10/06/23- Football Playoff Schedule Request and Football RPI Clarification and Clean-up

October 6, 2023 Football Blog Updates

FOOTBALL PLAYOFF SCHEDULING REQUEST

As teams start qualifying for the playoffs, we are asking for schools’ help in scheduling, especially in the first round. As all are aware, our supply of officials is not at the levels we were during the early 2000s when we had abundant numbers. Many of our associations, including some of our larger groups, have struggled to return to even their pre-COVID legals in terms of numbers. As such, staffing that first round which is always difficult, is likely very problematic, especially if all teams insist on trying to play on the same Friday night. Our assigners are very conscious of the need to only use those that feel are “playoff ready”, and really need your help on these dates.

There are distinct advantages to playing on Thursday or Saturday that negate the usual concerns about different preparation weeks, etc. Teams seem to be very adept at moving games during fall breaks, collegiate conflicts, etc. but don’t want to move for playoffs. Simply put, something needs to give. Even if all 96 games (up from 91 a year ago) only used five officials, that is 480 playoff-caliber officials, and that is without requests to play with seven. Last year, nearly 20 first-round games and many use that number exclusively. And that is a time when some of our officials who also work collegiate contests have to hold that weekend for playoff assignments at that level as well. 

The answer is fairly easy. Work with your opponent to play on Thursday or Saturday. If in fact, we get into a situation where we can’t staff the adequate number of officials, we will literally draw a class number from a hat and select a game or games that need to be moved. We don’t want it to get to that point. The students getting to play is far more important than any other concern.

As you move toward the playoffs this year, please have those discussions within your schools and explore options.

FOOTBALL RPI CLARIFICATION AND CLEAN-UP

At 1 p.m. ET today, the revised RPI calculations were posted on the KHSAA website and will continue to be updated hourly. There have been no changes in the calculations for the sports of soccer, volleyball, field hockey, basketball, baseball or softball.

However, a discovery was made this week of a flaw in the implementation of the double play-down exemption for football. Thankfully, with hundreds of games of live data, more tests on the data could be performed. Thanks to the watchful eye of a couple of our larger schools, this flaw was easy to trace and revise.

The beauty of a very public system is that it is both transparent and replicable. One of our assistant coaches who happens to teach match at Trinity High School, asked an innocent enough question about how a team in the largest class could have an OWP greater than 1.0. While mathematically possible in an extremely unusual situation, it certainly shouldn’t have applied to so many teams in the largest class. We are grateful that simple curiosity by Coach Michael Fox and his report to the office was able to be verified and the appropriate revisions made long before any impact on final standings would have been applied.

In review, it was determined that the class factor had been erroneously applied to the OWP and OOWP calculations when the change to the 2 play-down exemption was implemented. This error has been fixed and the revised calculations appropriately reflect both the 2 play-down exemption and the appropriate use of the class factor. Obviously, due to the potentially mathematically circular nature of applying that factor down the line, it has never been a part of the calculations and was inadvertently made for all schools regardless of class, illustrating the problem.

If you are curious about the calculations, remember there are two helpful links.

• First, is the main page for the RPI at https://ly.khsaa.org/da5a.
• Secondly, you can go to the RPI page for the current season, at https://ly.khsaa.org/yymg and click on any school, and basically “drill down” to any calculation.
• That’s the very basics of transparency.

We are very appreciative of Coach Fox and each of our member school coaches and assistants who have built “replicators” for the RPI to help in your planning and analysis and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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