High school football coaches in the CIF Southern Section can't help but chuckle as their basketball-coaching colleagues experience the rollercoaster of emotions that come with tracking computer rankings for the first time.
Football has been using the computer rankings model to determine playoff divisions for the last four seasons. As basketball coaches begin to think they're acclimating to the new era, there's another wrinkle lurking that football programs are all too familiar with: the wonder of how many teams will be in the top division, which is determined at the end of the regular season by the Southern Section office. In basketball's case, the top division is the Open Division, which could "consist of eight 8 — sixteen 16 teams in a pool play tournament," according to Page 4 of the basketball playoff bulletin.
The proverbial line drawn by the Southern Section office won't just impact the top teams in the Open or D1 , it will influence the subsequent divisions below, which could change projected division placement and seeding. As we head into the final week of the regular season, a team Open seems very feasible, given the parity among the top boys basketball teams in the section. Could the Open Division be eight? Welcome to ' competitive equity '. Just like football in , which saw the CIF create a team Division 1 playoff , the parity at the top could garner a team Open Division field as opposed to the 8-team field that's been the norm since Here's what it would look like, and it's not much different.
However, a deeper incentive would be threaded through the process. Two pools. Five teams in each pool. Each team is guaranteed four games, and the top two finishers of each pool advance to the final for a fifth game. Here's where things would be different. That is not the case this season. Only the last-place teams in each pool would not advance. In theory, this model would incentivize teams to keep playing competitively even if qualifying for the final is out of reach.
In Divisions A all other divisions , a team must reach the semifinals to earn a berth to the state playoffs. That's three postseason victories. Eight from the Open Division and four semifinalists from each subsequent division. As of Monday's latest computer rankings on January 27 , the top 10 teams are:. Bubble teams that could make a leap into Top 10? Due to the drama in the Trinity League, teams like St. John Bosco, JSerra, Mater Dei and Santa Margarita have all beaten each other to create a much more competitive window of teams that could justify a team field.
