MHSTigerFan

As I said above, if we really have access to all these advantages, we're pretty bad at taking advantage of them -- considering those loooong losing streaks to the likes of Reitz, Jasper, Castle, and Mater Dei. I had asked how this real-world (and not very ancient) history squared up with your "once in a decade" idea. But you never answered.

Did you see what Justice Souter said about this? I posted it above. The TSSAA had initially fought Brentwood's suit (it was a First Amendment claim) on the grounds that they were a private entity and that Brentwood, like all its members, was a voluntary member of it. As such, they believed they had no duty to respect the constitutional limitations the way a governmental agency would. Essentially, the court first held that TSSAA was a quasi-governmental agency (for the reasons Souter explained) and thus did have an obligation to respect the constitutional rights of its members. This allowed the lawsuit to proceed. With this, the court established what is called an "entwinement test" to determine when an agency like the TSSAA is a state actor. FTR, that doesn't necessarily mean that the IHSAA would be found to be a state actor by way of the entwinement test. But I'd be willing to bet that the prospect of this had a lot to do with the fact that the Success Factor was implemented, rather than a rule that was clearly discriminatory towards P/P member institutions as some had been advocating at the time.

If that's the case, then so much for the idea of a Multiplier or anything else that only applies to private school members. Again, I'm no lawyer -- and Muda's right that the IHSAA is technically a private organization. But it would appear that they're (correctly, IMO) regarded as a quasi-governmental authority and thus bound by the 14th amendment (as well as the 1st, etc.). But, here again, I think it's wrong for them to try to "throttle" anybody -- whether it's legal or not.

Well, nothing is stopping them from doing that. I think the ICSA is still around and consists of non-IHSAA affiliates. There may be others. But I don’t think any school voluntarily being in the IHSAA requires them to surrender their constitutional protections or absolves the IHSAA from having to respect them. The Supreme Court ultimately found that Tennessee’s sanctioning body wasn’t violating Brentwood Academy’s 1A rights by requiring them to comply with rules regarding recruitment. But the suit was allowed to proceed on the basis that the TSSAA was effectively a state actor. Well, the 14A guarantee of equal protection seems like it would make it difficult for the IHSAA to establish different rules for private school members than it has for public school members. I seem to remember some discussion about separating out the PPs back when the success factor rule was adopted. This happened after the Brentwood decision. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the Association’s legal counsel advised them not to go that route.

This is from Justice Souter’s opinion in Brentwood Academy vs TSSAA, regarding the latter’s standing as a private entity: "The nominally private character of the Association is overborne by the pervasive entwinement of public institutions and public officials in its composition and workings, and there is no substantial reason to claim unfairness in applying constitutional standards to it." The court ultimately found for TSSAA in a 5-4 decision. But they also had made clear that the TSSAA was still bound by constitutional standards.

True. But courts have in the past declared entities like the IHSAA to be quasi-governmental in nature. That could be operative in a number of ways — even things like 1st amendment cases involving prayer and such. And, of course, even being a fully private entity is no shield from civil litigation. I’m an employer and I can assure you that I’m expected to abide all sorts of anti-discrimination laws - including ones involving religion. I’m not sure if Indiana courts have ever viewed the IHSAA as quasi-governmental. But I do know that courts elsewhere have approached similar organizations that way.

I wonder if PP schools would have standing and grounds on which to sue the IHSAA if they were reclassified simply because they’re a private school. The SF, as ridiculous as it is, at least is based on objective criteria that apply equally to all member institutions. So, while I think it’s a bad policy, I’m sure courts would be very reluctant to get involved. But I’m not sure that would still be the case if classification policy was openly discriminatory.

To each their own, of course. But I think it’s a good thing to kick a little money their way to support televising sporting events....especially during Covid. I’m sure the IHSAA and the member schools have taken it on the chin this year. Seems like 20 bucks isn’t too much to ask to help the cause. I don’t have a team left...but I think I’d like to see Southridge tangling with Danville. That ought to be a great game and I’m a big fan of what Coach Buening has done at Southridge. And I’d also like the IHSAA to keep this up. It costs money to televise games and I doubt that advertising covers all the costs.

