Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Forget Van Buren's school district suing the Arkansas Activities Asssociation and its board of directors over the current football playoff seeding structure. The folks who should be suing are the state's high school football fans. They are getting short-changed with the current bracket system.

What's wrong with this picture, the picture in question being the Class 7A state playoff bracket?

For most of this season, the three best teams in the entire state of Arkansas - based on polls of sportswriters (The Associated Press), rankings in newspapers such as the statewide Democrat-Gazette, and the ArkansasVarsity.com coaches polls that run on this site - have been Bentonville, Springdale Har-Ber and Conway. Each of those teams has been ranked No. 1 at one point in the season. Each is a Class 7A team; Bentonville and Har-Ber compete in 7A-West, where Bentonville won the league title at 7-0 last week and Har-Ber fell to the No. 3 seed out of the conference because of the tie-breaking procedure. Conway came out of 7A-Central as its top seed among a three-way with Cabot and Bryant.

However, of those three teams that most pollsters have said all season were the state's best, only ONE can possibly make the 7A state championship game. Even worse, after the Nov. 19 games, either Conway or Har-Ber will be done for the year, since the bracket has them playing each other that Friday night in Conway (provided Har-Ber gets by Little Rock Central this Friday).

Oh, and did we mention that even though Conway defeated four of five 7A-enrollment-size schools in its conference (Van Buren and Russellville are classified as 6A schools for playoff purposes, hence that Van Buren lawsuit to which we referred above, and something we'll get to in a moment), it DID NOT get the No. 1 playoff seed that goes to 7A-Central's winner, in the bracket opposite 7A-West's No. 1 seed, Bentonville.

No, that went to West Memphis. This would be the West Memphis whose only 7A-enrollment foe in its league, Little Rock Hall, dressed 21 kids in its season finale and played like a bad Class 4A team for most of the season. However, the AAA's new playoff seeding procedure for 7A and 6A, as voted on in January by the 7A/6A schools (except for Van Buren and Russellville, who according to a Van Buren source did not receive a ballot), allowed for West Memphis to load up on points for the 7A playoff bracket by beating 6A teams and getting bonus points for winning what's essentially an all-6A conference.

So, West Memphis sits in a bracket with Cabot, Fayetteville and Fort Smith Southside as the higher seeded among eight teams, while Conway, Har-Ber, Bentonville and Bryant are the powers among those eight teams in the bottom half of the bracket. Now, we understand the tie-breaking procedure that placed Har-Ber as a No. 3 seed and won't quibble with that, and it's the Wildcats' fault for losing to Southside and falling to a No. 3. However, Conway should not be in the same bracket with Har-Ber or with Bentonville.

At some point, common sense ought to come into play with seeding football teams for the postseason.

Then, we have the Van Buren squabble, in which a Crawford County circuit judge said Monday the suit was filed in the wrong location and sent it along to Pulaski County, where the Arkansas Activities Association's offices are located.

Van Buren doesn't believe its conference games against 7A-Central teams should have been the only determiner for seeding in the 6A playoffs. Who does, besides the AAA? (Russellville was the only other school in 7A-Central that would fall in the 6A-enrollment level, and Russellville bombed this season and isn't in the playoff equation.)

But, according to the AAA, the decision to place all the 6A and 7A teams in their regional conferences - in most cases the same conferences as in the 2008-2010 cycle - and then use this power rating formula to seed four teams (West Memphis and Hall for 7A, Russellville and Van Buren for 6A) was agreed to democratically by all the schools. Van Buren's claim is that it was not informed of the addendum to count only conference games. Even if Van Buren had opposed the addendum, it passed overwhelmingly.

The real problem is, the formula is flawed. West Memphis has done nothing on the field to merit a top seed in 7A, while Van Buren was unable to do much on the field to show precisely where it belonged in 6A. Van Buren is a No. 4 seed in 6A and would have been a 4 or 5 seed if it were competing in the 7A playoffs. How can that be, unless 6A and 7A teams are essentially of the same value? And, if that's the case, why have separate classifications?