MHSTigerFan

Colton’s going to be a senior. But I would put Josh Russell out there as a junior-to-be to watch. Tough kid.

Joey Paridaen at Evansville North. The Huskies really improved a lot this year and, from what I hear, Paridaen deserves a lot of the credit for instilling a culture of commitment and accountability. WR Dylan McKinney was one of the best players in Southwestern Indiana. Paridaen guided Eastern Greene to an appearance in the state finals a couple years ago. Keep an eye on him.

I’ll probably take some heat from my fellow Tiger fans in saying this. But, in a number of ways, Mooresville outplayed us. I don’t recall the yardage figures. But I’d be surprised if they didn’t outgain us. We capitalized on a very poorly thrown pass and a short field thanks to a fumble on the ensuing kickoff. Other than that, we didn’t move the ball very well. That said, our D did its usual job at being really hard to score on, too. It was a hard-fought game between two really tough teams. I can see why Mooresville knocked off EC.

This may sound like a flippant question, but I’m genuinely curious to hear your answer, given your comments about keeping things competitive.... Should IHSAA golf events be handicapped?

Speaking of football participation rates....what the heck has happened at Evansville Harrison? Their enrollment is listed by IHSAA at 1250. I never looked at their official roster. But, when we played them, I counted about 25 kids in uniform. And I'm pretty sure they didn't field a freshman team again this year. If that was correct, they've got about a 2% participation rate. And this is a school that has put 3 guys in the NFL (Scott Studwell, Kevin Hardy, Sean Bennett) -- and various other elite athletes (Calbert Cheaney, Walter McCarty, Joey Elliott, Chris Lowery, Brad Brownell).

Just out of curiosity, which are the rehashed arguments that have been thoroughly debunked here? You can't really debunk an opinion -- although you can certainly debunk arguments made to support one.

What makes you think 3A is the "toughest class in football"? I mean, I don't disagree that Chatard's team this year belongs in the discussion of best team in all classes. But, aside from that, I'd guess that virtually any other 3A team wouldn't have fared well playing in 5A or 6A. But, if they don't (and, you're right, they don't), what's the point of even saying this? No, reality is reality. Perceptions, on the other hand, are often distorted. I can't speak for any other school, but my P/P's enrollment has shrunk by about 25% since I went there. And, when I went there, we had never even gotten to a football state final. In the past 11 years, we've been 5 times, winning twice....and with significantly less enrollment. If you mentioned to our president or principal anything about "capping" enrollment, they'd laugh in your face while fighting off tears. The truth is that they're not far from desperate for more enrollments.

Also, speaking from experience these past several years, 3A has definitely been tougher than 4A in football...whatever that’s worth.

You realize that, if the IHSAA made this change, the cutoff points between classes would almost certainly shift down. Lots of schools would see significant decline in enrollment. Some more, some less. But I wouldn’t automatically assume that any particular school would go down in class.

Ha! I hear ya. I know Memorial is not unique in having a such a great, lifelong familial culture. But it certainly is that and I’m proud to be associated with it. What’s great about it, although some people view these sorts of schools as cliquey and exclusionary, is that we welcome with open arms new families who have no prior connection to the school. And anybody who thinks that most families who send their kids to parochial schools are “rich” is just wrong. I can’t tell you how many people I know for whom the tuition is a real burden. But when they ask us for fees to pay for this or that, most families who can afford it will kick in extra to help pay for those who can’t. Because that’s what families do for each other.

Memorial has been practically begging to get more students in the door for years. And, believe me, they couldn't care less if the student plays any sports. When I went there, we had around 800 students. Today, they have around 580. I'm not privy to any of the budgetary numbers. But, given the enrollment decline, I'm sure they aren't pretty. I don't know what the current football cutoff is between 2A and 3A (Mater Dei's listed enrollment is 497). But I bet we aren't terribly far off from it.

You brought this hypothetical kid up in relation to my comment about motivating kids to succeed in life. I responded in kind. Your original comment had nothing to do with counting special education or special need students in IHSAA enrollment figures. As such, neither did my response. I've already made clear elsewhere that I'm generally sympathetic to the argument you're referring to here. I don't think it really makes that big of a difference in all of this. But, to be sure, I would be supportive of a policy that excluded such students from the enrollment figures for purposes of classification. Assuming you don't start bringing home more championships, then what?

