The effects of a "Results Factor"...

[Konza]

So should the football districting survive, schools will not longer be able to schedule at least seven games of their regular season. While now they can affiliate with other schools to form conferences and thus choose what level at which to play their regular season games, in the future the IHSA will decide that for them.

Is there a way to let programs find their own level in a totally subjective way? There may be.

I entered the enrollments and last five years' win-loss records into a spreadsheet for any school that had an enrollment of over 1500 and any 6A school that had an enrollment below that but made last year's playoffs. That included non-boundaried schools for which the current 1.65 multiplier put them over 1500. The enrollments were taken from the IHSA football site. Came out to about 176 schools.

I used the win-loss records to create a "results factor". Essentially it's the win-loss percentage for each year, weighted 5-4-3-2-1 in favor of the most recent year. I added it to 1 and multiplied it by the school's enrollment. If the school was non-boundaried, I kept the 1.65 multiplier.

The top five "results factors" were: Lincoln-Way East 0.8769, Phillips 0.8764, Batavia 0.8652, Prairie Ridge 0.8619, and Oswego 0.8616. The bottom five were: Elk Grove 0.0519, Waukegan and Maine East, both 0.0667, and Proviso East and Chicago Heights Marian, both 0.0815.

If you figure that the 64 biggest schools would have been 8A and the next 64 would have been 7A, the schools whose "results factor" would drop them out of 8A would be:

Elgin
Belleville East
Dundee-Crown
Niles West
O'Fallon
Conant
Stagg
Plainfield East
Glenbard North
Proviso West
McHenry

They would be replaced by:

Benet
Lincoln-Way Central
Lincoln Park
Normal Community
Hononegah
Chicago Mt. Carmel
Whitney Young
Batavia
Von Steuben (would go from 6A to 8A)
Niles Notre Dame (would also go from 6A to 8A)
St. Ignatius (would also go from 6A to 8A)

Schools with enrollments ranking from 65 to 128 would have been 7A. The "results factor" would drop these schools out of 7A:

Proviso West (Drops from 8A to 6A)
Round Lake
Plainfield Central
West Chicago
Proviso East
Mundelein
Streamwood
Elk Grove
Romeoville
Argo
Collinsville
Maine East
Oak Lawn
Granite City
Fox Lake Grant

They would be replaced in 7A by:

Quincy
Shepard
Thornton
Cary-Grove
Chicago Kennedy
Normal West
Crete-Monee
Richards
Lake Forest
Riverside-Brookfield
Rock Island
Prairie Ridge

I suspect that another school could still sneak into 7A from below, but they would have to have had a pretty good four year run from 2014-17 and fallen to 4-5 or worse in 2018. East St. Louis currently sits with the 156th highest score, so they would probably land in 6A.

Lake Park was the lowest scoring 8A school at 3486. That means that any school with an enrollment higher than that is going to be 8A, which means the biggest thirteen schools in the state. The highest scoring 7A team was St. Charles North. The lowest was Chicago Kennedy. Proviso West was the top 6A team.

I'll let someone else do this for the other two thirds of the schools, but my guess is that there's some serious movement given that one third of 7A moved up or down.

 

[No Bias---Just Reality]

The entire purpose of districts is to make sure the best teams are making the playoffs in each class. All you seem to have done here is help not so good teams try to find easier routes into the playoff by lowering their classifications and bumping up the good teams.

Should we just take all the 5-4 or better teams lump them together so that some are assured to be left out of the playoffs while we lump together all of the 4-5 or worse teams and assure that some of them do make the playoffs? This is ridiculous people. The good teams belong in the playoffs and the bad teams belong out of the playoffs that’s the whole darn point of playoffs. Can we stop trying to find convoluted formulas to get weaker teams in the playoffs!

 

[Konza]

I'll have to disagree with your initial premise. The purpose of districts for football, more than anything else, is to put an end to all of the conference shuffling that has taken place in recent years, ostensibly because some schools were having trouble making the playoffs. The secondary reason would be to make it easier for schools with strong programs to find opponents.

When schools choose their own opponents, they can take a number of factors into consideration. The IHSA limits those factors to enrollment and geography. That works well for some programs; not so well for others.

 

[No Bias---Just Reality]

I'll have to disagree with your initial premise. The purpose of districts for football, more than anything else, is to put an end to all of the conference shuffling that has taken place in recent years, ostensibly because some schools were having trouble making the playoffs. The secondary reason would be to make it easier for schools with strong programs to find opponents.

