This is sad:
The Oscoda Area High School football team hasn’t won a game, or even scored a point, in four games this season. Because of that, the school district has decided to cancel the remaining games.
Of course that’s a little misleading… the reason the school board says they cancelled the season is because the kids are so bad that they’re in physical danger. Which, if true, is a sad state of affairs. I can hardly think of a situation where this would happen but it wouldn’t be the result of a poorly run state association football program.
Heh…
“Seniors, I feel for you. There’s nothing I can say other than I’m sorry,” board member Neal Sweet said. “But you’re not quitters. You went out there and did your best.”
Yeah… you’re not quitters, so we’re quitting for you.
[Via Manny]
September 28th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I certainly don’t claim to know anything about Michigan HS football. But in Texas and LA, schools are placed into districts/conferences with other schools similar in size. You play a few non-district games and the rest are district games.
I just can’t imagine a school that is in a district with similar sized schools being in physical danger because they are so bad. It’s not like a team with 120 players is playing a team with 15 players. And… why did it take them 4 games into the regular season to determine this?
I just don’t believe it. There must be something else to this.
September 28th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
That’s what I’m saying… in Illinois sports have two classes… except football which has six. Makes me wonder if they don’t have too few classes.
September 28th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
I just looked up some info on the MHSAA website, and it looks like they are classified in 4 classes (A, B, C, and D) with the divisions at 245, 510, and 1055. Oscoda has an enrollment of 539, putting them near the bottom of class B. They were shutout in all four games played by an average of 41 ppg. All games played so far were away, and they were looking forward to 4 out of the remaining 5 being at home.
I think they do have too few classes. Their classes average a little over 150 schools per class. Alabama is generally about 70 per class. Both states have a 5-game playoff system, so while about half of Alabama schools go to playoffs, only about 1/4 of Michigan schools are able to do so.
September 28th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
heh, reminds me of my high school football team, which I played on
I went to a private school with a class size of about 200 - problem was, less than 30 in my class were guys. This was fantastic in some regards, but made fielding a competetive football team, well, impossible - iron man anybody?
My area had several all boy private schools, but very few all girls schools, which (probably) accounted for the gender discrepancy.
Anyway, we always had a great soccer team for some reason and our system made us put all of our teams in the same class (I’m a little sketchy on the details, it’s been a while). So our school was in the A class, so that the soccer team could do its thing, and therefore so was our football team.
We got CRUSHED - bad, I mean real bad. We were playing schools like Albany High, Troy High, Schenectady High… Our offensive line would usually be outweighed by the opposing teams by a good 400 pounds or more.
Fortunately, we had a great kicker (thanks to the soccer program), so we usually got a couple field goals in.
The point of this (long) post is that we never gave up, or had someone do it for us, and we were certainly in “physical danger” almost every game. If the kids want to play, let ‘em play. Gettin the crap kicked outta ya builds character.