Bigdogg;590346 wrote:Do you deny that public schools have parents that could care less if their child went to school? We are talking about advantages and disadvantage as it pertains to DSJ's football program as compared to other D-6 public schools football teams. Do a little research regarding social-economic status and parental participation as it pertains to successful schools and students.

It seems that we've gone from attempting to find and attempt to correct "unfair" advantages, to a Harrison Bergeron world where any difference is considered unfair by definition. That school "A" has more parental involvement than school "B" may be an advantage, but something "unfair" that needs to somehow be equalized? Not on your life, it's muddleheaded social engineering that has been tried and failed miserably in any number of human endeavors, and would be equally ineffective here.

fish82;590461 wrote:You want an easier path to a title. After 40 friggin' years, I suppose it's understandable.

You're correct, but Mr. Gore didn't invent the internet til the 90s. Had the internet been around in the 70s, I'm quite sure I would have had some complaints about the Indiana/Kentucky/Ohio Crusaders.

I just had a strawberry milk.

Gardens35;590487 wrote:I just had a strawberry milk.

Let me guess, you and Coyote, one strawberry milk, two straws?

sherm03;564017 wrote:The privates would not bolt if a multiplier is added. They would bolt if the OHSAA tries to separate the playoffs completely, as the OP suggested it is time to do.



The Youngstown city school system is in academic emergency. A majority of kids in that system are eligible for vouchers, and both Mooney and Ursuline have scholarships that they give out for students whose parents struggle to afford tuition, and for students who demonstrate academic excellence. I know at Mooney, there is a program in place where someone can sponsor a student and pay a portion of their tuition. And before someone says it, no...this is not something that they use to get football players to come to school. I never played a down of football in high school, but received scholarships and had an alumni sponsor me for two years.

To imply that Mooney and Ursuline limit the number of kids that come in to their school to remain in a lower division is just absurd.



I agree 100% with this. If a multiplier is put in place...which again, most private school fans that I've talked to could care less about...they should probably call it the "Mooney/Ursuline" rule because that is essentially why the rule is being considered.

And when Mooney moves up to D2 and continues to do well...and Ursuline moves up to D4 and continues to do well...what do the whiners complain about next?


I think the funniest situation would be if the OHSAA puts a multiplier in place (everybody says 1.5, so I'll assume that), and Mooney and Ursuline both stay in the same division. THAT would be absolutely hilarious, IMO!

Yes, and if 1.5 won't keep them from winning, we can go to 1.75... and if that doesn't do it, we can got to 2.0... and if that works, we can go to 2.5 and not have to work nearly as hard in the off season... We'll teach those darn private schools!

queencitybuckeye;590477 wrote:It seems that we've gone from attempting to find and attempt to correct "unfair" advantages, to a Harrison Bergeron world where any difference is considered unfair by definition. That school "A" has more parental involvement than school "B" may be an advantage, but "unfair"? Not on your life, it's a total load of nonsense.

That's the point I tried to make earlier in the thread about how it's probably advantageous that some schools are in a wealthy area with more tax revenue, more people coming to the games, high tech equipment, etc. compared to a school with low property taxes, less people, not as high tech equipment, etc.
I believe I gave the example of Canfield vs. Chaney...two non-open enrollment D2 public schools. Canfield is better than Chaney year in and year out. The only differences between the two is the areas of town they are in. If everyone is so upset about these "unfair advantages" and we have to separate publics and privates over an advantage...then we should have to separate any advantage out: Rich area vs. Poor area, Big following vs. No crowd in the stands, Top of the line equipment vs. Outdated training rooms, Good coaches vs. Bad coaches, etc.



I believe I got jumped on pretty badly for that one...so tread lightly queencity.

We make the problem too complicated. Some are only concerned about a winning athletic program. I believe the real problem is we have taken responsibility away from people, parents in particular. I am for responsibility and for choice, esp. when it comes to education. The barriers to quality education are placed there by school boards, school unions, politicians, each using the other to better themselves at the taxpayers expense. Since education is a public monopoly it needs to be broken up, but that is not possible. One thing that can be done is to allow tax education dollars to follow the student not the district. Here is the great equalizer, competition. Any parent can afford to explore the education avenues that will allow their child to succeed in the areas they are most gifted. The ability to determine if another nearby public schools athletic program provides a better opportunity, or their music program, and of course a better education in maybe a safer environment. Let's face it, over most of Ohio the publics are failing in their one mission to educate our children. Free those chained to an out of date system, give them vouchers, and watch the system change.

skank;590492 wrote:Let me guess, you and Coyote, one strawberry milk, two straws?

