All Things 2022 Minnesota High School Football Thread

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Support for the program. Fans in the stands. Getting kids to come out for football and wanting to play for their school (instead of transferring).
 

discochris said:
Sell to whom? Players? The issue I brought up has nothing to do with whether kids want to play football as much as it does having to prioritize the sports that are basically year round at this point over football, which is a short season. Or do you mean to the community for support, which has no real bearing on the above point.
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Sell to the community
discochris said:
Self scheduling issues is how we ended up with this district football mess. The really big schools couldn't get people to play them, resulting in teams like EP going out of state or to Winnipeg. I hate district football scheduling - it's stupid that Wayzata doesn't play their conference rivals like Minnetonka, EP, Edina, etc.
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The district scheduling is literally killing programs. Programs lose their big money games and can’t afford helmets. This is a way for teams to play rivals inspire of the MSHSL
discochris said:
This will never, ever happen. There will be an outpouring of protest from parents of these losing schools that "their kid didn't get to play as many games."
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If you expand to 9 regular season games it is literally the same amount of games
discochris said:
Once again, what are you trying to sell, and to whom?
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Trying to sell success to the community.





Two of the reasons football is dying is concussions and specialization
The biggest reason programs are dying are because some programs don’t win. There are a lot of options for kids. Playing an 8 game schedule for where 4 are blowouts to get awarded with a 2-7 or a 1-8 game for another blowout means the bad teams get worse every year.

Burnsville is a 3000 student school and can’t field a JV team.
Half the 6a programs can’t field sophomore teams…and they aren’t the winning half.
You need something to sell To get the community to stop talking shit about how bad the program is. You need something to sell to kids who are 50/50 whether they want to play football.
 

Gophers_4life said:
Support for the program. Fans in the stands. Getting kids to come out for football and wanting to play for their school (instead of transferring).
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Pretty easy to see IMO
My solution is probably not best. If we continue in present mode some of the 6 programs will have to co-op football in 10 years.
 

Some guy said:
Sell to the community

The district scheduling is literally killing programs. Programs lose their big money games and can’t afford helmets. This is a way for teams to play rivals inspire of the MSHSL

If you expand to 9 regular season games it is literally the same amount of games

Trying to sell success to the community.





Two of the reasons football is dying is concussions and specialization
The biggest reason programs are dying are because some programs don’t win. There are a lot of options for kids. Playing an 8 game schedule for where 4 are blowouts to get awarded with a 2-7 or a 1-8 game for another blowout means the bad teams get worse every year.

Burnsville is a 3000 student school and can’t field a JV team.
Half the 6a programs can’t field sophomore teams…and they aren’t the winning half.
You need something to sell To get the community to stop talking shit about how bad the program is. You need something to sell to kids who are 50/50 whether they want to play football.
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Would a solution be to let those perennially bad, huge schools play at a lower level?
 

Word said:
Would a solution be to let those perennially bad, huge schools play at a lower level?
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How is that fair to the lower level schools that have to same issue?

Congrats st Francis, coon rapids is so bad they get to come kick your ass.
Congrats 5a spring lake park, one of your better teams in years gets to lose in the state quarterfinals to 6a coon rapids because coon rapids is so bad they moved down a class

^both of these have happened in the last 6 years.


You can’t be so bad that you get picked to win. The system has to be built in a way that teams have a chance. But the solution isn’t game the system. Every football game has a winner and loser. If you pick a winner (someone moving down) you’ve picked a loser (the team that has to play them).
 


Some guy said:
How is that fair to the lower level schools that have to same issue?

Congrats st Francis, coon rapids is so bad they get to come kick your ass.
Congrats spring lake park, one of your better teams in years gets to lose in the state quarterfinals to coon rapids because coon rapids is so bad they moved down a class

^both of these have happened in the last 6 years.
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Just giving you ideas.
 