When schools choose their own opponents, they can take a number of factors into consideration. The IHSA limits those factors to enrollment and geography. That works well for some programs; not so well for others.

People shuffle districts looking for favorable match ups. You have 6a teams getting playoff qualifying wins against 3a teams in conferences like the CCL and teams like say Aurora Christian when they were in the CCL missing the 3a playoffs because they had losses to 6,7,8a teams. The district format makes all of your qualifying games against teams in your classification so whatever round about way you want to look at it the district format makes sure a 5a team qualifies by beating 5a opponents and not on the backs of some smaller opponents thus it helps make sure that teams belong in that particular classes playoffs and takes away the punishment of some teams missing the playoffs because they are playing larger schools and losing to them.

You avoided the entire premise of my reply. Why are you wasting time on a formula that tries to find a way to qualify undeserving teams? If you have 2,000 kids and you can’t get in the playoffs by beating other schools with 2,000 kids why should you get to drop down and play schools with 1,500 just to help your chances at the same time you punish a good team with 1,500 and bump them up to play the good teams with 2,000?

 

[Undercenter3rd1]

Take a school like Mundelein with over 2000 enrollment they have been loosing for decades at football, but for baseball they are really good!They should not be in 8A,playing Main south.You have to consider in success factors over a period of time where to place teams.It ruins HS football to have programs lose for decades!

 

[Konza]

People shuffle districts looking for favorable match ups. You have 6a teams getting playoff qualifying wins against 3a teams in conferences like the CCL and teams like say Aurora Christian when they were in the CCL missing the 3a playoffs because they had losses to 6,7,8a teams. The district format makes all of your qualifying games against teams in your classification so whatever round about way you want to look at it the district format makes sure a 5a team qualifies by beating 5a opponents and not on the backs of some smaller opponents thus it helps make sure that teams belong in that particular classes playoffs and takes away the punishment of some teams missing the playoffs because they are playing larger schools and losing to them.

You avoided the entire premise of my reply. Why are you wasting time on a formula that tries to find a way to qualify undeserving teams? If you have 2,000 kids and you can’t get in the playoffs by beating other schools with 2,000 kids why should you get to drop down and play schools with 1,500 just to help your chances at the same time you punish a good team with 1,500 and bump them up to play the good teams with 2,000?

The point of the exercise was not so much to qualify undeserving teams for the playoffs but to improve the regular season product, especially, once again, because for the games that count toward playoff qualification, the schools are not going to be able to choose who they play. I expect that, after a couple of iterations of this, many schools will find their level and settle there, and since the enrollment serves as a floor, schools will not be able to keep losing their way to a level where they can win.

Here's my shot at what the 7A and 8A districts might look like:

8A1: Glenbrook South, Loyola, New Trier, Niles Notre Dame, Stevenson, Warren, Waukegan, Zion-Benton.
8A2: Curie, Evanston, Lane Tech, Lincoln Park, Maine South, Taft, Von Steuben, Whitney Young.
8A3: Barrington, Bartlett, Fremd, Hononegah, Huntley, Lake Park, Palatine, South Elgin.
8A4: Leyden, Lyons Township, Morton, Mt. Carmel, OPRF, St. Ignatius, Simeon, York.
8A5: Batavia, East Aurora, Metea Valley, Neuqua Valley, Oswego, Oswego East, Waubonsie Valley, West Aurora.
8A6: Benet, Downers Grove South, Glenbard East, Glenbard West, Hinsdale Central, Naperville Central, Naperville North, St. Charles East.
8A7: Bloom, Bolingbrook, Brother Rice, Homewood-Flossmoor, Lincoln-Way Central, Lincoln-Way East, Marist, Sandburg.
8A8: Edwardsville, Joliet Central, Joliet West, Lockport, Minooka, Normal Community, Plainfield North, Plainfield South.

