Still much mystery for this year's TSSAA football playoff

Arkansas-SEMO Live Blog

A new TSSAA football playoff format already has been approved, so coaches, players and fans know that after this year guessing games are out.

The new format is simple: Finish in the top four in your region and you're in the playoffs; finish first or second and you'll host at least one game; and you know from which region your opponent will come.

Under the current playoff format, which included mixing teams from different classifications during the regular season, no one knows what will happen until opponents and playoff quadrants are spit out by a computer at the TSSAA.

"This (current system), I don't like," Notre Dame coach Charles Fant. "I remember one year they were going to have this big production with a show on the web and (the site) crashed. Nobody could get on the site. That was frustrating."

Coaches don't like the unknown or the system used to compile lists of probable seeds and playoff teams in each class.

In District 7-AA, five of the seven teams are still listed by the TSSAA as possible for slots in their classes' 32-team bracket. Notre Dame (Class 3A) and Signal Mountain (Class 4A) grabbed the automatic berths, but Bledsoe County (4-5), Grundy County (5-4) and Chattanooga Christian (4-5) were listed in the latest 32 top playoff candidates. Sequatchie County (3-7) was No. 34.

"I can't tell who we're liable to play with this stupid bracket, but it's the TSSAA. What would you expect?" said Bill Price, the oft-outspoken Signal Mountain coach.

The playoff formula concocted by the TSSAA is a combination of won-lost record, district finish (first and second automatically qualify regardless of record), natural geographic quadrant, opponents on a team's schedule that won 50 percent of their games and how many of those the team defeated, total of opponents' wins and total of opponents' losses. No coach knows if one category is weighted more than another or if each category counts the same.

District 5-AAA, which includes Class 5A and 6A teams, still has six of its seven teams in the running for a playoff spot, led by Ooltewah (9-0) and Cleveland (5-5) in Class 5A, but Soddy-Daisy (4-5) is listed No. 29. Of the two Class 6A teams in the district, Bradley Central (4-5) currently is in at No. 32 and Walker Valley (4-5) is only four notches behind at No. 36 and McMinn County is No. 38.

McMinn is 3-6, but the opponents it has faced have a combined 60-31 record.

"I guess on one hand you have teams with a chance right here at the end, but it makes it tough," Walker Valley coach Glen Ryan said. "My first year here we finished 5-5 and got beat by Cleveland. We went to the playoffs and they didn't. This year it could happen to us. And a couple of years ago Bradley and McMinn played Week 10 and turned around and played the first week of the playoffs.

"I think we're better off going back to the old way -- match up with another region where No. 1 plays No. 4 and No. 2 plays No. 3, et cetera."

Although he's concerned about the new alignment that will place his team in the travel-laden Super 32 for 6A, Bradley coach Damon Floyd is one of the few who doesn't mind the current playoff format.

"I don't have a problem with it," he said. "The issue is not knowing who you're going to play that first week. It doesn't really affect us because we don't look ahead anyway."

Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him at Twitter.com/wardgossett.

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