Word said:
Just giving you ideas.
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They’ve tried it. It just isn’t the deal.
The correct solution is to do something different. No rearrange the wires on a broken down car.
 

Some guy said:
They’ve tried it. It just isn’t the deal.
The correct solution is to do something different. No rearrange the wires on a broken down car.
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I come from the traveling (club) soccer world (coach and parent for many years) and for the most part, teams in that arena get to self-select what level they play at for league and tournament play. So I guess I'm just used to that concept. It's not perfect but seems to work ok.
 

discochris said:
People seem to have a really difficult time understanding that. Cities and townships are units of government. School districts are units of government. Sometimes, they coincide. For example, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the school district and the city are the same. In most cases, they are not, because school districts grew from rural schools that consolidated in an area over a number of years.

The Wayzata district includes all of Wayzata, and parts of the cities of Minnetonka, Plymouth, Corcoran, Medina, Maple Grove and Orono.

I'm in Minnetonka, but in the Wayzata district, and I live closer to the high schools in Hopkins, Minnetonka, Orono, and possibly St. Louis Park, than I do Wayzata high school.

I can't tell you how many times people assume we are in the Minnetonka school district.
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Tell me about it. I'm an election judge. and there are precincts that have 3 school districts (because the lines are so irregular), so if there are referenda in a non-school board election year in one or more districts, we would have up to 3 different ballots in our precinct.
 



Word said:
I come from the traveling (club) soccer world (coach and parent for many years) and for the most part, teams in that arena get to self-select what level they play at for league and tournament play. So I guess I'm just used to that concept. It's not perfect but seems to work ok.
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One would think football could do a bit of a promotion / relegation system. Only the top 8-10 teams get to play at the highest level. They need to earn their way up to that spot. Bottom 2 teams get relegated. Leave some room for discussions on if a top team voluntarily wants to be relegated due to massive player loss.

Allow 2nd level teams to opt into the tier 1 Championship playoff if they desire.
Have 18-22 schools that are in that 2nd level. Top two finishers get promoted the following year.

Have third level broken out more regionally into 3 or 4 regions. Each region with 30-40 schools.

Below that is fourth level which has remaining number of small schools broken into regions and conferences. Again, top teams get promoted to level 3, bottom teams get relegated.


None of this is impossible, but the politics in the MSHSL system would probably prevent common sense solutions.
 

You can see from hockey (looking directly at you, Hermantown) that the self-selection model is far from perfect. And sometimes it's understandable - St. Thomas Academy will play one competitive game at 5A this year, against Mahtomedi, before the state tournament, but on a year-to-year basis they are not at the level of the top 6A schools so it's arguably defensible for them to stay where they are.

School size is a very imprecise proxy for level of play - there are 4A and 5A schools that would beat Hopkins, at 6A, easily - but I'm hard pressed to come up any realistic options that would work a whole lot better.
 

the difference with football again is that it's a numbers game.

Yes, there are larger schools that struggle, but for the most part, a school with 200 kids per class is going to have an advantage over a school with 50 kids in a class and so forth.

and the big difference is that a school with more players can platoon, especially the linemen. smaller schools that have the starters going both ways result in the linemen getting beat up and they're gassed by the 4th quarter. the bigger school can bring in fresh kids - huge advantage.

you can tweak the playoff system all you want, but it comes down to this:

a school starts losing
kids don't want to be part of a loser, so they don't go out or open-enroll out
it's harder for the team to field a competitive roster, so they keep losing

once that starts, it is really hard to turn around. and consolidation is no automatic fix, because a consolidated program often has to play in a larger class due to the way they count enrollment.
 

Face The Facts said:
One would think football could do a bit of a promotion / relegation system. Only the top 8-10 teams get to play at the highest level. They need to earn their way up to that spot. Bottom 2 teams get relegated. Leave some room for discussions on if a top team voluntarily wants to be relegated due to massive player loss.

