
For Thanksgiving week this year, the CIAC master schedule shows one game Monday, then six Tuesday, 13 Wednesday and 36 on Thanksgiving Day. So that’s 71 out of 138 state teams (plus Westerly, R.I.), playing on the holiday morning and another 40 earlier in the week.
Five of the state’s six longest rivalries according to the Connecticut High School Football Record Book meet on Thanksgiving. The sixth, SheltonDerby, was a Thanksgiving staple until 2021, when Derby forfeited for lack of players and the series ended. Shelton no longer plays on Thanksgiving, but reconstituted Derby began a series with Oxford last year.
Teams are allowed 10 regular-season games now. Berkowitz said it’s possible that two teams could agree to play a 10th, whether officially or not.
“Just like any other sport where you’re allowed to schedule a scrimmage or whatever you want to call it,” Berkowitz said, “as long as it’s before the season ends, which is the championship. Some may want to, some may not.”
The proposal moves entirely away from traditional league schedules, which had been de-emphasized in recent years in most conferences. There are already no more league playoff games, and in every conference but the NVL and Pequot, the Alliance schedule has rearranged league games into games against a theoretically better-matched nonleague opponent.
“People say there’s a chance this opens things up for (less league influence in) other sports. I disagree,” Berkowitz said. “Football is a different beast. It’s once a week, Friday and Saturday for the most part, so it doesn’t impact academics at all if you have to travel a little bit.”
He also pointed to the size of football rosters, where school size often plays a role in how large or small teams are; that’s less of a safety concern, he said, in other sports.
“Not every league schedules the same way,” Carbone said. “Everyone’s like, ‘SCC Tier 1 is a gauntlet.’ We’re proud of that. It’s good football. In the end, those teams in SCC Tier 1 are in four different (playoff ) divisions.
“Is our league schedule helping our teams get in the playoffs? If you go 5-5 in a good league,” Carbone said, “you should get rewarded.”
The playoffs expanded from 32 to 48 teams last year, and this proposal makes 72.
Proponents of expanded playoffs argue that while giving more players a chance at playing postseason games they also keep more teams in contention and make more regularseason games meaningful. Opponents say they water down the playoffs and introduce first-round mismatches. A frequent gripe is that while .400 is enough to make the playoffs in many CIAC sports, there were 13 .600 and two .700 football teams who missed out last year even with expanded playoffs.