Uh, making a living as a doctor or attorney has very little to do with an employer giving you special consideration for where you went to high school. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that more of these sorts of professionals come from private schools (per capita, anyway). But I have a hard time imagining a hospital giving a hoot about where a prospective doc went to high school. They might care where you went to medical school, but that's not what we're talking about. I didn't bring up human capital, Titan did. I've repeated it because I find it rather peculiar terminology. I can't speak for anybody else, but all I've ever really cared about when hiring are things like experience, skills and qualifications, attitude, professionalism, cultural fit. I'll consider educational background when and where it's relevant -- such as with an accounting/finance position. But I can't imagine what would ever prompt me to consider the particular high school they went to. I never have -- and I've hired lots of people. I don't know for sure, but I suspect most small business owners would say the same. The point here is that all this supposed success we have is hardly universal. I'm not looking for any sympathy -- let alone somebody to change rules. Most people who do that are just sore losers. Lastly, most of the football success my school has had recently can fairly be chalked up to two brothers and their cousin whose mothers are twin sisters and whose paternal aunt happens to be married to our head coach....not because of some ethereal advantage we have for being a Catholic school. If that were actually the case, we wouldn't have been licking our wounds for the better part of a decade.

Well, I don't bet on sports at any level. And I sure as heck wouldn't bet on HS sports -- because it's a completely different beast than college or pro sports. I think one can assume that Duke basketball is going to continue doing well so long as Coach K is roaming the sidelines. HS sports have pretty much always been dependent on the state of their pipelines. And those are unpredictable. That said, if I were forced to make such a bet, I think I'd want more information about the schools than simply that one's public and one's private. For instance, here in Evansville, Reitz and Bosse are both EVSC public schools. One of them has a very rich football tradition and the other does not. As I said earlier, we went over a decade without beating Reitz up until about 3 seasons ago. Historically, I think most people around here would say that Reitz has the most successful football program in the area. Bosse, on the other hand, has had lopsided records for quite some time, and not in the good way. If you told me that the public school was Reitz and the private school was Memorial or Mater Dei, I'd bet on Reitz. Because history would strongly favor me -- even recent history. Over our last 10 matchups with Reitz, we're 4-6 (we played them twice this year after moving up to their 4A sectional) and that's after winning 4 straight.

Not only did I not say that, I pretty explicitly said the opposite of it. I only mentioned nepotism in unions because you did. But you had made an assertion different from nepotism -- you said that many employers favor private school grads. There's no evidence for such a thing. Nepotism typically involves favoritism towards family members. But it is not necessarily an overestimation of anybody's "human capital". Typically metric of merit are disregarded entirely. In other words, it certainly could involve overestimating somebody's merit. But it doesn't have to. Mmm, I don't think I agree with that. A whole lot of high income people are professionals of one kind or another -- physicians, attorneys, accountants, engineers. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that an inordinate number of these people went to private high schools. But that has nothing to do with employers favoring them in the hiring process because they went to private high schools. Many other high earners are high volume salesmen. There, too, this is something that one either is or isn't. Sales reports really don't care where (or even if!) you graduated high school. You either turn over a lot of business or you don't. First, you're the one who hijacked the thread with a tangent about employment. Second, that's not really what I've said. My primary point is that I don't think the IHSAA should be tinkering with rules in order to bring about certain favored (and thus prevent certain disfavored) outcomes based on some limited sense of relevant advantages and disadvantages. In reality, I think a "level playing field" is something of a unicorn. Nobody knows what kinds of athletes are coming up in what school programs at a given time. And it's not as if administrators can control, for instance, a great soccer player in the Evansville area from going to Memorial or one in the Fort Wayne area going to Canterbury. Of course the best players in a sport are going to have some extra interest in going to the best programs for that sport when they have an opportunity to do so. This is why I referenced some history here. In my school's case, it took us some 35 years to reach a state final in football -- despite all our alleged advantages. It took us another 10 to win one. We've never reached it in boys basketball. Our football team has been pretty successful of late. But, in between appearances in the finals, we spent a slew of years in the bottom half of our conference. Why hath thou foresaken us, advantages? Maybe they aren't actually worth what some presume? Besides, I can and did name a couple of places where P/P schools tend to lag their public school counterparts: budget and facilities. Titan dismissed these -- but, what else would he do? They don't really fit his narrative. But, if money spent on athletic programs doesn't have any bearing on the success of those programs, then why the hell are school corporations wasting so much taxpayer money? If they could have just as much athletic success with smaller budgets, then couldn't that money be put to productive use elsewhere?