7A1: Alton, Belleville East, Belleville West, Normal West, O'Fallon, Pekin, Quincy, Yorkville.
7A2: DeKalb, Jacobs, Machesney Park Harlem, McHenry, Moline, Rock Island, Rockford Auburn, Rockford East.
7A3: Buffalo Grove, Carmel, Cary-Grove, Lake Forest, Lake Zurich, Libertyville, Maine West, Prairie Ridge.
7A4: Elgin, Geneva, Glenbard North, Larkin, Marmion, St. Charles North, Wheaton North, Wheaton-Warrenville South.
7A5: Addison Trail, Conant, Dundee-Crown, Hersey, Hoffman Estates, Prospect, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg.
7A6: Downers Grove North, Fenwick, Glenbrook North, Highland Park, Niles North, Niles West, Riverside-Brookfield, Willowbrook.
7A7: Andrew, Blue Island Eisenhower, Lincoln-Way West, Plainfield East, Reavis, Richards, Shepard, Stagg.
7A8: Bradley-Bourbonnais, Chicago Hubbard, Chicago Kelly, Chicago Kennedy, Crete-Monee, St. Rita, Thornton, Thornton Fractional South.

Obviously there are a lot of ways one can draw these lines and I apologize for any geographical faux pas. You can probably see, however, how exchanging one school for another could result in a re-draw of the entire map.

 

[PanthersWildcats86]

The results factor may work better at big schools...But the swings at some smaller schools make this difficult.

I'll use Westville, a 2A school near Danville for my example. 387 kids. Guy Goodlove has been the coach since 1995. Between 1974 and 1999, one 7-2 season, three 5-4, zero playoffs. Since 2000, 13 playoff seasons, 5 one loss seasons, 2A runners up in 06 & 07 at 13-1. But the bad seasons? They were 11-1 in 17, 0-9 in 18; 1-8 in 03, 8-3 in 04; 1-8 in 14, 7-3 in 15. The whipsaw at even well-coached smaller schools can be vicious enough without some success factor...The coach didn't forget how football is played going from 11 wins to winless in back-to-back seasons...something tells me graduation losses gutted his team. A results factor would just have rubbed his team's nose in the dirt even worse in 18.

A 1A school who has Clark Kent on its roster is going to be awesome, as Clark is likely to win 4 straight state titles in his 4 track events and might win state track titles by himself. They'll probably nickname him Superman on the football field, as he rushes for 800 yards per game and a touchdown on every carry en route to 4 straight football titles. He'll average 150 points per game in basketball as they win 4 straight titles and he dunks 75 times per game (and never has to dribble as he flies in to dunk on every play). Then he graduates, but the results factor makes the next year's winless football team even worse...There is no way to create a success factor that takes Clark Kent into account when he graduates (as even 8A kids can't even tackle him);

 

[Konza]

The results factor may work better at big schools...But the swings at some smaller schools make this difficult.

I'll use Westville, a 2A school near Danville for my example. 387 kids. Guy Goodlove has been the coach since 1995. Between 1974 and 1999, one 7-2 season, three 5-4, zero playoffs. Since 2000, 13 playoff seasons, 5 one loss seasons, 2A runners up in 06 & 07 at 13-1. But the bad seasons? They were 11-1 in 17, 0-9 in 18; 1-8 in 03, 8-3 in 04; 1-8 in 14, 7-3 in 15. The whipsaw at even well-coached smaller schools can be vicious enough without some success factor...The coach didn't forget how football is played going from 11 wins to winless in back-to-back seasons...something tells me graduation losses gutted his team. A results factor would just have rubbed his team's nose in the dirt even worse in 18.

A 1A school who has Clark Kent on its roster is going to be awesome, as Clark is likely to win 4 straight state titles in his 4 track events and might win state track titles by himself. They'll probably nickname him Superman on the football field, as he rushes for 800 yards per game and a touchdown on every carry en route to 4 straight football titles. He'll average 150 points per game in basketball as they win 4 straight titles and he dunks 75 times per game (and never has to dribble as he flies in to dunk on every play). Then he graduates, but the results factor makes the next year's winless football team even worse...There is no way to create a success factor that takes Clark Kent into account when he graduates (as even 8A kids can't even tackle him);

I get Westville's "results factor" to be 0.5937, so if you add 1 to it and multiply it by their enrollment of 387, you get 616.75, which would push them up into 4A. That's done in a vacuum, though; every other school's enrollment would also be subject to its own school's factor, and since every game has a winner and a loser, one would expect the average factor to be around 1.5. Since Westville wasn't that far out of 3A to begin with (largest enrollment among 2A qualifiers was 399), chances are that they would move up a class.

I would be the last one who could comment on the difference in level of play among classes, especially in the ones who play their championship games on Friday.

It would be interesting to add data from another group of schools- possibly all of those with enrollments between 1000 and 1500 that I haven't already added- and see how things shake out.