George Orwell 2

Can we all agree that every team will hit hard, will play as hard as they can, will play all 4 quarters, will be unselfish, will love each other, won't underestimate their opponent, won't give up, won't be intimidated, that they are a special group of players that have prepared their entire lives for this moment, and that the coaches will put in new wrinkles and will be prepared for anything? That applies to every team. Let's just take that as a given, shall we?

I agree with the comments on Sigler. Kid is amazing and will be super tough to handle. I think this is the best game of the weekend (admit to obvious bias). Two great teams, great tradition, history, etc. I choose not to make predictions about any game, except, that I do think this will be the closest game Chatard plays this year. I don't see this as a multi-score difference in favor of either team. Hopefully, Chatard pulls it out, but, whichever team wins will have deserved it. If Chatard wins, they will have beaten the #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and #7 teams (by Sagarin) in 3A. If HH wins, then it will have defeated the #1, #8, #9, #10, and #11 teams in 3A. Nothing cheap about this championship either way.

Chatard 45 Marian 0 Final

Chatard 31 Marian 0 7:18 3rd Quarter

First Half Offense Chatard 264 yards Marian 20 yards

Chatard 24 Marian 0 Halftime

Chatard 17 Marian 0 7:20 2nd Quarter

Chatard had beaten Danville 13 times in a row in the post-season (or something like that), so, I think we can all empathize with even the most exuberant celebration in that situation. Danville won those two games fair and square, they should be proud of that accomplishment. If Chatard gets lucky and the football gods smile on us against Marian, I hope Danville wins this weekend, so, we can continue this great local rivalry. Of course, I also hope HH wins, so, we can continue that great inter-regional (?) rivalry. Either way a Chatard win over Marian, if we are so fortunate for that to occur, should produce an exciting state championship game.

That would drive me crazy too. Mostly because it is simply wrong. This is a team that won a state championship a few years ago by beating the $hit out of everyone they faced. I'm sure there are a lot of teams in the state that would like to be "stuck at this level for 4 to 5 years now." Granted the team would better if all of the great athletes played football, but, I think those days are gone for all schools. More and more families are choosing to not allow their kids to play football. I can even see it at Chatard and especially at the grade school level feeder programs. But, to use losing* as an excuse at a school that is competitive every year and recently won a state championship is completely irrational. *I am not big enough therefore I am afraid of being seriously injured is a completely legitimate reason not to play football.

Spegal is great, no doubt, but, someone needs to talk about that O-line. The yards after contact are Spegal, but, those long runs were about great blocking. How many times did you guys fail to set the edge because your DE got hooked? Answer: a lot. New Pal won this game at the LOS, both offensively and defensively. Someone give me an Amen.

It looks like Concordia will be a tough out in the future. Good skill position players, very well coached (I really like their offensive schemes, especially the O-line), just need bigger and better linemen, which comes with age and reps. This should be a good team for the foreseeable future (provided the soccer team doesn't steal all of the good players). As I've said all year, this Chatard team is all about line play. Skill position players are a nice bonus, but, you could put me, Lysander, and Trojan88 in the backfield and we'd score 42 a game . . . ok, after the first series we'd all be on the sideline with hamstring injuries, but you know what I mean.

I had been struggling to understand what you were referring to in your post until I re-read my post from 4 years ago. I used the phrase "uneducated immigrant kids." That was a really poor choice of words on my part. I didn't mean to imply that they were literally uneducated or that education wasn't important. What I meant to communicate is that the kids of those days in those neighborhoods were unsophisticated, rough and tumble type kids. They were German, Irish, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, and other eastern Europeans and grew up in neighborhoods like Haughville, Fountain Square, Little Flower, and Fletcher Place. I can remember my grandfather telling the story of the neighborhood football team playing against the inmates at Pendleton. I always thought that was pretty bada$$ . . . crazy . . . but bada$$. Most of the good athletes in those neighborhoods ended up at Cathedral which has had a great football tradition since like the 20's or something like that. As I said in my earlier post, I'm sure that there are many stories like that around the state, but, that is the one I am familiar with. I think my post made it clear that there isn't one thing that makes the great programs successful. It isn't the religion, socio-economic status, ethnicity, geography, or any other one thing. It is a really complex mix of many factors. Of course, P/P's have inherent advantages over public schools. I have been clear on that from the beginning. But, the "problem," to the extent there is one, has to do with a few specific programs that out perform their enrollment, rather than a certain type of school. The uber-successful programs are mostly P/P, but not exclusively. There are some publics sprinkled in there as well. That is why I think that the success factor has been fairly successful at addressing the "problem." It isn't perfect. I would like to see four year cycles instead of two and fewer points to stay up in the higher class, but, it seems to have done its job. It certainly accomplished the goal of making GID a pretty dull place . . . UNTIL NOW. BRING IT ON PUBLICS! [jk]