Three. Chief's is here. They've got their Earnhardt gear on. I'm feeling uncomfortable.....

Jr. or Sr.?

Not sure what's goin' on, Chiefs is running around the room in a circle yelling "I'm loose, I'm Loose" and Coyotes is sitting on a big bar stool yelling back "No, you're tight........You're tight". I think they're arguing, but I'm not sure.

IDK, but I got my money on "I'm loose".

It's over..........said they're off to "Victory Lane". I'm outta here!

Gardens35;590568 wrote:It's over..........said they're off to "Victory Lane". I'm outta here!

Victory lane? I bet they 'burn rubber'.

fathertime;590518 wrote:We make the problem too complicated. Some are only concerned about a winning athletic program. I believe the real problem is we have taken responsibility away from people, parents in particular. I am for responsibility and for choice, esp. when it comes to education. The barriers to quality education are placed there by school boards, school unions, politicians, each using the other to better themselves at the taxpayers expense. Since education is a public monopoly it needs to be broken up, but that is not possible. One thing that can be done is to allow tax education dollars to follow the student not the district. Here is the great equalizer, competition. Any parent can afford to explore the education avenues that will allow their child to succeed in the areas they are most gifted. The ability to determine if another nearby public schools athletic program provides a better opportunity, or their music program, and of course a better education in maybe a safer environment. Let's face it, over most of Ohio the publics are failing in their one mission to educate our children. Free those chained to an out of date system, give them vouchers, and watch the system change.

Amen!

HSFootball#1Fan;590471 wrote:The poll results don't make sense... Private schools make up 9% of the high schools yet more people are voting no...................

How much the poll results "make sense" wouldn't necessarily have much to do with the proportion of Ohio football-playing schools which are public. First of all, there's no reason the 'voters' would be similarly distributed, but leaving that variable out, it's probably reasonably close to being the case, there's another very obvious driver which you can pick up from reading thru the thread, certainly from reading my own posts: a great number of supporters of public school (the most successful ones, anyway) do not want a state* championship* playoff, at the end of which you would tell the winning* kids that they are state champions, except for some of the other really good programs, who folks in this town are afraid to play. skank is in the minority here, but speaks with a loud and unruly voice, unfettered by logic or facts (just try to get him to answer a direct question or cite a fact!). The weirdest part is that when I take this position (with the Ironton program as my own centerpiece and reference point), and then suggest that skank would do his team more good if he did the same and started crowding out the whining and conspiracy-theorizing in his own program, he then, and you gotta love this, accuses me of actually being a fan of the parochial programs!! He can't imagine a public program strong enough that it's not afraid of the dreaded (by him) catholics. Not sure what the real driver is here, but he and others (Be Nice main among them) are blind. Even the more-balanced ideas like multipliers (for privates and open enrollments) or promotion/relegation schemes (like those used all over the world) are of no interest to these guys. They need a system which assure they will be "state champion*," some kind of system which will assure that no team in their division is as good as they are. Odd but true!

skank;590446 wrote:Do YOU even believe the crap you post? You and your "Parochial pals", have tried to paint "us" as wanna be victims, as whiners, as knuckleheads, dumbasses, smartasses, morons, idiots, juice box drinkers and the such, when all we want is FAIR PLAY. No more, no less.

So far I believe it all except for the two small errors I made a few pages back where I misunderstood something about a northern team's schedule or record in 2010 and was swiftly and politely corrected. So far, i believe everything I've posted in the general direction of folks like you and Be Nice. This is mainly the case because you refute none of it. At least you throw back some random ad hominem vitriol, which is sorta fun. With sherm or other with real data you just clam up completely.

