Column: GHSA does right by new tie-breaker plan

Published 11:19 pm Wednesday, August 29, 2007

There wasn’t a tremendous amount of activity at the Georgia High School Association’s executive committee meeting earlier this week — nor was there much expected, with a slim agenda — but the biggest decision involved the football season that starts Friday.

Although the GHSA had already decided earlier this year to break ties in football state championship games, there was still the matter of deciding how. Now, ties will be broken the same way as the rest of the season, using the shootout-style method in which both teams are given equal opportunities to score from the 15-yard line.

It’s a good call, although according to reports in the Macon Telegraph and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, not a popular one with some veteran coaches who simply prefer the old penetration tiebreaker used until a few years back.

The coaches who don’t like the shootout say it’s an unnatural way to settle the score, but it’s hard to believe that anyone who’s watched a penetration tiebreaker considers that a fitting way to decide things, either.

If a game was tied at the end of regulation, teams played two five-minute extra periods that followed roughly the same format of the rest of the game — including kickoffs. The exception was that if neither team scored during either period, the side that had gone deeper into the other’s territory was declared the winner.

This was actually the most entertaining part of such an overtime game, though, because a school official was usually the one who held a flag to indicate the penetration mark. I was always waiting for the day when we heard about a juicy yard-cheating scandal, some administrator who shifted his feet, centimeter by centimeter, until his team had the advantage. Never happened, to my knowledge.

But mostly, that type of overtime was underwhelming, especially if neither team had scored midway through the second extra period. At that point, coaches had to play a chess match that sometimes involved letting the other team score if the opponent was already ahead in the penetration category and held the ball with time running down.

There’s nothing satisfying about seeing 11 guys stand up and watch a ball carrier stroll into the end zone, but that was the gamble for victory teams were forced to take.

No overtime method is perfect, but then again, four quarters is an arbitrary way of deciding who’s the better team, too, isn’t it? A shootout is at least entertaining, something the old overtime method was only because of its bizarre nature.

Regardless, it’s good to know that co-champions are a thing of the past. The situation wasn’t a major problem, at least not if your criteria is frequency — in 266 state title games dating to 1947, only nine had ended in ties. But it’s worth noting that three of them happened in the past three years, including two last season, when Class 5A’s Peachtree Ridge and Roswell and Class 2A’s Charlton County and Dublin split the pot.

The recent shares likely hastened the decision to do something in regards to championship overtime, which seems like anything but something to fear from a fan’s perspective — after all, what’s more exciting than a few extra plays in a title matchup?

It’s tough to see one team walk away dejected after coming so close in a championship game, but handing out two titles at the end of one game takes something away from both sides. That kind of conclusion was even more unsettling than the old overtime method.

n Speaking of the GHSA, here’s some kudos to its effort to make more information easily accessible.

The organization’s constitution and by-laws datingto 1938 are available for download at ghsa.net — with the exception of a missing document from 1939-40 — adding to the history already available through the list of champions in all GHSA sports that has been on the site for a while now.

With the constitutions, you can take a look at rule changes over the years and see how it’s changed how the games are played. That might be geeky sports writer stuff more than anything, but I’m sure there are some hardcore fans who could dig in and keep themselves entertained for a while with that type of info, too.

n On the same subject, here’s another plug for high school sports history.

The Georgia High School Football Historians Association site (ghsfha.org) is a great place to look for teams’ and coaches’ records, as well as a lot of other Peach State football history.

It’s a volunteer site that has come a long way quickly for having been around only a few years — according to the home page, around 100,000 games are recorded at this point.

We definitely like the site and rely on it to help with information about area schools and their opponents, but there’s also information about past all-state squads, team rankings and lots of other good stuff.

Remember, football only happens once a week, so you’ll need something to keep you entertained when you’re not at the game — or for the diehards, watching practice.

n Beating the pros and high school — in this state anyway — to the punch, college football starts tonight with an SEC matchup between LSU and Mississippi State in exotic Starkville. The full slate hits Saturday.

We try to keep up with how former players are doing at the college level — hey, that’s former Dalton High School standout Cole Bennett on the cover of this year’s Auburn football media guide — but we welcome news and notes on those players from you, too. Let us know if a local athlete is doing something special at the next level so we can follow up on their effort.