Allow 2nd level teams to opt into the tier 1 Championship playoff if they desire.
Have 18-22 schools that are in that 2nd level. Top two finishers get promoted the following year.

Have third level broken out more regionally into 3 or 4 regions. Each region with 30-40 schools.

Below that is fourth level which has remaining number of small schools broken into regions and conferences. Again, top teams get promoted to level 3, bottom teams get relegated.


None of this is impossible, but the politics in the MSHSL system would probably prevent common sense solutions.
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This kind of exists to some extent. Let's look at 6A. There are two districts.
Metro Gold:

Metro Maroon


If I recall, the districts are set up every two years based on how competitive the teams were during the previous two seasons. So you have mostly teams like Forest Lake and Hopkins in the Maroon division, because they've largely stunk, and teams like Wayzata and EP in the Gold division because they've been really good. I believe they redistrict for 2023-24, and so you could see Edina for example, move to Maroon, and Woodbury for example, move to Gold. I don't know the exact formula, but it is kind of a promotion-relegation system.

And then of course there's the whole thing about using reduced lunch as a component of school size so you have Park Center and Coon Rapids playing below their actual enrollment at a lower level (I think both should be 6A). Seems like that started a big argument here last year.
 



I understand the points/opinions related to the failures of the District scheduling model. I don’t intend to disagree/debate that because I get it.

I will point out that there is at least one success story at least partially tied to district scheduling.

Mound Westonka used to be a dreadful football program. Decades (not years) of sustained losing, placement in one of the toughest football conferences in the state, and a never ending carousel of journeymen coaches, always gone within a couple seasons. I’d go to their games. They looked like little stick figure kids on rosters of about 50, lining up against hulking weight lifting athletes from rosters of 80-100. The games would nearly always be over by half. Westonka had built a new stadium but didn’t bother putting bleachers on the visiting side. There was always enough room for everyone on the home side. It was nearly impossible to improve or establish a beachhead, losing 60-6 every week.

Just prior to the dawn of district scheduling, a new coach (Nick David) arrived and said “I’m buying a house here and I don’t care how long it takes.” He built the program and took advantage of district scheduling to gain a foothold. They went from playing in the weakest subdistrict in the Twin City district, to the toughest district, and I suspect they will soon be pulled out of the Twin City district completely, to be placed in a suburban alternative with their neighbors. They have had to add seating and the place to be Friday nights in Mound is now the football game.

Winning has grown the program (roster has grown from 50’s in the 2010’s to this year, at 95). This has happened despite the district itself remaining roughly the same in enrollment. The players have grown too. Suddenly they are the muscular, hulking players on the field, and more and more of them are finding their way to college rosters.

Clearly the coach has done wonders. Without him, Westonka probably would have settled in as a perennial .500 team in the lowest subdistrict of the Twin City district. But, the program was in such a state of disaster 10 years ago, I don’t know if anyone could have achieved these results without district scheduling.

It has been like watching a duck that had been caught in a horrible oil spill get cleaned up, rehabilitated, and is now ready to be released back into the wild.
 

Word said:
I come from the traveling (club) soccer world (coach and parent for many years) and for the most part, teams in that arena get to self-select what level they play at for league and tournament play. So I guess I'm just used to that concept. It's not perfect but seems to work ok.
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Yeah. High school league has told 30 teams they are only allowed to play with each other. Bottom 8-10 can’t compete at all with the top 10-15

But team 29 isn’t allowed to play team 35 even for one week.

Killing about 10 of the states top 30 programs by size.
Go 1-7 every year and the kids would rather stay home and tik tok than play. Easy to say just win, but not that easy.

Need better scheduling for all not just a 1 or 2 off for two teams (coon rapids and Brainerd)


Im not as familiar with the lower classes but I’m just it holds true. Our model just kills 8-15 programs per class.
7 classes.
That’s 70 programs.