Here a post I made about 4 or 5 years ago. "I must say there have been a lot of intelligent statements made in this thread and for the most part I am impressed by the civility of the discussion. Although the old public-p/p discussions (pre-Success Factor), were much more entertaining. The difficulty in this debate is that the inherent advantages of private schools simply cannot easily be separated from the earned advantages of certain private schools. Everyone recognizes that there are certain inherent advantages but everyone also recognizes that there are earned advantages that certain schools (many, but not all, private) have attained. Contrary to many views expressed on the forum, there aren’t one or two or even a few specific variables that one can point to which lead to long term, significant football success. The fact is that the variables involved are so numerous and so complex that it is nearly impossible to identify all of them or to determine how much each lend to the success of the program. In addition, some variables may lend more to the success of certain programs and other variables may lend more to the success of others. Also, some variables are inherent in a community and others are developed over time. The attribute which has the most direct correlation with football success is enrollment size. The size of the school has a stronger correlation with having a better football team than any other variable. If you use Sagarin rankings as the measure of quality, larger schools, on average, are consistently ranked higher than smaller schools. As we all know, although size matters, it isn’t necessarily the determining factor. In fact, there are numerous variables which seem to have a correlation to football success but are not absolute determining factors. How about simply being a private school? On the other hand, there are many private schools that are not very good at football at all. What about being located in a densely populated area? Once again, lots of schools located in densely populated areas aren’t very good. The opposite is also true. There are some very good rural programs. Being Catholic versus other religious schools versus completely secular private high schools? Same thing. Some Catholic schools are good, some are not, some non-Catholic private schools are good, some are not. There also seems to be consensus that average household income has some effect on success. I don’t know if there are any studies on this but I question the significance of this variable. My suspicion is that at some income levels the difference isn’t very significant. For instance, the difference in the success effect between enrollment populations with very low average incomes as compared to slightly above average incomes is probably much greater than the difference between enrollment populations with average incomes versus above average incomes. In fact, there is probably a point at which increasing income levels decreases football success as very high income households may dissuade their children from football participation. Of course all of this begs the question as to why certain schools have achieved a level of dominance over the others? I have read some posts which insist that the Catholic schools (or more correctly, the Catholic schools which are dominant) have better players than their private school counterparts. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that that is true (at least at game time). In fact, let’s assume that this is true of all schools which have experienced significant football success regardless of whether they are public or private. Why is it that the athletes on the field would be better at one school of similar size than another? The obvious answers are 1) a higher percentage of the population desires to play, 2) they start playing earlier, 3) they receive good instruction from a young age, and 4) the players develop a team oriented identity from an early age. When you get down to it, football (all sports really) is a math game. The more students a school has to choose from, the more quality athletes will be in the pool. Why does the German national soccer team beat the US national team every time they play? The German national team has better players than the US national team. Why? The German national team has the 25 best athletes in the country on the team. They started playing at a very young age. They received good instruction from an early age, they developed a team oriented identity when they were very young, and they devoted themselves to soccer success. The US national team doesn’t have the country’s best athletes on the team. There are some very good athletes on the team; some that may be the top athletes in the country. But not all of the best athletes in the US play soccer, nor do they get the same level of instruction as German youth players, etc. So the first, and probably most important variable, is that every one of the good athletes in the community must have a strong desire to play football from an early age and to devote themselves to the success of their team. Understand that this variable isn’t inherent in a Catholic school, a public school, a city school, a country school, a rich school, or a poor school. This is a variable that is a by-product of the identity of the community. Certain communities value football participation (and by extension, success) more than others. The Indianapolis Catholic community (of course, there are others but this is the one of which I am most familiar) has taken great pride in their football success for generations. Football was a sport that lent itself to the blue collar, mostly immigrant, and less sophisticated Catholic communities in the early part of the 20th century. At the time, football was a poor man’s sport. It was tough and violent and there were a lot of serious injuries. The type of activity that poor, uneducated immigrant kids and young adults would not be dissuaded from. It