lazarus

well, now i am doubly disappointed. not only did i not get to see the ncs-vb game, i missed the opportunity to meet bighurt. not that i didnt go. i went to the trouble to make the drive to nashville because i thought eagleville-ca and ncs-vb would be the best pair of games on the night. eagleville-ca did not disappoint,but i didnt get to see much of the second game due to an embarassing group of ncs students (or more likely recent grads). they came over to the designated vb section, (where my wife & i had been unlucky enough to locate ourselves) mostly filled with parents and grandparents (the students were behind the vb bench) drove off the people occupying the front row seats and treated us all to an evening of profanity & behavior that would shame apes. one of the highlights being their mistaking the row of coaches and coaches spouses behind them for vb fans,taunting them and attempting to start trouble. their treatment of the poor vb cheerleaders when they came over to cheer in front of their designated section was nothing less than disgraceful. i dont think i was alone in my opinion by any means. the officals threw one of them out probably for the profanity, but there were plenty of reasons to choose from. the police started over there at one point, probably to remove them but were stopped by an ncs official. i dont think he surely realized how bad their behavior. the police did come and talk to them after the game. the shame is, this in no way is representative of ncs, a good school with first rate people running it. nor coach anderson, not only a great coach but a first class person. oh yeah, and lest you tag me as just some old cranky guy, i attend about a hundred hs basketball games a year have seen and heard it all. there is no problem with you acting the fool. that is what youth is for. but take it to the student section where it belongs. that sort of language & behavior would be better appreciated by your peers. what would you think if someone acted like that to your parents and grandparents?

"That is a real easy read! Reminds me of some college assingment reading many years ago." even tho it had nothing to do with sports, it does make you think about these debates, huh? a fun read, but not a confidence builder as far as the ability of humans to reason. "I was hoping some of my comments and questions could prompt one to see things from a different perspective." ah, so human. we are always asking of others what we are unwilling to do ourselves. "I have heard someone has submitted a proposal for a total split between the public and private schools. Wonder if it will have legs?" dont know if it will have legs, but the thing seems to have immortality. it's been popping up since classifications were invented. is it just me, or was football more fun BEFORE the playoffs?

stan, well, that is kind of a rough description. but there is a lot more going on than that. there is one paper i think you would enjoy and find informative: "cognitive biases potentially affecting judgement of global risks" by eliezer yudkowsky it includes the definition: "the systematic experimental study of reproducable errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes..." i checked and you can google it up by entering the name of the paper. while not designed as an introduction to the discipline itself, it is written in plain language and i think you'll find it a good starting point. (and it only takes a few minutes to read. it's about 20 pages long) i warn you; you might have a hard time stopping, once you get started. this is fascinating stuff and there is a lot out there.

(laz, Would you agree with this statement: "The vast majority of public school administrators and coaches do not believe private schools belong in the same classification with public schools.") yes, i believe that is a true statement. (No matter what the numbers say, many people believe that there is an unfair advantage held by the privates. Put privates in 4A and 5A and WW III will break out.) i'd say that is accurate as well. (Who is "BC"?) balled coach....... now, would you agree with this statement: the arguments made on either side of the public-private debate offer views of reality that are grossly distorted by personal interest, and prove little beyond the validity of the theories of psychological heuristics.

"I would be interested in seeing the numbers on winning percentages in the playoffs public vs. private. and the percentage of private schools that make the playoffs vs. publics" i am amazed that you havent seen those percentages. it's too big to fit on here, but i had the stats from every public-private contest played from the inception of the football playoffs thru about 3 or 4 years ago. over most of that time period privates had won around 70-75% of the games with publics. after the "split" the private winning % began to go up, instead of down and before the multipler was added was getting to be up in the 90+percentiles. i had a number of years worth of regular season games & the winning percents on those werent as extreme as the playoffs. if you eliminated non-region (or district) play the percentages were similar to those of the playoffs. obviously privates preferred to play "up" publics in their non region games (or maybe publics preferred to play "down" privates!) understand that the winning % didnt "guarantee" a private champion every year, as, even if you win 90% of the time, you lose 10% and privates also knock out privates. not every bracket contained privates and some contained several. likewise, a public champion didnt have to effect the winning % much, since a lot of brackets would allow a public champion to see only one private on the way. (or potentially none) after the multiplier the winning percent went to (i dont recall exactly) something in the area between 2/3 and 3/4 which doesnt really bother me that much. i think it is reasonable to expect the privates ought to be in the top 1/3 of schools. after all, they are charging people to send kids there. if they were bottom dwellers, wouldnt that be a ripoff? the brackets are still similar enough that public schools have a reasonable chance to win titles and privates will win some too. i dont think you would want to see privates in a hopeless situation either. i realize that some publics are not in a very favorable geographic location, but no system is perfect. there are always going to be stronger & weaker regions. if it creates a sense of some justice there are also privates with little athletic emphasis who are multiplied up into a worse situation than just having a tough road to a gold ball. from my viewpoint, mathematically i would expect the privates to have some advantage. repeating myself, they are charging people to go there. the larger part of them place emphasis on strong athletic programs just like the larger part of the publics. administrations that cant deliver in the privates wont last. in publics they can last (forever) until some people retire (or a new position is created in the school system administration) i can live with a lot of privates fielding good teams. i'd expect them to have some dominant teams as well. but there are plenty of good public schools right now and some dominant ones. things seem pretty competitive (at least by my numbers). i was a skeptic about the multiplier and it hasnt been around long enough to completely win my trust. but my numbers say it is working out about right so far. i still think BC's phantom athletes are baloney, tho.

