Having gone to college in this state and spent most of my post-graduate life here, one thing I’ve noticed about Hoosiers is that they tend to cling to tradition and “that’s just how it’s always been done here” a little more tightly than most places.
And in some cases, there’s merit to that. I still strongly prefer golden era (early 1990s) hip hop, New Jack Swing R&B, ’80s pop and yacht rock to any music that has come out this century. I would still rather play video games on an old Nintendo Entertainment System than on an Xbox, I didn’t own a cellphone until I was 27, and I miss the days when a pack of 15 baseball cards could be had for a quarter.
But there are times when nostalgia impedes forward progress — and as it pertains to my line of work, there is no more obvious case of this than the IHSAA’s blind draw for state tournaments.
There was no good reason for Center Grove and Whiteland — the top two teams in their sectional based on regular-season body of work — to play each other in the opening round of the state girls basketball tourney. The Trojans are ranked 15th in the state, and the Warriors ran the table in a conference that included three other teams in the bracket.
Why they were matched up in Tuesday’s opener makes absolutely zero sense.
Amazingly, this wasn’t even the most egregious example in this year’s girls tournament. In the Fort Wayne South Sectional, the host Archers (20-4) edged No. 4 Homestead (19-3) in a first-round game Tuesday. So now, the defending Class 4A state champion is out, while either Muncie Central (5-17) or Fort Wayne Wayne (2-19) will have a spot in that sectional final.
South of here, Bedford North Lawrence and North Harrison, tied for 11th in the state coaches poll and a combined 39-6 entering the postseason, face off in a first-round game tonight.
The blind draw has produced similarly cringe-inducing matchups nearly every year in just about every sport — with perhaps the most egregious blunders coming the last two years in Class 5A football.
In 2016, unbeaten and second-ranked New Palestine was one of just four 5A teams that had to play a first-round game during what was a bye week for the rest of the class. The Dragons’ opponent? Fourth-ranked Columbus East, who won the game to earn a sectional semifinal date with — drum roll, please — a 1-8 Martinsville team.
This past fall, No. 4 Roncalli and No. 5 Cathedral played one another in a sectional opener, and the winner got No. 3 Decatur Central.
Why are three teams that good being lumped together while other sectionals are loaded with weaker schools?
One argument might be geography — which would be just fine if there weren’t several other schools within minutes that could have been shifted in so that one or two of those top-five teams could’ve moved out. If the IHSAA can send Hauser’s softball team on a 90-minute drive down winding back roads to Rising Sun for a sectional when Edinburgh was hosting one right up the street, it could have easily created competitive balance elsewhere with a few tweaks.
And please, please spare me the idea that it makes the tournament more interesting. Sure, you get more compelling matchups in the first round. But when you have a 20-win team survive a tough test on Tuesday only to potentially steamroll a three-win team in the final, is that benefitting anyone?
So what are the solutions? I’m glad you asked, even if you didn’t. Here are a few to get you started:
1) Start the sectional bracket-building process by separating the top teams. Pick a cutoff period during the regular season and select the top 16 teams in each class; it can be done with Jeff Sagarin’s computer or by poll rankings. Separate those 16 teams into different sectionals and build the field from there, being careful not to overload any one bracket. If this requires a little more travel, so be it; it’s not like the current setup doesn’t have its share of geographic contortion baked in.
2) Once the sectional fields are set, seed each one. Again, how they’re seeded is less important; Sagarin would be the most fair, but any method will be better than doing it blind.
3) Scrap the notion of sectional hosts and let the higher-seeded team host every sectional game. It cuts down on unnecessary travel and increases ticket sales across the board. What was the logic of having Bloomington South play a boys basketball sectional game against Bloomington North at East Central, two hours away from both (it happened two years ago). Please explain to me how that benefits anyone.
And if you don’t think it’s fair that the same good teams get the revenue boost from hosting extra games year after year (no one said life was fair), then split the gate for each game between the two teams and let the home team keep concession-stand revenue for its efforts.
None of those three steps would require much heavy lifting, and they’d make for a fairer, higher-quality tournament. (And they wouldn’t be eliminating the possibility of a Milan-style Cinderella run — you’ve pretty much already done that with class basketball anyway.)
We’re too late to save the likes of Whiteland and Homestead from a raw deal this year, but we can prevent other good teams from suffering a similar fate in the future. I’m an old-school head most of the time, but tradition alone isn’t sufficient reason not to fix a broken system.
It’s time for the IHSAA to start moving forward.