I do applaud them a little for the maroon/gold sub groups
It’s not just bad for the bad teams. Not having competition is bad for good teams too
 

Schnauzer said:
I understand the points/opinions related to the failures of the District scheduling model. I don’t intend to disagree/debate that because I get it.

I will point out that there is at least one success story at least partially tied to district scheduling.

Mound Westonka used to be a dreadful football program. Decades (not years) of sustained losing, placement in one of the toughest football conferences in the state, and a never ending carousel of journeymen coaches, always gone within a couple seasons. I’d go to their games. They looked like little stick figure kids on rosters of about 50, lining up against hulking weight lifting athletes from rosters of 80-100. The games would nearly always be over by half. Westonka had built a new stadium but didn’t bother putting bleachers on the visiting side. There was always enough room for everyone on the home side. It was nearly impossible to improve or establish a beachhead, losing 60-6 every week.

Just prior to the dawn of district scheduling, a new coach (Nick David) arrived and said “I’m buying a house here and I don’t care how long it takes.” He built the program and took advantage of district scheduling to gain a foothold. They went from playing in the weakest subdistrict in the Twin City district, to the toughest district, and I suspect they will soon be pulled out of the Twin City district completely, to be placed in a suburban alternative with their neighbors. They have had to add seating and the place to be Friday nights in Mound is now the football game.

Winning has grown the program (roster has grown from 50’s in the 2010’s to this year, at 95). This has happened despite the district itself remaining roughly the same in enrollment. The players have grown too. Suddenly they are the muscular, hulking players on the field, and more and more of them are finding their way to college rosters.

Clearly the coach has done wonders. Without him, Westonka probably would have settled in as a perennial .500 team in the lowest subdistrict of the Twin City district. But, the program was in such a state of disaster 10 years ago, I don’t know if anyone could have achieved these results without district scheduling.

It has been like watching a duck that had been caught in a horrible oil spill get cleaned up, rehabilitated, and is now ready to be released back into the wild.
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District scheduling no doubt is great for the teams at the top of the district by demographics. Being given a reasonable situation with a good coach and a program can still be built. Which is why I’m in favor of changing the model to give more teams reasonable situations.


Mound Westonka would beat Hopkins this year but Hopkins is “so good” they aren’t allowed to play a team like mound westonka
 

Districts will change again this year based on school’s feedback. There’s not a perfect system but you have very few if any teams looking to fill schedules. This has been a positive. Wayzata traveling to KC or Howard Lake Waverly only having 7 games has been mitigated.

Section football for the regular season is a nice concept until you get to greater Minnesota. Bemoaning, Brainerd, Detroit Lakes would have terrible travel schedules.
 

Why do Gold teams play two games each year vs. the Maroon teams? Enough teams to just play G/G and M/M. What's the point of having Prior Lake, LS, Shakopee, etc. playing two games against Hopkins, etc. and winning 49-0, 56-3......?
 

balds said:
Why do Gold teams play two games each year vs. the Maroon teams? Enough teams to just play G/G and M/M. What's the point of having Prior Lake, LS, Shakopee, etc. playing two games against Hopkins, etc. and winning 49-0, 56-3......?
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Even the best teams do not want murderers row for 8 games. It also assists with seeding for post season. Forest lake may get a higher seed by beating StMA
 

balds said:
Why do Gold teams play two games each year vs. the Maroon teams? Enough teams to just play G/G and M/M. What's the point of having Prior Lake, LS, Shakopee, etc. playing two games against Hopkins, etc. and winning 49-0, 56-3......?
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Because the MSHSL doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to actually break teams into evenly divisible divisions
 

Some guy said:
Because the MSHSL doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to actually break teams into evenly divisible divisions
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You should become an AD or work at MSHSL. I don't mean that with any snark. You are clearly very passionate about this stuff and maybe that's how you can make some change.
 

xyz1 said:
You can see from hockey (looking directly at you, Hermantown) that the self-selection model is far from perfect. And sometimes it's understandable - St. Thomas Academy will play one competitive game at 5A this year, against Mahtomedi, before the state tournament, but on a year-to-year basis they are not at the level of the top 6A schools so it's arguably defensible for them to stay where they are.

