City Section Revamps Playoff Structure

The City Section revamped its oft-criticized football playoff structure Monday, promoting 12 teams to the 4-A Division to establish two more evenly balanced brackets for the fall season.

The Interscholastic Athletics Committee, the governing body for City sports, voted 16 to 5 to adopt the new structure, rejecting another proposal that called for placing the section’s 49 schools in one division.

The vote followed a report from Brad Ratcliff, president of the Los Angeles Coaches Assn., who said a poll of City football coaches showed strong support for the plan. According to Ratcliff, University High School’s football coach, 32 of 46 coaches backed the proposal, with three coaches failing to respond.

The new plan establishes a 24-team 4-A Division and a 25-team 3-A Division, with each division consisting of six leagues. The City will decide at a meeting in three weeks whether to adopt 16- or 12-team playoff brackets for each division.

The plan, which will be reviewed after its first season, is patterned after a proposal by Monroe Coach Dave Lertzman, who designed the present City conference structure three years ago. Next fall, each of the six eight-team conferences (the Southeastern Conference has nine teams) will consist of one 4-A league and one 3-A league. The four conference teams with the best conference record based on last year will form the 4-A league, with the other four teams forming the 3-A league.

“If we wanted to keep the 3-A Division, this is what we had to do,” Ratcliff said. “The system wasn’t fair and we had to give the 4-A a better playoff.”

Critics of the old system charged that the 4-A Division playoffs had become meaningless because so few teams participated. Last year, 37 of the section’s 49 schools competed at the 3-A level and 16 advanced to a four-round playoff. The remaining 12 teams--all of which qualified for the playoffs regardless of their record--came from three leagues, producing a 4-A playoff that created rematches from the regular season.

City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness, a critic of the old system, praised the newly adopted structure as a satisfactory compromise.

“It’s workable and something worth doing,” he said. “We’re never going to overcome the concept of dividing teams by ability. This is a way to make it more equitable for both sides.”

The move wasn’t received well in all quarters, however.

Kennedy Coach Bob Francola objected to the plan in general and specifically to the move of his Golden Cougars to a 3-A league in the Northwest Valley Conference based on last year’s 3-4 conference record.

“No way am I going to coach a 3-A team,” he said. “Our whole conference should be 4-A. It’s a matter of pride, a matter of how hard everybody wants to work. It seems like everybody wants to wallow in mediocrity.”