What in the name of all that's holy does dealing with a disabled kid -- or a hundred disabled kids -- have to do with IHSAA policies designed to advantage/disadvantage schools' athletic teams? Of course you deal with such kids differently than you do people of able body. So this is a complete non sequitur. But, since you mentioned it, our local press has focused a lot of attention on a Memorial student and his older sister (though she graduated last year) who both have Epidermolysis bullosa -- a horrifying disease that, among other things, makes their skin so delicate that it tears like wet toilet paper. They basically have to be wrapped up like mummies 24 hours a day. They can barely walk and they are in eternal pain. Among one of the ironies is that these childrens' father and uncle are two of the better athletes in Memorial's history. The uncle, who was HS baseball teammates with Don Mattingly, played in MLB himself for a number of years. Nobody has ever blown any sunshine to these kids about their prospects in life. They're going to have it rough, and they know it. But Sam, the freshman, is a huge sports fan and the team treats him like one of them. When he walks the halls at school, one of the players (often Brock Combs) accompanies him and carries his things to make sure that he gets where he needs to go safely. If you see any pictures of Brock at the celebration pep rally, you'll notice he's the only player not wearing his State Championship medal. That's because he gave his to Sam. Yes, I know that just about every school has kids like this. And just about every school has people in their community who go out of their ways to help them in countless ways. But I can tell you one thing, I've never run into anybody in our school community who would point to Sam or any other kid dealing with a hard situation there as a reason why the IHSAA needs to set policies that are designed to give us a better chance at winning sports tournaments.

I made that very comment in another thread. All I said is that, despite my haranguing about the Success Factor, the truth is that, if we were in 3A this year, we probably wouldn't be celebrating right now. That doesn't change my opinion about the success factor. But it's the truth. Sectional 32 is almost always a very tough sectional -- and both HH and GS were high caliber teams this year. Even if we'd have made it out of there, do I think we could've beaten Chatard again? I watched your game...and I have my doubts. They looked phenomenal.

That's a very presumptive statement. You have no idea how many of these kinds of situations exist at any particular school. Maybe they don't exist much at certain P/P schools, but do at others. To just make a blanket assertion like that is...well, let's just say it's akin to certain stereotypical attitudes that we've really been trying to exorcise from our society.

Bingo. You want to beat a team like Chatard? Improve. That's a much more constructive outlook than saying....get those bums into 4A, pronto!! We're entitled to win tournaments too and we can't do that as long as they're standing in the way! Now, I don't necessarily disagree with those saying that enrollment alone is not the best way to derive classes. But bumping up kids who were in 8th or 9th grade when a team had two successive great seasons? Senseless.

The world is a competitive place -- and real success does not come by throwing obstacles in other peoples' ways just because they're outpacing you. Preventing somebody from doing this is not "brushing them aside" at all. Nobody is entitled to any victory or championship. And to say "either I win championships too...or else you're brushing me aside" is ridiculous. If this is really indicative of your worldview, I'm glad my kids don't go to your school. You're going to have a hard time producing too many successful people if you encourage them to gauge their own success by how much better other people are doing relative to them...and thus just fomenting envy. What you should be encouraging them to do is model such people, not thwart them.

I couldn't agree more. The whole thing has a very "participation trophy" feel to it. And, frankly, I think that's one of the fundamentally wrong turns we've taken as a society. It was taken in the interest of promoting "success" by trying to eliminate (or, at least, diminish) the prospect of failure -- and it accomplishes this by making success harder for others to achieve. Imagine if, say, a commissioned sales force worked this way. We've got a team of 2 sales reps -- Joe and Bob -- and they each start out with an annual quota of $1 million. After a couple years in, both reps are making quota. But Joe is pushing $3 million in sales, while Bob is just getting beyond the $1 million quota. How much sense would it make to increase Joe's quota to the $3 million mark, while leaving Bob's alone? No matter what you might do with compensation, you'd still be telling your better rep that, because he's proven capable of selling more than the weaker rep, he's going to have to triple that guy just to keep his job....while the other guy can sell a third as much and still keep his. This isn't how the world works -- nor should it be. And to call it "fair" is positively Orwellian.

The enduring success that GS has had -- particularly since Nick Hart was hired -- is as good an example as I can point to why something like the SF is not only not good, but also not needed. GS is a smallish, rural public high school. Around 700 students from an area that is neither rich nor poor. It's not Carmel or Zionsville, but it's also not East Chicago. But the school not only has great facilities, it also has a very strong feeder program. I've had conversations with a number of GS people about it -- including one of the coaches. Coach Hart and the other members of the staff -- along with the administration, parents, and boosters -- have all done a phenomenal job putting together a top notch football program. Some years they have the horses to play with anybody, other years they're a bit down. Right now, you guys have a QB who will end up a 4-year starter and a sky-high potential. It's entirely conceivable that Allen will lead GS to LOS at least once, if not twice. But does that really mean that the kids coming up behind him, once he's gone, should be put on a steeper path? I don't think so. And, for me, it doesn't have anything to do with P/P versus public, or rich vs. poor, or anything like that. It has to do with common sense and logic -- plus a general belief that HS (athletics and otherwise) should properly prepare kids to compete in the workforce and policies like this work counter to that goal.

