When Does 4 Wins Not Equal 4 Wins?

PHOTO BY CHRIS SEWARD - THE NEWS & OBSERVER

Glad you asked, or, perhaps you didn't because for a number of years now reaching that magical four win plateau in North Carolina high school football has meant at least a shot of making the big dance the first few weeks of November.  Well, based on recent changes by the NCHSAA and the new 10 games schedules (or 11 game schedule) in 11 weeks, this hard and fast rule of getting to 4 wins has become just a bit more convoluted.  For those coaches and administrators that read through the NCHSAA handbook prior to this season or maybe more importantly prior to deciding to either add that endowment game or not, this is probably not that big of deal - even more so if they let everyone else that didn't have a handbook know what they found out.  For those that didn't read it thoroughly and thought the high school football world of 2011 was on a standard operating procedure of 2010 and prior - well, today may not be what you would call a good day.

So what is this big change, how does it deal with the mythical four wins and why should anyone care you ask?  It's all about the endowment and that '11th' game.  To be blunt - it doesn't really exist.  See, prior to this year, if you played an eleven game schedule with an endowment game you had the opportunity to 'get-rid-of' any non-conference game on your schedule to get you down to the 10 game reportable schedule for playoff consideration.  This meant that if you played Team X as the endowment game and won, played four other teams in non-conference and won all of them but one (putting you at 4-1 in non-conference play), then when it came to reporting that 10 game schedule you could ditch that one non-conference loss and effectively be 4-0 in non-conference play, thanks to your endowment game!  So what's the problem you say?  Well, over the past year things changed and teams are no longer able to operate under the above mentioned criteria.  Specifically, for teams that played an endowment game, Win or Lose, that game and only that game must be dropped for the 10 game reportable schedule.  What that means is that four wins, might just mean three wins and not the four wins you might have been expecting!  In the situation provided above, the team would have to keep the 3-1 record in the non-conference games and drop the win they picked up in the endowment game.  For teams that lost their endowment game, no big deal, but for those that won that game - or perhaps for teams that are currently on the bubble of trying to reach four wins and have yet to play their endowment game...it means that game in essence doesn't exist from the perspective of reaching the four win plateau.  I should add that the endowment game may be of importance when it comes to tie-breakers in the seeding process, but aside from that element and historical record books, the game will not be counted towards playoff qualification purposes.

J. Mike Blake at the Cary News [LINK] has a story up directed at this new change as does Earl Vaughan out at the Fayetteville Observer [LINK].  Links are provided for both for additional details.  In addition, the NCHSAA Football handbook is referenced [LINK].

The implications of this new rule are many, first it means that trying to predict who will make the playoffs, aside from the automatic qualifiers is going to be incredibly tough, unless you have a detailed schedule of every AAAA team, but also have verification of which non-conference game on their schedule was the endowment game.  This is important because only the endowment game is removed from that 11 game schedule.  I would be hard pressed to simply find which of the non-conference opponents for the PAC-6 were the endowment games, much less the rest of the 99 teams that play AAAA classification ball.  Second, it means that there are teams that currently have a certain number of wins, but in fact actually have one less win then the record is showing.  In the past this was never really the case, unless the team had won all of their non-conference games and played an endowment.  With the recent change, that is not necessarily the case and knowing which of the games was the endowment is ultra-important.  Third, for the small group of teams out there that have yet to play their endowment game and may perhaps be in a situation where they are still trying to reach that four win plateau, this may or may not be an eye-opener for them.  My assumption and certainly hope is that for teams in this situation, all those involved knew and understood this fact and so this isn't really news, rather just some additional clarification.  Regardless, the 'you-can-only-drop your endowment game' rule is something that will certainly add to the already complicated and layered system that we call the North Carolina high school football playoffs.

Photographs courtesy of newsobserver.com (The News & Observer)