i must be crazy to respond to this, heck, i was crazy to even read part of it. but i seem to be about the only one who has seen all of these teams play (well, almost all, i havent seen molasses) those are some good single a teams. good personnel & good coaching. but none are without their strengths and weaknesses. on the right night i think any of them could beat any of the others. whose shots fall? who can control the tempo? who gets a couple of tough calls on the wrong guy? who has the perfect game plan for the night? (of course with a coach like coach anderson you'd be a fool to count him out if he assembled his team out of middle schoolers last week.) any of these teams could take it all. but what makes this thread truly crazy. not a one of those teams is so good that their ticket to the boro is as good as punched. (hope that dont hurt any feelings)

hi guys, been too busy to visit for a while. i see my old pal baldcouch is still assigning the phantom athletes to the public schools' pool. BC; you reduce your school's pool by the athletes who arent available because they cant come to your school due to grades, money, interest, etc. seems like the public schools could also reduce their pool by the athletes who arent available for the very same reasons.... altho, technically, they are considered students at the school. i'll check back later for your response. right now it's back to work. maybe with a little luck i can be "too busy" for another few weeks.

"Nothing against our seniors ... that first quarter ...was hard to watch." well, it sure sounds like something against your seniors. and it isnt really fair. i've seen quite a few of cascade's games this year, and each of those guys has made contributions when called on during the season. but when tradition calls for you to start all your seniors, and your 5 seniors consist of 5 undersized 4's & 5's the lineup is going to lack a little in balance. it isnt fair to pick out a couple of players in unfamiliar roles & put it all on their heads. besides, cascade continued to lose ground in the second quarter with the regular lineup in. the comeback was all in the second half. " there has to come a time when you do what you have to do to win" what they needed to do to win was have a couple more boxouts on the defensive end late in the game, after they'd gotten the score close & forced a miss on the initial shot. second chances kill.

i watched the film clip. that's a 0.6 second shot, no problem. unless that's a clip from some other game, you got no gripe.

i dont have any opinion about uc vs molasses, but i wanted to point out that computer rankings do involve human input. computers can process a lot more information, perform more calculations, and not make computational errors, compared to humans. however, the logic behind any computer ranking program is purely the product of the human who wrote (or conceived) the program.

obviously i cannot speak for everyone, but i like to play private schools. the old playoff setup was clearly unbalanced, (i will wait to judge the multiplier system until there is more data). but for regular season games, good opponents are more desireable than weak opponents. of course humans typically make more decisions on emotion than on logic. a coach who has invested in developing a special talent only to find that player in another team's (especially an opponent) uniform come high school, may respond by refusing to schedule that team (and that could be public as easily as private) a coach who has taken a "once in a decade" or "once in a century" team to playoffs only to get beat down by a private team that makes it look like he carried a team of 12's to a 14 yr old tournament might carry a grudge for a while... but there are publics that wont play other publics over petty (or non-petty) grievances from the past. i think privates would find themselves to be desirable enough as opponents to keep a full dance card.

"That's very interesting. I wonder how well it works ..." i dont know about those high school examples, but i know of merit systems in use by other sports organizations, and they seem to work quite well.

"Seeing that you are a member of the private schools system , you can't see the public school side to this..." there you are wrong. should the discussion turn to D-1 privates being grouped with D-2 privates, you will see that the D-1 guys not only understand the public arguments, but will not hesitate to use them: they recruit they have more money they are just entirely different kinds of schools from us it isnt fair

he was giving OS coach the opportunity to get all her girls on the floor in a state championship game, which he obviously wanted to do himself as well. with about 25 seconds left, the game was already decided. maybe he thought she was sending hers in, maybe he thought she would take the opportunity and send hers in. whatever the disconnect, she didnt send them in, so he didnt want to send a bunch of 8th graders in to get pressed by the OS starters. he sent the first group back, the officials told him they couldnt come in (properly) so he called time out, after which the starters could legally return. one more foul, 2 more FT, and then everyone got their chance to go in. OS coach ended up calling time out at 8 seconds to get her last girl in. no big deal, no illegal substitutions.

as a tullahoma grad, i periodically check in on this thread. i hope someone will tell me i have misunderstood. is this really 17 pages of a high school coach being trashed by another high school coach from a different sport within the same school... on a public forum no less?

"id say the team that was better 3/4 of the game is the better team!" sorry man, they declare winners based on points scored, not minutes in the lead. on saturday, forrest was the better team. maybe mr thompson can explain the math part to you. tell him laz says hi.

"I guess I just fail to see if programs like TC and South Pitt can do so well then why shouldn`t other 1A publics be able to come close to doing the same." hate to interrupt the money discussion (trust me, the poor privates have more available -per kid- than the publics, whether it is in the school already or coming from home), but i see my old pal the thracymachian general has raised the age old question. i am still waiting for the corresponding question to be answered. if BA could win back to back 5-A championships with 1-A enrollment, why cant all the privates?

"There are other fine 1a teams that have that same chance. South Pitt is the one around here." just out of curiosity, when was the last time they beat ya'll? (prior to that whopping 5 pt win during ya'lls 4-8 season this year).

". . . Next thing you know, you might actually become a soccer fan! (Yeah, I know... that is truly asking for a miracle!) Try convincing Lazarus." i have been trying to be more fair to soccer, especially since they have come up with their new slogan: "at least it's not hockey"

"Easier to patrol if both are divided." you seem to have some misconceptions about the tssaa's position on recruiting, etc. they do not monitor the schools, they have no investigative staff. what actions they do take come as a result of 'someone' reporting 'something' to them. they have also made it clear that they have no intentions of getting into the investigating business. whether there is 1 class or 100 will have no effect on that.

"If ... FCS had been in DII with the recruiting schools" the recruiting rules for d-2 are exactly the same as for d-1. you are so offended that memphis tigers makes blanket accusations of cheating against your schools. yet casually make the same accusations against ours. any particular reason that you think its ok for you, when it is wrong for him?

"Also, what jumped out to me the most, is i couldn't find another state besides Tennessee that had only one sports assosiation. every other state had at least one group (no matter how small or whatever reason) that jumped ship and formed their own assosiation with their own champions." tennessee also has a second sports association. lighthouse left the tssaa to join it just a few years ago. i cannot remember their initials right now, but they have championships in at least basketball... i am not sure what other sports.

"What problems do you have with a merit system?" my problem is; i dont see it being discussed where it counts... or maybe that's my problem with the tssaa?

i was also there. while punishment will appropriately be dealt to players from each side, who either participated in the fight, or came off the bench to join in, the fault lies with the officiating crew. unionville played well early, and cascade was a little flat. however, the two teams are at different places in the cycle right now, and cascade started to pull away late in the half. i am sure there was some frustration, and there were some hard fouls in which no play was being made for the ball. intentional foul calls (as called for by the rules) right then might have gone a long way toward settling things down. both coaches and the officials had a conference about the rough play, at the end of the half. it seemed to help briefly at the outset of the second half. things started to get rough again as the 3rd progressed, but the game was called loose, instead of cracking down. bodies hit the floor on a number of plays, and both coaches pulled players off the floor, who appeared to be losing their temper, in an attempt to keep things under control. about the third time i said that the officials had better stop play and talk to both teams before we have a fight, a fight broke out between two players. some players came off both benches (others had the sense to stay put) and some people came out of the bleachers. at least part of those came to remove their own kids. a large number of adults on both sides were content to act like idiots from the bleachers. security apparently consisted of a single female officer, kind of hard to understand, given the history of problems when these two teams play. none the less, order was restored in a relatively short time, both teams went to the locker rooms, and the crowd was sent home. none of it had to happen. 1) call intentional fouls when they occur. ie no play for the ball, or unnecessarily rough foul. 2) call the game closer when things start getting too physical. 3) stop the game when players are obviously getting mad, and talk to both teams while allowing a cooling off period. i am familiar with two of the officials at tonights game, and they do a good job of getting the calls "right". however, as a crew, in this instance they failed to maintain control of the game.

hey bc, i am not disputing your figures. i am saying they have nothing to do with the number of college calibre athletes available to single a public schools. the half the students that arent going to graduate are not passing their classes, nor are they eligible to play ball. the kids who play ball mostly graduate. the coaches stay all over them about it. half the graduating half may not go to college, but that doesnt mean half the kids offered college scholarships dont go to college. no athlete from our school has turned down a college scholarship within my memory (unfortunately that is a substantial period of time, altho a miniscule number of kids). the number of college athletes we have produced fairly represents the number of college calibre athletes we have had available. if you can assign us imaginary athletes, i think it is perfectly fair to point out that the city of chattanooga has produced a large number of d-1 college athletes. they are all close enough to go to your school. therefore you have enough d-1 prospects available to fill every starting position on every athletic team.