With the new realignment and playoff system coming, the N.C. High School Athletic Association has the opportunity to straighten out some of the wrongs of the past.

The new playoffs are clearly complicated to figure out, considering that we still don’t have much of a clue about how teams will qualify even though its been revealed how many will make it.

There are now eight classifications. And with the newly revealed 48-team bracket standards, far more teams will make the playoffs than ever before.

As someone who has spent more time studying the current playoff system, I’m uniquely qualified to comment on its shortcomings.

I assume anyone reading this already has a good understanding of the current qualification and seeding process, but if not, this column will give you the step-by-step rundown to catch up.

What I want to focus on is the qualification process, which is overly complex and unfair as it exists today.

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The Problems with the Current System

Under the current playoff system, schools that compete in split conferences have unique advanatages when it comes to qualifying.

For the schools that are one of multiple teams from a classification in a split league, they get a guaranteed playoff spot for merely being the best of their group. For example, in the current Queen City 3A/4A Conference, the 3A teams regularly lag behind in the smaller sports but get to send someone to the playoffs anyway. A Queen City 3A/4A team that finished around No. 50 in the final 3A West RPI rankings has been sent to the playoffs on multiple occasions.

Additionally, these schools only have to finish with a .500 overall record or in a top three spot in the final conference standings to receive a home game in the first round. This is a whole new can of messy worms. These teams don’t have to win their conference to receive the advantage of the home game. We’ve seen many teams who were able to squeak out a 12-12 finish get a home game only to be blasted by a traveling team that didn’t win its non-split league.

We’ve seen below .500 teams get awarded with a home game because they managed to finish in the top three spots of a low-quality conference. (A note on the top three conference finish avenue: this rule has no stipulation for conference size. A team in a split conference with six teams has a better chance of finishing in the top three spots than a team from a split conference with say, eight or more teams. This quirk shows you how well thought out this process was. The whole thing makes no sense.)

These split conference teams that are granted these special top seeds seldom pan out. You’ll often see them seeded in the 7-10 range right now. Pay attention to how they perform in the first rounds of the spring playoffs.

As we transition into a playoff era with 48 or 24 team brackets, working this “free home game for split teams” bug out of our system is even more paramount. In a 48 team bracket, eight teams will get a bye from each region while 16 teams play in the first round. In a 24-team bracket, four teams from each region will get a bye while eight would play in the first round. Do we really want to grant a 12-12 team a free trip to the second round, while better teams have to play in the opening round and get banged up? I don’t think so.

In the new realignment, we’ll have a record number of split conferences at 54 of the 64. Even if these conferences were only composed of two classifications (they’re not: 11 of the split conferences have three classifications involved), you’re looking at over 100 teams qualifiying for the playoffs as a “champion” if we do things the same way.

Another way for teams to automatically qualify for a playoff spot now is with the second place or third place finishers. Leagues with six-eight teams get an automatic at-large spot for their second place finisher and leagues with nine or more teams also get one for their third place finisher. This is a largely redundant process, as these second and third place teams are most often well within the top 32 spots in the final RPI rankings. But when it has rarely needed to be utilized, it essentially serves as a way to get an extra piece of representation from a bad conference. (Also, back to the top three finisher from the split conferences point: It’s funny how they recognized that conference size can have an impact on where teams finish in the standing slots for this part, but didn’t think it mattered for the teams in the split leagues).

RPI finish is how teams are selected to the at-large spots now. However, the NCHSAA added a twist to this process with the leapfrog rule, which doesn’t allow a team to make an at-large spot in the playoffs if a team that finished a spot above them did not. This rule has had negative impacts, as teams that would’ve received a seed in the low 20s have been pulled out by a team from its conference that finished outside the top 32 in RPI. The leapfrog rule is also the No. 1 reason why it takes so long for the NCHSAA to produce brackets on seeding days, since you have to double-check that every single team in the field is not in above someone it shouldn’t be.

For more on the pitfalls of the leapfrog provision, see this column by J. Mike Blake:

How to Move Forward

The best way forward to is trim down the automatic qualifiers and limit the guaranteed home games.

The NCHSAA should only hand out the very top seeds in the brackets to teams that win their conference outright. So any top-finishing team from a solo-classification conference or from a split conference will be seeded before the rest of the teams in its classification.

If we trust RPI enough to order the teams for seeding, we don’t we trust it to do the qualifying?

After the outright conference champions are placed at the top of the playoff fields, the rest of the seeds should be filled out using RPI only. We shouldn’t even need to have a leapfrog rule and tiebreaker procedure.

If a team was the best of its half of a split conference but did not earn a top 24 finish in its region’s final RPI rankings, it would not make the playoffs.

I’d understand if people would have concerns about smaller teams in a split conference not having a guaranteed path to a playoff spot if they can’t overcome the larger teams for a league championship. But, consider this: 1) we’ve seen smaller split conference teams win the outright champion a decent amount of the time, 2) it’s still possible to get a nice seed and a home game if the RPI is good enough, it just won’t be at the very top among the teams that won a league championship, and 3) smaller teams in a split often get an RPI benefit by being forced to play those larger teams. Since RPI’s inception, the average scores have been higher as you go up classifications. For example, the average final RPIs in boys basketball this season were 0.5295 in 4A, 0.5028 in 3A, 0.4956 in 2A, and 0.4642 in 1A.

However, if the NCHSAA decides there should still be an actionable way to get a smaller split conference team a home game, let’s do something different than the easy outs of the .500 overall record or top three standings finish.

Here’s how I’d be open to giving these teams a home game: if their final RPI score is equal to or exceeds the lowest RPI from an outright conference champion in the classification.

Follow this potential example: say next year, Jack Britt finished as the top 7A team from the Mid-South 7A/8A, but 8A Pinecrest won the conference title. For Jack Britt to be seeded with the 7A outright champions, it would need to have an RPI than the lowest for one of those outright champs. If Jack Britt had an RPI of .6500 and Greater Neuse River 7A outright champion Garner had an RPI of .6400, Jack Britt would be allowed to be seeded with that group Garner is in at the top of the bracket.

The leapfrog stipulation should be removed. I understand the argument that conference finish should matter, there are good points that people have made. However, if we play seasons with both a conference stretch and a non-conference stretch, both should be accounted for when it comes to playoff seeding. It should be a team’s whole body of work that matters, not if it got tripped up by a team that knows it well in conference play.

Even if the NCHSAA insists on keeping the leapfrog provision, the current tiebreaker procedure has to go. The tiebreaker procedure is the most convoluted thing that the NCHSAA does, and that’s saying a lot. If a tie can’t be broken using head-to-head, the current procedure takes you on a winding journey that includes team-by-team performances against others from the conference. It’s a total waste of time and has led to some bad results because of quirky upsets. We already have something that we use to determine playoff teams most of the time: it’s called RPI.

The NCHSAA should break ties like this: head-to-head competition, best conference tournament performance (if applicable), and then, finally, RPI strength.

The automatic at-large spots for second and third place finishing teams should also be stripped since its rare implementation only leads to a team with a stronger resume getting pulled out.