School size is a very imprecise proxy for level of play - there are 4A and 5A schools that would beat Hopkins, at 6A, easily - but I'm hard pressed to come up any realistic options that would work a whole lot better.
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100% agree that school size is a very poor metric. For a million reasons.

But there are also factors that would be very hard to consider (maybe "shouldn't be", but they're still there), like Some Guy is bringing up.

Just to pick on a random school: take Hutch. Fantastic program. But part of that is that they've built up such a winning program. If they were "forced up" into 5A and had to play metro teams all season and in the playoffs, they probably wouldn't win as much. Interest would fade, kids wouldn't want to come out for football as much, etc.

(I'm assuming they're only 3A or 4A, but watch they could already be 5A, I have no idea)
 

There are so many factors to try to take in.

Not the least of which, and much more important to out-state districts than metro: geography and historical rivalries.


Of course, things change. It was the right move for St Louis Park and Robbinsdale schools to separate from Hopkins, Wayzata, etc. even though they'd long been rivals on that side of town.
 

State of Football said:
Even the best teams do not want murderers row for 8 games. It also assists with seeding for post season. Forest lake may get a higher seed by beating StMA
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Forest Lake is an interesting case. (disclosure - I am an FL grad). They've been absolutely horrible in football for a couple decades now. I have no idea why that is. It's a very big school.

Now, all of a sudden this year they're 3-0 and appear to have a legit good team. Completely out of nowhere. So teams can turn it around.
 

To spice things up a bit and to generate more comments without starting a new thread---should the MSHSL change rules to allow the largest schools to regularly schedule out-of-state games when there is support of a Sponsor...GEICO...ESPN. For example, EP/Wayzata/Prior Lake/Shakopee/LS vs a large WI school or IA school or IL school, concurrently readjusting in-state games so the largest only play the largest? I know there was difficulty scheduling out-of-state several years ago but the schools to my knowledge didn't have TV sponsorship.
 

Gopher 461 said:
To spice things up a bit and to generate more comments without starting a new thread---should the MSHSL change rules to allow the largest schools to regularly schedule out-of-state games when there is support of a Sponsor...GEICO...ESPN. For example, EP/Wayzata/Prior Lake/Shakopee/LS vs a large WI school or IA school or IL school, concurrently readjusting in-state games so the largest only play the largest? I know there was difficulty scheduling out-of-state several years ago but the schools to my knowledge didn't have TV sponsorship.
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when MN schools play out-of-state schools it doesn't count on the QRF formula that the state uses for playoff seedings in most sections.

I could give you an extensive rant on QRF. suffice it to say that the MSHSL decided to take a proprietary points system from a private web site and make that the "official" system for ranking teams in MN. (a few sections do not use the QRF and still seed by coaches' vote, but most use the QRF). and the only person who knows how the formula actually works is the creator of the web site.

just another example of the MSHSL finding ways to farm out responsibility. If Cousins could pass a football the way the MSHSL passes the buck, the Vikings would win the Super Bowl.
 

Word said:
You should become an AD or work at MSHSL. I don't mean that with any snark. You are clearly very passionate about this stuff and maybe that's how you can make some change.
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I've always said that some guy had the testicular fortitude to effect real change
 

short ornery norwegian said:
when MN schools play out-of-state schools it doesn't count on the QRF formula that the state uses for playoff seedings in most sections.