I know your fact-allergy will make this painful, but do you DISAGREE with anything specific I say, anything quantitative, for instance? I know you disagree with me that a public school can be very successful, presumably because you've got a bit less experience with it, but anything factual?

queencitybuckeye;590477 wrote:It seems that we've gone from attempting to find and attempt to correct "unfair" advantages, to a Harrison Bergeron world where any difference is considered unfair by definition. That school "A" has more parental involvement than school "B" may be an advantage, but something "unfair" that needs to somehow be equalized? Not on your life, it's muddleheaded social engineering that has been tried and failed miserably in any number of human endeavors, and would be equally ineffective here.

qcity, you have a keen eye for the underlying sociology here, a bunch of folks who want guaranteed outcomes rather than a fair fight. So they distort the semantics and talk about how a system in which they win because the teams better than themselves are eliminated from competition would be the "fair" one. I've tried hard, and sherm and you and others have tried harder, to pin down some facts from this crowd, but they just sneeze and go back to their mantra: "we can't win, no public school can win, it's not fair, we are victims of an unfair system... blah blah blah."

Alma_Parker;590366 wrote:But DSJ keeps getting held up by the whiners on here as a prime example by folks here of what is wrong. (And I suspect it would be broadly supported by the folks who see their success over the years as something to aspire to as a prime example of what is right, when it is right.)

Not at all. St. Henry has no open enrollment and Marion and Coldwater get very few net open enrollment kids. They also have to take all kids that walk in their doors. Nobody has a problem with their success, as a mater of fact they should be admired for it. I think that the majority of people on here see that the playing field is not level and there needs to be some tweaking with the current system. If there would have been a multiplier in effect this year, I suspect St. Johns was good enough to win D-5 as I am sure the Youngstown all-stars would have moved up also.

skank;590479 wrote:You're correct, but Mr. Gore didn't invent the internet til the 90s. Had the internet been around in the 70s, I'm quite sure I would have had some complaints about the Indiana/Kentucky/Ohio Crusaders.

this is the most telling comment to the underpinnings of this stuff since the "admitted catholic" slip from the other guy yesterday.... skank, if you do believe that mr. gore invented the internet, you probably buy into some of his other big ideas, guaranteed equal outcomes for everybody (and a handful of big houses for him). yikes! or maybe it's just sarcasm, as fact-avoidance?

Bigdogg;590691 wrote:Not at all. St. Henry has no open enrollment and Marion and Coldwater get very few net open enrollment kids. They also have to take all kids that walk in their doors. Nobody has a problem with their success, as a mater of fact they should be admired for it. I think that the majority of people on here see that the playing field is not level and there needs to be some tweaking with the current system. If there would have been a multiplier in effect this year, I suspect St. Johns was good enough to win D-5 as I am sure the Youngstown all-stars would have moved up also.

some kind of multiplier based on private status (in big cities) or open enrollment (with net adds) could make sense to the balanced folks on here, with the devil in the details. problem is, though, that the hardcore anti-catholic folks won't be satisfied; they make that clear again and again, you have to cordone all the good programs off into a separate division so they can have a clear path to their state* championship*.

skank;590395 wrote:Ok, the repeated juice box comments are making me wonder if you guys all hang out at the same teen club on the weekends.

FYI, Massillon hasn't dodged ANYONE, in the last decade they have played, Ignatius, St. Edward, Chaminade Julienne, Benedictine, Elder, Moeller, Ursuline, Has YOUR school appeared on our schedule?

On juice boxes, we've probably all cringed to see our kids get trophies for not-actually-winning, which, unfortunately, has been increasingly fashionable. This is what your approach reminds some of us of, lots more state champions so that even lots of teams who can't win in open competition can still take home awards.

Now on the the more serious topic, do you really want to make some kind of comparision of Massillon to Ironton in terms of program quality? How would we do that? At risk of really setting off your fact-aversion, let me try a few ideas on how we might conduct such an exercise. Please surprise everybody and answer some of these thoughts; I'll be careful to use only facts. You can call me mean or compare me to Barney Fife or the Tin Man, but please go out on a limb and try to supply a fact or two if you really have a refutation. And really focus here and remember, we are comparing two public schools!!!