just so happened that there were a lot of poor Catholic kids in Indianapolis at that time and a great many of them starting playing football. That developed into football success and a certain pride what went with it. In a community that had no other way to favorably compare themselves to the majority, athletic success, especially in football, became part of its identity. The resulting pride in that success was passed down from generation to generation. It became part of the culture of Catholic school education. Now, this history isn’t unique to the Catholic community. There are other communities throughout the state, which are not necessarily Catholic, which have developed a “football culture.” The fact, though, is that it takes generations (not years or even decades but generations) to develop the type of football culture that leads to dominance at the high school level. But it is this “football culture” that most strongly drives the success of the community’s football programs. The result is that when teams like Bishop Chatard, Roncalli, Cathedral, Andrean, LCC, etc. take the field, the 50 or 60 best athletes in the school are on the football team. Not only that, but they have been preparing to play for the high school team for years before they even get there. Most of the kids have played together for eight to ten years by the time they are seniors. From the time they are in the 3rd grade, the value of football success starts to be positively reinforced by the entire community. What position do you play? Did you win this weekend? Congratulations on your city championship. Subtle interactions like this with the adults in the community constantly reinforce the importance of football success. (This isn’t to say that other things are not reinforced; academics, charity work, appropriate behavior, and participation in the church and school are all reinforced as well. But when it comes to athletics, football is important in the Catholic community. It’s just the way it is.) That isn’t true for all schools where other sports such as basketball, soccer, baseball, etc. may draw athletes away from football. That also isn’t true of schools where the community isn’t athletics focused or in communities where the students are expected to work at home or have other responsibilities. The football culture is the single largest advantage that any school can have (excluding enrollment). But there isn’t one variable that one can point to which defines it. Some of the variables are inherent and some are earned. But it is impossible to separate the variables that give one community a strong football culture and others not. Now, in my opinion, the most important manifestation of this culture is a very strong youth program. The most direct relationship for success is the quality of the youth program in the community. One can look at non-Catholic schools who are similar in size and circumstances to see the difference in success based on the quality of youth programs. There is a reason that Indpls. North Central is consistently inferior to Warren Central. Warren’s youth program is very good. North Central’s is not. I would bet that there are very few successful programs who do not have a well developed youth program. Another aspect of football, in general, that is very difficult to explain but is probably inherent in football success is that, for some reason, football lends itself to dominance by small groups. Look at past champions of NCAA Div II, Div III, NAIA, and even Division I to a lesser extent. A small group of schools, usually around 10% – 20% win a significant majority of the championships. This aspect of football seems to be inherent in the sport. What we will inevitably find is that the variables which lead to football success are many, varied, and non-linear. Ultimately, the “system” which creates the success is extraordinarily complicated; much too complicated to accurately model. Nassim Taleb, in his work, The Black Swan, spends considerable effort discussing the attempts by people (mostly economists) to model systems which are extremely complicated and are ultimately based on human behavior. The one thing all of the models have in common is that they inevitably fail (see e.g.: financial crisis 2008). I believe that Mr. Taleb would probably say that this system is simply too complex to attempt to model. I can certainly see why the IHSAA would want to avoid the difficult discussions involved in attempting to parse out which variables should be used, and to what extent, to determine class realignment. So, what we are left with is the success factor system. All of the difficult variables (the causes) are eliminated and it is only the end result, regardless of how it is achieved, that is used to realign the classes. Is it an honor or a punishment? The beauty of that is in the eye of the beholder. I think that the Success Factor with a few tweaks can resolve most of the issues. For instance, I’d like to see 4 year cycles instead of 2 and fewer points needed to stay in a higher class. But, this is a system that will work much better and more fairly than multipliers, automatic bumps, or a separate tournament. Finally, it is important to remember that we are dealing with very small sample sizes. The current class system has only been in place for just over 30 years. There were periods of time where public schools had much more success than they are having now. Over the next 30 years, some programs will improve over that time and some will decline. The cultures of communities change over time, populations shift, incomes are redistributed, and priorities change. In a generation, there could be a completely different discussion which dominates this forum, such as why the participation in football has diminished to the point where football is nearly irrelevant. I fear that that is our greater enemy. As we argue with one another over the thing we enjoy so much, it is disintegrating around us."

YYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSS! Old school GID is back! The absolute worst thing about the success factor has been what it has done to this website. It is so &%%$ing boring now. Back in the old days, there would be 5 - 10 threads going on at the same time over the Public-P/P issue. We would reach 10, 12 pages before a moderator shut it down. When was the last time a moderator shut down a thread? It doesn't happen nearly enough. HERE WE GO: Well said, Cow Bell. Stupid. But well said. [Now you insult me, a few other Publics will jump in, then, I'll insult you and a few other P/P's will jump in. This is going to be so much fun! Yes! It is back, baby!]

Well said. I would go one further and say that this entire season has been a showcase for Chatard's O-line. It would be interesting to know what the cumulative time of possession is for the season. Really the entire program is built around exceptional offensive line play. Those guys definitely don't get enough credit year in and year out.

. . . "(a couple were even pretty lopsided losses)." Including the last two . . . and the two to North Montgomery in '95 and '96. 3A is a really tough competitive class and has been for quite a while. I don't see Chatard winning every game by 2+ touchdowns. I also don't think they are the favorite considering WL is the defending champion and has a ton of talent. While Chatard's skill position players are good, the real talent on the team has been the OL and DL. As long as they play well, they have a good chance of winning. But, as we know all too well, there are no guarantees.

Just some fun facts (because one team continues to come up in this thread). Since 1983 (36 years) Chatard has lost 23 times in the tournament. 6 times to Roncalli, 3 to New Pal, 3 to Memorial, 2 to Danville, 2 to Cathedral, 2 to North Montgomery, and once each to Brownsburg, Franklin Central, Beech Grove, Heritage Hills, and NorthWood. Of the teams Chatard has played more than once in the tournament, they have losing records to only Roncalli (3-6), New Pal (2-3), Memorial (1-3), and Cathedral (1-2). 13 times Chatard did not lose a game in the tournament beating SB St. Joe (3), Andrean (3), West Lafayette (2), NorthWood (2), Norwell, Luers, and Hamilton Heights for state championships. And . . . as has been mentioned numerous times, lost once in the championship game to NorthWood. Not a bad run. While, I have my doubts of the future of high school football in the long run, I can think of no other sport that is better at developing character (win or lose/good program or not).

I don't know if Chatard would have won state in 2013. It is nice to think so, but, we did lose to Brebeuf (albeit the first game of the season) and Andrean was pretty damn good that year too. But, it would have been great if Chatard would have played GS all four of those years from 2012 to 2015. I think Chatard wins in 2013 but 2014 would have been a toss up and we all know how close the 2015 game was. Still the worst conditions I've ever watched a game in.

Best coaching job I've ever seen was in that state championship game. Chatard's bread and butter play was a short toss sweep with the QB acting as a blocker. NorthWood must have spent hours and hours running that play in practice until everyone knew exactly what to do. Someone (I think it was the play-side linebacker) came in an blew up the fullback as far back in the backfield as possible every single time Chatard ran that play. Didn't try to make the tackle, just did his job every play. That pushed the ball carrier back or disrupted the timing of the play just enough for someone else to make the tackle after only a short gain, if any. It was very impressive work by the coaching staff. Good players too. I was very impressed. It was a well deserved win for that program. After learning its lesson the hard way, Chatard won the state championship the next two years. I hate to be on the wrong side of it, but, I do love those stories. Good thread!