First, my company is neither imaginary nor “podunk” - though, obviously, all things are relative. But I really don’t care whether you believe that or not. It’s of no consequence. Second, if you assert simply that nepotism exists in various forms, that’s obviously true - but hardly indicative of employers as some kind of quantifiable rule giving favor to alums of private high schools. You mention unions and in my experience skilled-trade unions are particularly ripe for nepotism....which typically involves legacy applicants irrespective of where they went to school. Third, you whiffed again on your empirical evidence. The study you linked had to do with a relationship between income and where somebody went to high school, not whether employers favor job applicants who went to private schools. Interestingly, that study found a relational link for females but not so much for males. It touches on various explanations, all of which seem logical but none of which being that employers leap down to the bottom of resumes to see where an applicant went to high school. Are there any studies you came across actually showing what you claimed? Because both of the ones you linked to show something else - and that’s a waste of both of our time.

Wait, you say that employers target graduates of private high schools, presumably at the exclusion of graduates of public high schools, and then give me a link about college admissions? You’re not very good at this.

So how’d we so miss the boat on girls golf? North just won something like their 4th state team title in a row. They’ve had a lot of success with boys over the years, too. Jeff Overton played there...and he ended up on a Ryder Cup team. I can’t explain any of that. But it wouldn’t surprise me that a really good female golfer would choose to go to North...just as it doesn’t surprise me that most of the best wrestlers in the area find their way to Mater Dei and most of the best boys soccer players go to Memorial or Castle. But I don’t think private/public has anything to do with it. I think strong programs get stronger because they naturally attract more of the top kids coming up. Central’s (arguably) best player this year transferred from Bosse. And can you blame him? Central’s had a winning program of late. Bosse, God love ‘em, has struggled.

Well, first, my anecdotal evidence is better than your zero evidence. You’re the one who made the unsupported assertion (and called it indisputable fact, to boot), not me. I simply asked you to support it - which you didn’t (and probably couldn’t if you tried). Second, comparing this to Ivy League vs Ivy Tech is absurd on its face. I think the teachers at Memorial would find it humorous that you compared them to the faculty at Yale...and the teachers at North would be insulted that you comparatively likened them in this stupid analogy to instructors at Ivy Tech.

Circling back to this, and the “once in a decade” remark, did you know that it wasn’t that long ago that it was a running joke in Memorial circles about how many consecutive losses we’d piled up against Reitz, Jasper, and Mater Dei? I can’t remember the exact numbers. But each one was in the range of double-figures. Those strings of losses extended from the time Michael Lindauer was learning to write his name through his junior year. And, speaking of Castle, our record against them in that stretch wasn’t much better. So how does this real life history square with your once in a decade theory? In these cases, we were the school fortunate to finally have a once-in-decade phenom after years of losses.

Do you have any documented evidence of this indisputable fact? I’m an employer with more than a couple employees. And it’s never even occurred to me to target employees by their high school alma mater. The thought is actually absurd. “Sorry sir, we don’t hire Reitz graduates here. If only you’d have gone to Mater Dei.”

No it doesn’t work that way at all. If you and another guy are competing in, say, sales positions, your boss isn’t going to give you a lower quota because you come from a poor neighborhood or went to a public school and the other guy didn’t. You can’t cite that as a reason you aren’t on a level playing field with that guy. But you’re wanting to teach our kids that they should be able to. It’s an awful lesson to teach them — that they and their classmates are (on average, of course) lesser “human capital” than kids whose parents could and did pay for their education. Its demeaning, frankly.

