What will end of Metro-Suburban mean?
The Dolphins, fresh off a trip to Germany five weeks ago, could be headed out of the country again in 2024.
NFL owners holding winter meetings in Dallas on Wednesday decided to hold a game in Sao Paulo, Brazil, next season. Although the matchup wasn’t announced, the NFL team with rights in Brazil is ... the Dolphins.
This would be the first NFL game held in South America.
But there’s a wrinkle.
Because the NFL now has an uneven 17-game schedule, teams are alternating playing their “extra” game on the road every other year. Next season, the Dolphins are scheduled to have only eight home games and nine on the road. From that standpoint, it would make sense for any Dolphins’ overseas trip to come from the selection of road opponents.
The game in Brazil will be at the Corinthians Arena, home to the SC Corinthians
The Metro and Suburban football classes are dead.
The Florida High School Athletic Association’s board of directors voted 9-4 to abandon the classifications after a two-year cycle in favor of going to seven classes determined solely by school enrollment as well as one rural class.
Splitting the schools into Metro and Suburban classes in football was controversial from the beginning, with the vote passing the board by just a vote in 2022. The board member who ultimately swung the vote in favor of Metro and Suburban came back a few months later and tried to have it overturned.
Many schools in Metro regions were opposed from the beginning, arguing everything from classes being too big (Class 2M included schools with as few as 600 students to schools more than twice that size) to even claiming racial bias.
I was one of the people banging the drum for Metro and Suburban classes. I was accused of wanting certain schools to win championships, but the reason for wanting the split is much simpler: competitive balance.
I want to see great state championship games. Call me an idealist, but I want the state championship to be a showcase of elite football. I don’t want to see a matchup like Merritt Island vs. Miami Central, which was the Class 5M final
Sunday’s game
Jets (5-8) at Dolphins (9-4)
1 p.m., CBS; Fubo, NFL+, Paramount+, YouTube Sunday Ticket outside South Florida in 2021. Not surprisingly, Central won that game 49-14. This isn’t an attack on Merritt Island or the players who earned their way to a state championship, but it was going to take a miracle for that game to be competitive.
In mid-October, a few days after Florida football beat Vanderbilt to improve to 4-2, head coach Billy Napier was asked about the importance of re-recruiting players on the roster.
“If they don’t want to be here, they don’t want to be here,” Napier said. “We have the opportunity to sign the best players in the country both in high school and the best available in the portal. I don’t think that’ll be a problem going forward.
“Will we have attrition? Absolutely. There’ll be some attrition. But I think that’s just reality. Some of it’s healthy. When you think about it, if a guy’s on the fence he doesn’t need to be here. Right now, I can tell you this group of players, they’re in. There’ll be some attrition when we get to the winter. In the meantime, I think we have a pretty good product to offer.”