The following piece was written by Steve Copeland and published on November 9, by PrepCountry.com.
Like thousands of other high school football fans, Stuart Glenn pulled up the football playoff brackets on Saturday to see how his favorite team was seeded. He looked for his Pelham Hornets and found them in the left lower quadrant, paired up with Greenville. As any optimistic fan would do, he followed their path to the finals and looked at potential opponents.
That’s when he noticed something odd. As the number four team from Region 1, he expected his team to meet up with the regions #1 team, Clinch County, along the way. Instead they could meet region runner-up Miller County in the semi-finals. Looking closely, he saw the same potential match ups for all of Regions 1-4. For Regions 5-8, he saw the expected match ups between the #1 and #4 teams, along with the #2 and #3 teams. He even went so far as to check the basketball brackets and found the same oddity there.
As a knowledgeable fan of PrepCountry.com, Stuart contacted the web site to find out if there was an explanation for this odd seeding. He even offered up a simple solution in his message. My job as manager of the web site includes creating and updating all brackets. I checked the brackets and quickly found that Stuart was correct.
I wrote to the GHSA to make them aware of the situation. The staff at the GHSA looked at the football and basketball brackets and discovered there was indeed an error in the original brackets published in the GHSA Constitution for this year. This error occurred in the football, basketball, baseball, soccer and tennis brackets.
The GHSA has now issued a new, corrected bracket alignment that resolves this error. No first round match-ups in football have changed. In fact, the corrected bracket does not impact any potential match-ups until the third round.
Stuart probably never imagined he would bring about a change in the playoff brackets for five high school sports. In this new age of instant media and news, fans can play a part in the process like never before.
Loading ...
