Division Realignment Passes

In principle, this seems like a good idea to me. You can also read more about it on Zach Ewing's blog.

Starting in the fall, individual teams (rather than schools) will be assigned a playoff division based on their performance in the past two years. "Performance" will be measured by league finish, playoff seed, and playoff finish. There will be a minimum of 13 teams in each division and you can only move one division each realignment.

The existing system is so arbitrary that almost any change is bound to be an improvement. How much of an improvement will depend. The main problems with the existing system are the distribution of teams and the assignment of teams within that distribution (aside from that, it's great!). In basketball, the distribution currently looks like this:

D1 - 11 teams
D2- 15 teams
D3- 27 teams
D4- 31 teams
D5- 10 teams

In three of the divisions, everyone with a pulse makes the playoffs. In the other two, about half of the teams stay home. The 13 team minimum helps even things a bit, but if you just moved two slots from D2 to D1 and three slots from D4 to D5, this distribution would be compliant. This kind of lumpiness only makes sense if there are some clear and wide breaks in competitive levels that you could accurately predict. You might want to keep such "natural" divisional breaks in place. I doubt that these exist, with the possible exception of the very top schools in some sports. Even if they did exist, I have serious doubts about the ability of the Central Section to locate them. This looks like it could be a baby step toward ending the lumpiness.

The second problem with the current alignment is with the assignment of teams to particular divisions. Currently this seems to be based partly on enrollment, but with a strong does of ad hoc caves to special pleading.



Ridgeview and Golden Valley have some of the highest enrollments in Bakersfield, higher than Division 1 Centennial, for example. But they drop all the way to Division 3, where they clean up. Why should they get to do that rather than North or West, both schools with lower enrollment? No idea.

My advice to Crichlow:

1. Try for an equal number of teams in each division. If one division is going to be small it should be the top one and only the top one. There is no good reason for some divisions to have three times as many schools as another.

2. Make the point system public. I expect it to lead to some goofy outcomes, but at least we'd know why.

3. Don't allow appeals. Every case is special. Every school has a reason why it should go up or down. The only fair way is to set the rules, make them as clear and fair as you can, then live with them.