It’s De La Salle-St. John Bosco in CIF Open
Regional bowls to start this week; Spartans set for Dec. 17 showdown
A monthlong process of crunching data and studying potential pairings based largely on “competitive equity” culminated Sunday as the California Interscholastic Federation unveiled matchups for the state championship football bowl games.
De La Salle, fresh from winning a 25th consecutive North Coast Section title, will again bypass the regionals and move on to the state Open Division game at Sacramento State on Dec. 17 against St. John Bosco.
Freedom, the unbeaten opponent De La Salle routed in the NCS Open final Friday, was placed in the tier right below the Open Division. The Falcons will play Friday night at St. Mary’s-Stockton in the 1AA regional game.
Valley Christian, the highest-rated team from the Central Coast Section, was placed a tier lower than some had projected, sliding from I-A to 2-AA. The Warriors will play host to Cardinal Newman of Santa Rosa on Friday.
Serra, which overcame an 0-4 start that included losses to De La Salle, St. Mary’s-Stockton and Valley Christian to win a section title, will bring a nine-game winning streak into the 2A regional Saturday night. The Padres will travel nearly 200 miles to face undefeated Sanger, a Fresno County school that plays its home games at Tom Flores Stadium, named in honor of the former Raiders coach.
In all, nine teams from Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and Contra Costa counties will participate in the state bowl championships, which expanded to 13 divisions last year.
The CIF stretched the format to make room for all section champions to play in a regional, 50 teams in all.
Sections with Open Divisions, which includes the CCS and NCS, are allowed to send Open runners-up in place of enrollment division champions. Freedom, for instance, took the NCS’s Division I spot, replacing Monte Vista.
Ron Nocetti, CIF associate executive director, spent the past month doing homework to make the conference call Sunday with the CIF’s 10 section commissioners seamless. It took the commissioners roughly 31⁄2 hours to finalize the matchups.
“We get a lot of input,” Nocetti said. “A lot of our seeding meetings we have to wait until the brackets are done with the sections. This is one is where it’s a fourweek process, very similar to what you saw with our volleyball. This is a process that started much earlier so that we’re not scrambling Sunday morning.”
In Cal-Hi Sports’ projections, Valley Christian was slotted to play in the 1-A game against Del Oro-Loomis. Del Oro instead will play host to Bakersfield in the 1-A game.
“We considered Valley, Bakersfield, Serra, Del Oro,” Nocetti said. “Bakersfield beat a very good Central team that’s still ranked pretty high. They have a really good history. We felt that Valley Christian-Cardinal Newman created a good matchup as well. We thought we’d get two really good matchups and four really good teams. But you could very easily have flipped those, and I don’t think anyone would have looked twice at that.”
De La Salle will have its third bye in six weeks as it prepares to defend its Open state title against St. John Bosco, which avenged one of its two losses Saturday when it defeated unbeaten Mater Dei 42-28.
Bosco and De La Salle have one common opponent this season. De La Salle beat Servite 28-27; Bosco beat Servite 70-6.
“Our kids know it, our coaches know it, anybody that’s seen us play knows it, we’re completely different than we were against Servite,” De La Salle coach Justin Alumbaugh said. “We’re a different team. But that being said, they’re a really good team. We’re going to have to play really well. But I am not comparing scores. If you go by comparison of scores, we’d have been crushed by Freedom.”
Menlo-Atherton, which received permission from its neighbors to play on its home field under the lights, will be at home Friday for a 3-AA game against Manteca. Also Friday, Campolindo, a two-time reigning regional champion, will travel to Salinas to play Palma in 4-AA, and Bishop O’Dowd will play host to Capital Christian in 5-AA.
Saturday, Milpitas will play a 4-A regional against Pleasant Valley-Chico in Oroville, and Oakland Section champion McClymonds will face East Nicolaus in 5A at Chabot College in Hayward.
The winners in all 12 regionals will advance to play Southern California champions the following weekend.
When it’s over, 13 teams — including the Open champion — will celebrate. Is 13 too much? “No, it’s not diluted,” CIF executive director Roger Blake said Sunday. “There are different levels of competitiveness. None of us can compare our Open Division to our Division 5 or 6. It’s significant difference in their abilities. But for those kids that are playing, they’re participating at the level that fits them, fits their team.
“For them, it’s a championship and it’s a lifetime memory. That’s a big part of our goal.”