Even if this is the case, I don't think it justifies the SF or any other rule designed to make sports success more difficult for Dwenger (or anybody else). It's a really bad representation of how success, failure, etc. work in real life. If somebody else is having more success than you are at whatever pursuit or endeavor you're undertaking, and this is something you can't abide, the answer to that should never be to throw whatever bombs you have at your disposal in their path. That's not competition -- or, at least, it's not the way to deal with competition. The benefit of competition is that it makes all competitors strive to be better -- not to try to seek equal (or more equal) results, however possible. We shouldn't be teaching kids that the way to get the results they want in life is to take actions to hamper others who are seeking the same results, just because they're getting better ones. Because, among other reasons, that's not how it's going to work for them when they enter the workforce. If they want better results there, they're going to have to improve their own performance. I have a lot more sympathy for this argument. But wouldn't that mean having to officially exclude these kids from competing in athletics? It seems to me that would be a prerequisite for discounting them from the enrollment figures. I don't think it's something you can have both ways -- "we're going to exclude special education students from our enrollment figures, except those who actually participate in athletics." But, that issue aside, I do generally agree that it makes no sense to count them for the purpose of developing athletics classes. Well, this might just be a semantics thing. But, after all, schools that get enough points aren't moved down a class, right? They're not pulling out a pair of dice and rolling it to see which class they'll compete in in succeeding years, right? The entire idea is to pit those schools against stiffer competition -- which is another way of saying that they should have a harder time getting through tournaments. I guess we can debate whether or not "punishment" is the right word to describe this, but it certainly doesn't seem like any kind of reward. That said, whether or not it's a "punishment" isn't really my beef with it. My beef with it is that the SF burden is almost always placed on people who weren't responsible for the success. That makes no sense at all.

OK, I agree that the program is not immaterial and that this isn't an exact science. But the problem is that the success factor seems to rest on a presumption that the program is everything and the specific players -- those who had the success, those who come after -- are immaterial. The truth is that every scenario is different. My alma mater has been to 3 football state finals in a row, winning two. In the first season of this run, however, our headlines were reading "Memorial tops Jasper for first time in 10 years" (I don't remember the exact number of years...but that's roughly right). We had similar headlines when we beat (4A) Reitz and (2A) Mater Dei. So a program who has double-digit year losing streaks to 3 different annual opponents is now success-factored? As unfair as it is to chalk up the success of any team (especially in football, the ultimate team sport) to a handful of individuals, in our case it's almost certainly true. You take away Lindauer and the Combs brothers from us, and I strongly doubt we have the run we've had recently. But, while that era came to a close this weekend, our SF points have kept adding up. The kids who got them have moved on and the ones behind them, many of whom had nothing to do with it, now have an ostensibly steeper path to tournament success. I think most people see it that way, with reason. As I recall, there was even some discussion about putting P/Ps in their own division. But the SF system we have now is what they settled on. But why should the IHSAA, or any similar institution, be making policy designed to keep certain members happy at the implied expense of certain other members? If you want to have more success than you've had, take all the steps needed (within the rules, of course) to have more success. But to implement rule changes to make things harder for those who are having success? I wouldn't support any success factor policy, honestly. But, if they're going to have one, then they need to have a policy that better distinguishes between true perennial powers and programs that just happened to hit paydirt with a class or two of studs. I think the IFCA recommended a 4-year window to point up. That, at least, seems to guard better against the latter scenario.

The fatal flaw of the success factor is that it aims to make life harder on kids who had nothing to do with the success. ”Programs” don’t have success. Particular kids do. Should the IHSAA similarly add strokes to the scores of golfers or time to swimmers whose schools happened to have a few standouts the past couple years? “No, but those are individual sports!” Not really. They have both team and individual tournaments. And the success of a team is going to depend a whole lot on how good their individual athletes are.... ...which is no different than football or any other team sport.

Austin Jones looks headed to UIndy. He’s a great OLer. Did a phenomenal job on Karlaftis in last year’s final. But he just doesn’t have FBS size. And size is a prerequisite at that position. I’m sure Brock will play somewhere. But, yeah, it’s nuts he doesn’t have an offer. He’s a freak of nature - easily one of the best players to come out of Evansville since I’ve been paying attention.

Well, that’s probably true. But I’m not sure what it has to do with athletics.

You think they’re shelling out this money...because of sports?