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6A football: What's good for Texas isn't necessarily good for Oklahoma
Published: 1/10/2013 7:36 PM
Last Modified: 1/10/2013 7:36 PM

If you haven't read it already, you should check out Mike Brown's story from Thursday on the new plans being floated for Class 6A high school football in Oklahoma.

(Read the full story here).

The newest plan that will be submitted to the OSSAA is modeled after the way Texas crowns its football champions.

Class 6A remains 32 teams. The current district set up remains relatively unchanged. But once the playoff teams are determined, they will be divided into "big" and "small" school playoff brackets based on size.

Proponents of changing the current 6A set up will tell you it's about leveling the playing field between the biggest and smallest schools in 6A.

But in reality, this plan is about two things: Making sure more teams qualify for the playoffs and helping the enrollment "middle class" win championships.

Then there's this: a ridiculous watering down of the state's postseason that will have Oklahoma send 24 of its biggest 32 teams to the playoffs and crown nine total champions for less than 500 football playing schools (Texas crowns 12 for more than 1,200).

And it only figures to get worse. This system started with the largest class in Texas, too. But once the other classes saw the big boys getting two trophies, they wanted two as well.

Look, we get it. No one outside of Jenks and Union likes the fact those two schools win all the 6A football state championships. And at some point Broken Arrow, Union and Jenks should consider splitting their high schools in order to give their students more opportunities.

But the Texas model is clumsy and creates its own set of inequities.

Here's a look at the numbers from this year's Texas and Oklahoma football playoffs as an example:

In Texas' top two classes (5A and 4A) the two division system did allow smaller schools more opportunity. Texas has 10 high schools with 4,000 or more students. Three of those 10 made the Division I quarterfinals, while only two teams with less than 3,000 students qualified for the final eight (2,100 students is the current cut off between 5A and 4A in Texas).

In 5A, Division II, all but one of the final eight had an enrollment smaller than 3,000.

But there are always problems that crop up. One of the 5A, Division II quarterfinal teams was Plano West, which is Texas' fourth largest school with 4,944 students. Then there's Southlake Carroll, who made the Division I quarterfinals with an enrollment (2,588) that was smaller or comparable to four of the eight "small school" quarterfinalists.

And although people talk about giving smaller schools a better opportunity, the system is truly about aiding the upper-middle class.

Seven of the eight state champs crowned in Texas' top four classes this year were among the top 37 percent in their classification in school size. The only one who wasn't -- 2A East Bernard with an enrollment of 274 -- was still in the top 62 percent.

That doesn't exactly help the truly small schools in a given class.

If the system were in place this year in Oklahoma, six of the 12 "small school" playoff teams would have been bigger than the smallest Division I team.

The top 18 schools in the state in terms of enrollment would have made the playoffs, but only six of the bottom 14 would have qualified for the postseason.

Everything in Texas may be bigger, but it's not necessarily better.

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Tulsa World Sports Editor Michael Peters has nearly 20 years of daily newspaper experience. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M, he worked at papers in Bryan-College Station, Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Galveston, Texas, before joining the Houston Chronicle as High School Sports Editor in 2008. While in Houston, he coordinated coverage of the 2008 Texas Class 5A state football championships and the 2011 NCAA Men's Final Four.

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