I could give you an extensive rant on QRF. suffice it to say that the MSHSL decided to take a proprietary points system from a private web site and make that the "official" system for ranking teams in MN. (a few sections do not use the QRF and still seed by coaches' vote, but most use the QRF). and the only person who knows how the formula actually works is the creator of the web site.

just another example of the MSHSL finding ways to farm out responsibility. If Cousins could pass a football the way the MSHSL passes the buck, the Vikings would win the Super Bowl. you win:
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  • From MN Scores Website:(QRF)
  • X points for winning the game based on opponent Class
    • Y points times number of opponent wins based on opponent s opponents Class
  • If you lose:
    • Y/3 points times number of opponent wins based on opponent s opponents Class
  • The margin of victory/defeat is NOT part of the equation.
  • This calculation happens for every game, then averaged out to the QRF number you see online.
  • Once the average QRF is determined, it is compared to the average QRF of every other team in the State, and put into ranking order.
 

Some guy said:
How is that fair to the lower level schools that have to same issue?

Congrats st Francis, coon rapids is so bad they get to come kick your ass.
Congrats 5a spring lake park, one of your better teams in years gets to lose in the state quarterfinals to 6a coon rapids because coon rapids is so bad they moved down a class
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I just looked up the enrollment numbers again. These are the adjusted numbers from the MSHSL, so I assume that takes into account the whole reduced lunch thing, which is a debate in and of itself.

Far as I can tell, Coon Rapids is the only school that should be 6A by enrollment, that is playing below their level. That could change of course for 2023-24. They've been replaced at the big school level by Totino Grace, which is playing WAY above their enrollment level. They're smaller in enrollment than schools like Cloquet, Delano, Red Wing and Worthington.

The enrollment cutoff at this point, which will change next year, has Lakeville North the smallest school in 6A at 1780. The next school on the list is Brainerd at 1752. Which brings up an interesting question. Suppose an outstate school (Brainerd and Moorhead are the two most likely) leapfrogs their way into 6A based on enrollment. Will the MSHSL slot them with the Wayzatas and Eden Prairies of the world? Will a school like Park Cottage Grove have to bus 4 hours to Moorhead to play a game? Will every away game for Moorhead be an 8 hour round trip?

For discussion purposes, here's a link to the official enrollment numbers.

https://www.mshsl.org/sites/default...llments-for-2021-22-and-2022-23-by-enroll.pdf
 

disco said:
I just looked up the enrollment numbers again. These are the adjusted numbers from the MSHSL, so I assume that takes into account the whole reduced lunch thing, which is a debate in and of itself.

Far as I can tell, Coon Rapids is the only school that should be 6A by enrollment, that is playing below their level. That could change of course for 2023-24. They've been replaced at the big school level by Totino Grace, which is playing WAY above their enrollment level. They're smaller in enrollment than schools like Cloquet, Delano, Red Wing and Worthington.

The enrollment cutoff at this point, which will change next year, has Lakeville North the smallest school in 6A at 1780. The next school on the list is Brainerd at 1752. Which brings up an interesting question. Suppose an outstate school (Brainerd and Moorhead are the two most likely) leapfrogs their way into 6A based on enrollment. Will the MSHSL slot them with the Wayzatas and Eden Prairies of the world? Will a school like Park Cottage Grove have to bus 4 hours to Moorhead to play a game? Will every away game for Moorhead be an 8 hour round trip?

For discussion purposes, here's a link to the official enrollment numbers.

https://www.mshsl.org/sites/default...llments-for-2021-22-and-2022-23-by-enroll.pdf
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Brainerd is already 6a
Brainerd should probably play a schedule consisting of some NW suburb 6a schools and some 5a schools that are lower travel times.


Right now the MSHSL doesn’t let you play a mixed class schedule.
Those two are 5a schedules even though they are 6a.
So the only other 6a team they play is each other.

The fact that Brainerd can go 7-1 and end up a 7 seed tells you everything you need to know about the scheduling model.
Right now Burnsville is 2-1 but even if they go 7-1 they’re at best the 6 seed in their section due to how wonky the schedule is. I don’t think that’ll be an issue as they won’t go 7-1.
But you could have 7-1 Burnsville seeded behind a 1-7 Edina.
 

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