You just shake your head and wonder why logic and common sense weren’t in the room when the decision was made to decide the playoff fate of two teams by a coin flip.
Andrew Jackson and Gadsden County had their postseason hopes decided by one over the weekend and that’s just plain stupid.
I heard all about how the FHSAA never wanted that kind of big decision to come down to heads or tails.
But if that were true, if that was really in the heart of hearts of the governing body of Florida high school athletics, a coin flip wouldn’t have been a deciding factor to begin with.
What we had over the weekend was a reminder that the new playoff point system is far from perfect. It needs to be fixed.
Of course, that doesn’t help 4-5 Andrew Jackson now. It was left out of the postseason because 0-9 Gadsden County was blessed with the luck of winning something it had a 50-50 chance of winning.
Both teams ended the regular season tied in points and the coin flip, from what I understand, was the last resort for breaking the tie.
Neither team truly belongs in the playoffs when you get right down to it. Because if you don’t have a winning record, you shouldn’t get in. The playoffs are for the best teams, not the average ones.
In this case, though, someone had to make it, and that’s where someone should have stepped in and said forget the rules. Let’s use good old-fashioned common sense here and say the team with four wins gets in and the team with no wins can clean out its lockers.
I’m sorry. I don’t care how tough the schedule was that Gadsden County played. If you can’t win those games, you aren’t going to have success in the playoffs. This isn’t everyone gets a trophy world.
Andrew Jackson won less than half of its games despite playing fewer teams with winning records than Gadsden County did. It doesn’t deserve the playoff spot either.
Ultimately, because we had to have one of those two teams in, it should have been decided on the field.
What the FHSAA should have done was have the two teams play a half-game the Monday after the season ended, much the way the districts used to do to decide the district runner-up and second playoff team out of the district. Gulf Breeze got into the playoffs that way in 2015.
There would have been nothing wrong with a play-in game here. The winner is the low seed and plays the top seed in the first round. Sure, the winless team could have won but at least it would have been a game and not a coin flip.
I hope we never have to see something like that again. The purpose of the new playoff system is to ensure only the best play beyond week 10.
Work still needs to be done to make that happen. The football is on your field, FHSAA. Make it happen. And keep the coins in your pockets.
