When the NIAA announced that eight teams would make the Northern 4A football playoffs this year I was steamed, and four games into the season I'm still ticked off.
When you hear football coaches talk about it, they talk about all the hard work that their players put in during the off-season.
I don't doubt it, but football players don't have the market on off-season work. High school volleyball players play club when not playing for their school. Baseball players play summer baseball and basketball players play on travel teams. Wrestlers often times are wrestling for local club teams.
Certainly football is the most physically demanding of that group, and wrestling would probably be a close second.
The problem with having eight teams - and right now it is just a two-year experiment - is that you are most likely going to have a team that goes 3-5 make it. That's wrong. If you can't take care of business during the regular season, you have no business in the post-season.
All Northern 4A teams should play each other in the regular season. It's the only way to determine a true regular-season champion. The idea of teams not having to play other teams isn't right.
There are a couple of ways this could be righted:
• Have the NIAA or whoever determines the amount of games that can be played changed. Right now, teams can play nine and if they want to play 10 (the Hall of Fame game) they have to pay for it. Change it to 11 games so that teams can play one preseason game before jumping into league play with 10 games.
• Just shorten the playoffs by two weeks. Have only the top four advance instead of eight. If my math is correct that would enable all the Northern 4A schools to play each other.
I've been told that the northern schools have to stay on the same calendar as the Vegas schools. I can buy that.
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If you attended Saturday's soccer match at Carson, you know it was scorching hot out there, and even hotter on the field turf.
Carson coach Randy Roser said it was 121 degrees on the turf. I don't doubt it. What I have to wonder is why weren't the sprinklers on 90 minutes before game time, and why weren't they turned on during halftime?
If you have that capability, use it. As somebody who has umpired on field turf softball fields, it's not comfortable on your feet.
Maybe somebody needs to give Roser a key and/or tutorial on how the sprinklers are turned on and off, so he can make the determination if the field needs to be cooled down. No doubt the kids would appreciate it.
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A reader called in inquire why we weren't using Carson's No. 5 ranking in our stories.
First of all, the rankings are by MaxPreps, and the people doing these rankings have never seen Carson play in person.
I'm sure if you asked Carson coach Blair Roman about rankings, he would probably shrug it off. Any coach will tell you that the only ranking they care about is the final one. Anything during the season is meaningless because in sports you are only as good as your last game, and one loss will send you tumbling down any poll.