Oh I beg to differ. Come to our scrimmage sometime and watch our down-liners go against theirs. The falloff we have is pretty much always a lot sharper than theirs. And it shows. And why? Well, compare the number of kids in uniforms on either sideline. Besides, I’m not arguing that different schools have different advantages and disadvantages. Heck, one could make an argument that requiring tuition is, in and of itself, an obstacle to accessing great athletes whose families don’t have the money to send their kids to private schools. I mean, I grew up on the east side of Evansville around the time that Calbert Cheaney, Chris Lowery, Kevin Hardy, and Walter McCarty were donning red and black. You think we had athletes like that...because we were a private school? I’d say it’s more accurate to say that we didn’t have them because we were. In those cases, our East side rivals had advantages over us. It never would’ve dawned on us to appeal to the IHSAA to do something, anything, to help us better compete with those elite athletes...or guys like Elkins at Bosse.

By the way, I didn’t say the lesson we’re teaching our kids with the “if you can’t beat ‘em, restrain ‘em” approach was a valuable one. I said it was a terrible one. And so it is. Real life doesn’t work this way. You realize that, right? So why would we want to organize our high school athletics in a way that is wholly unrepresentative of life in a competitive society and economy?

You say that you’re arguing that using enrollment was broken. But I don’t find much in the rest of your post to actually support that argument. All the rest of it seems to just be saying that the “human capital” (just athletic, or otherwise?) at private schools is, on average, better than it is at public schools...because, unlike public schools, parents pay to send their kids to private schools (and, thus, expect and receive a better quality product academically and athletically than what the public schools provide). As such, the private schools need to have some kind of governor put on their athletic programs so as to emulate something approaching a level competitive playing field with public schools. Is that a fair restatement of what you’re saying?

I think that’s both reasonable and fair.

Well, I said I didn’t see anything wrong with it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And the only reason anybody thought it was broke was because (in particular) Cathedral, Chatard, Roncalli, Luers and Dwenger had “too much” success. So I’m guessing this whole Multiplier 2.0 discussion is coming around because the SF hasn’t done enough to quash their success. There are all kinds of variables the IHSAA could, I guess, consider to hold back programs they don’t want winning. But I would question why they would want to do that in the first place. You want to beat Cathedral or Chatard? Hit the weight room. Hit the film room. Put more effort and focus on your feeder program. Institute better discipline. But don’t gripe about them having advantages you don’t and can’t have and thus try to justify establishing rules which are obviously designed to make life harder on them just because they’ve been more successful than you have been. That’s, among other things, a horrible life lesson for the kids we’re raising.

I’m saying that the powers that be shouldn’t be monkeying with the rules in order to bring about certain preferred outcomes — that is, in favor of those which apparently aren’t preferred. I mean, what if they made these classifications based on money? Each school turns in budgets and they classified teams based on that? Is that more or less fair than the current structure? Why or why not? You want to start comparing budgets, facilities, and coaching staff salaries? The fatal flaw of the SF arrangement is that each particular class plays for 4 years. Then they move on and are replaced by different kids. So, if a school happens to have a couple studs in a class or two — say, a QB who accepted a B10 scholarship offer prior to his junior year — and those classes goes on to win a lot as expected, why does it make any sense to ostensibly make things harder on those who come after? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. The kids put on the steeper road had nothing to do with the “success” and, just because a school happened to produce a Charlie Spegal, a Jack Kiser, a George Karlaftis, or a Brady Allen doesn’t mean the kids who were in 8th or 9th grade when those guys were doing their thing should have weights put around their ankles. So, yeah, I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the class system we used to have. I’m not saying it’s the alpha and omega for how to approach it. But to make policies that are explicitly designed to combat certain (non-preferred) outcomes, and thus help to bring about different (preferred) ones? It’s nothing short of athletic welfare - made, I’d guess, at the behest of those who are usually on the wrong side of those outcomes....whining and moping about all their supposed disadvantages. Good grief, the Ev. Central team that lost in 4 OTs in the 4A state finals a couple years ago had 3 literally homeless kids starting — starring even — on that team. Talk about disadvantages. It didn’t hold them back. And they never once whined about it...nobody even knew about it until Gregg Doyel wrote a great piece about these kids and the battles they fought off the field. Life - and sports - is about overcoming your obstacles. Not trying to hack the rules to make things tougher on others who don’t have them.

Just an idea to keep things as fair as possible. I’m sure if they wanted to try this, they could find schools willing to accommodate it. Money makes the world go round, after all. But, either way, I’m very much in favor of neutral site semi-states.