Aces Exclusive: High School Football in the 50 States

Monday the NJSIAA full membership is invited to vote on the proposal to expand the public school football playoffs 2 more rounds and play it down to group champions. I have a column in the paper today.
But I got to wondering, really, what do the other 49 states do. When do they start practice, when do they play games, how long is their season, and most importantly, how many state champions do they have?
It took weeks of research, I mean it, weeks, but I compiled the chart, and you can see how New Jersey stacks up to the other states. And there are some great footnotes too add.
And this is incredibly, incredibly useful information.

High School Football in 2013

A look at how each of the 50 states play HS football

First, how did I do all this research?
Most of the information came straight from the individual HS athletic association web sites, you know, type in Ohio Athletic Association and it comes right up. But not every web site was, um, very good. Finding the start date for practice sometimes took some digging, but all I had to do was google “first day of fall practice in Alabama” and boom, something would pop up, a story, a photo gallery with the date.
I also called about 20 different athletic associations and talked to people directly over the summer. I found out some awesome stuff.
Let’s start with California. Obviously, California is, you know, huge. HS sports is run by the CIF there, California Interscholastic Federation. It has 48 (yes, 48) football sections throughout the state.
Once the 48 sectional champions are crowned. 20 of the schools are selected by a committee and advanced to Regional finals (yes, that means 28 stay home). You have 5 regional championships games in the North per group and 5 regional championship in the South. So 10 games. Then the winner of the North Group 1 (for example) championship plays the winner of South Group 1 championship for a state championship — Even though other sectional champions don’t get to advance.
So technically, California has 48 sectional champs, and then 5 state champs.
What surprised me a lot was the number of 8-man and 6-man football that is still played in America. I tried to list them all. In the state championships category, where it says 12 state champions for Texas, it means 10 11-man champs and 2 8-man champs, so 12 total.
Ok, I had a line about Alaska in the paper today. It’s true, West Anchorage HS in Alaska won the state title already in 2013 and finished 9-2. They played 11 games. St. Joes can win a state title this weekend and it will have played 11 games. So some kind of way, New Jersey has a system where its state finalist plays the same number of games as Alaska. Does that make any sense at all? It’s ALASKA.
Also, to find out the max number of games for schools in states, most had it listed on its web site, however, some didn’t and I basically had to make an educated guess by looking through each state’s archives and finding out it’s state championship teams from 2012 and seeing if they were 14-0 or 15-0. So, could some of those be incorrect? I guess so. But I did the best that I could.
Same for start date, a lot of states don’t list set start states for games for football season, but if they didn’t, I would go on to MaxPreps pick a state, like, say, Oregon, then find 5-10 HS football pages from high schools in Oregon, look at their schedules, and figure out when games started. Again, could there be some anomalies there? I guess so.
Also, I know there are some states who have non-public and public breakdowns for playoffs. In other words, like NJ, they split for the state playoffs. I think Georgia has one “open” group for football. I knew Louisiana put in a new system this year, 5 public school champs and 4 non-public. For purposes of this listing, I just put the total number of state champions per state, not breaking it down.

So what does all this tell us? You know, it’s a moot point anyway, I don’t believe the vote is going to pass. I think I did for a long time, but not any more. Apparently, people in the South thought people in the North were for it and vice versa, when really, it looks like no one is for it. The Great Jim Hague did some research and he found about a 50-50 split among the 30 coaches he talked to outside of North Jersey. My survey showed a 3/4 majority against the measure from the North Jersey ADs (20 said no, 9 said yes and 11 said don’t know). It needs 2/3 to pass, and the rumor is (oops, sorry for spreading rumors again) that the entire Shore Conference is voting against it because it doesn’t want to start on Labor Day. With those type of factors, it will never get two-thirds to pass. I think the proposal to add a week at the start and at the end wasn’t really well thought out. It actually wasn’t the initial Big North proposal, by the way.
And I don’t know what will happen next. I don’t know my NJSIAA by-laws enough to know whether or not the measure could come up again in a few years or not.