1. Ironton has about 42 playoff wins, Massillon has fewer than 30.

2. Ironton, outpointed Massillon in the computer rankings this year, 26.7 to 24.9, even though Massillon is D-I and Ironton is D-IV.

you might wonder if maybe, Massillon is a small D-I and Ironton is a big D-IV, so maybe that is slightly less shocking, but nope, OHSAA says I has 182 boys to M's 553!!

3. Despite this absolute size advantage of more than 3:1, Ironton actually outpoints Massillon consistently, 24.9 to 21.8 averaged over the past decade (2001-2010)

4. Taken together, this means that, on average, Massillon needs more than 25 boys enrolled for each computer point, while Ironton needs a little more than 7.

you might now be thinking 'but what about those years when Massillon is really good?

5. If you take Massillon's best season in the last decade, 2001, they did rack of an impressive 31.8 points, among the highest in the state. But, shucks, Ironton had 35.6 in the same year, which would have put them in the top 3-4 teams in all D-I regions and ahead of all D-II, D-III, and D-IV teams.

Any ideas now on how hard Massillon's schedule is? And I don't brag on Ironton because they are the only public who can and does compete well, over and over and over. Versailles and Mogadore and Steubenville and Kenton and others have similar records. We've said it 100 different ways: it's about great programs, not public or private or north or south or rural or urban or rich or poor. You challenged me directly on the one program I know well as to whether they can compete against a decent schedule. Of course, it's a little unfair for an admitted D-I bigot to pick on a lowly D-IV guy, a poor southern one at that. But you did. And turns out, as usual you aimed your gun before you loaded it with any facts. Even if you didn't have to play any catholic programs or any D-I or D-II schools you'd probably have that state title elude you, just as it has since they quit doing it by having a vote of northern editors instead of playing the games. Even if this makes you a little crazy, you should try to find a way to put the energy into winning and not whining, and it can all turn around.

Got any facts?

Alma_Parker;590704 wrote:some kind of multiplier based on private status (in big cities) or open enrollment (with net adds) could make sense to the balanced folks on here, with the devil in the details. problem is, though, that the hardcore anti-catholic folks won't be satisfied; they make that clear again and again, you have to cordone all the good programs off into a separate division so they can have a clear path to their state* championship*.

While personally I don't have a problem with the multiplier idea...I don't think it's as fair of an idea as everyone makes it out to be. Like I've pointed out, there are a number of private schools in the lower divisions that never sniff the playoffs. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to force those teams to move up 1 or 2 divisions just because Mooney, Ursuline, DSJ, and Newark Catholic do well on a consistent basis.

I feel that the best option is to give the schools...both private and public...a choice. Give all the schools who do well every year a chance to voluntarily "play up." That means, teams like Mentor Lake Catholic, Lake, Mooney, Steubenville, Alter, Ironton, Ursuline, Coldwater, DSJ, St. Henry could all voluntarily move up into tougher competition without penalizing the teams who struggle every year. Not only that...but it also doesn't penalize a school just for being private.

It's a way to generate a more competitive spirit among the teams that constantly do well.

But the haters don't like that idea. They want ALL the evil private schools moved up or out. They want the lower level divisions wide open for the MAC to take every single championship.

skank;590400 wrote:But the scholarships are reserved for the athletes....Right?

My private school absolutley, positively, without a doubt never handed out an athletic scholarship. As with almost all private schools you either get scholarships based on knowledge and merit or you have to fork up the thousands of dollars private education is worth. I'm not saying there isn't abuse within the system, because there obiviously is in both private and a public schools, I'm just saying that the vast majority of private schools NEVER hand out some sort of "scholarship". I mean a lot of people bash many private school's facilities because they are not up to par with public HS's, can't you see that these private schools don't have the money to just throw around?

sherm03;590768 wrote:While personally I don't have a problem with the multiplier idea...I don't think it's as fair of an idea as everyone makes it out to be. Like I've pointed out, there are a number of private schools in the lower divisions that never sniff the playoffs. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to force those teams to move up 1 or 2 divisions just because Mooney, Ursuline, DSJ, and Newark Catholic do well on a consistent basis.

I feel that the best option is to give the schools...both private and public...a choice. Give all the schools who do well every year a chance to voluntarily "play up." That means, teams like Mentor Lake Catholic, Lake, Mooney, Steubenville, Alter, Ironton, