Here's radical proposal.

[silverpie]

Start with a system like VolGen's "merit plan."

 

Divide the state into 12 zones. Each of the "big four" counties would be a zone unto itself, and the remaining ones would be Upper East, East Central, Southeast, Mid-Cumberland, Upper Cumberland, South Central, Northwest, and Southwest. (These are the regions used for TennCare purposes, and were explicitly designed with travel considerations in mind.)

 

For football, each zone would enter a champion in the playoffs, as long as at least five schools from that zone were in the state series, with the level being decided based on the zone's count of schools, and their total enrollment including bonuses. (Mostly, you would see zones entering at quarterfinal level; some small ones would start at the round of 16, and occasionally, a really big zone might enter at the semifinal level.) If a zone doesn't have five teams, it has to combine with a neighboring one for that class. (Each zone would set its playoffs to end the week prior to its champions' first state-level game.)

 

For most other sports, you would use a proportional system to allocate 32 places to the various zones, with each grand division always having a multiple of four total. Two sub-state rounds would be played within each grand division, and the 8 survivors would then make the trip to state.

[swamp]

Okay. I'm already confused.