NCS has major playoff changes in team sports

The North Coast Section football playoffs will have a different look next season.

Gone are the days of smaller schools such as Marin Catholic outclassing inferior opponents 69-0 or overmatched larger schools such as James Logan losing badly to De La Salle three years in a row.

Hello, competitive equity.

The most popular or unpopular term in the modern era of California high school sports, depending on where you stand, is coming to the NCS.

Not just in football but in all team sports.

The section's Board of Managers passed the proposal by a 30-13 vote on Friday.

“I think it will be good, and if it's not, we'll find where the tweaks need to be made and we'll tweak it and we'll make it better,” NCS commissioner Pat Cruickshank told the Bay Area News Group. “We're going to make this work for our kids. We want those more competitive games.

“It's not about championship equity. It's about competitive equity and being able to go to a game in our playoffs and be competitive in that game.”

If the new format had been in place last school year, Piedmont's top-ranked girls basketball team would have been among the section's six Open Division schools rather than plowing through Division IV.

The Highlanders won their three section playoff games by an average of 38.7 points.

Hardly barnburners. The NCS's format for football will be similar to the neighboring Central Coast Section, which has gone with competitivebased playoffs for a couple of years.

But they're not identical. The NCS model for football starts with seven base divisions determined by enrollment. The base for the top division is schools with an enrollment of 2,300-plus.

The home base for powerhouse De La Salle, with an enrollment of 2,046, is Division II.

For the sake of calmness, let's push pause for a second. Before you choke on your gum, De La Salle will not be in D-II.

Per the section's proposal, teams will be seeded using MaxPreps' (computer-generated) rankings. The top eight qualifying teams, no matter if they're Division VII or Division I, will be in the Open/Division I playoffs.

The rest will mostly follow in order of ranking, just as many sections and the state CIF have been doing to seed playoffs.

The NCS will continue to have a seeding committee, which has the green light to move teams around if there are head-to-head results and strength-ofschedule elements to consider.

The new format will remove the section's pre-determined divisions, which led to some deserving teams (Liberty and Antioch among them) from missing the football playoffs last season.

“It's different because it's more real-time now,” Cruickshank said. “We're going to use real-time data as opposed to divisions that were based on (results from) the last two years or three years.”

The base divisions in the new format will prevent the largest schools (James Logan or Amador Valley, for instance) from dropping to Division VI or VII or the smallest schools jumping from Division VII to Division II.

Except for the Open/Division I bracket, teams are not allowed to move up or down more than two divisions from their home base.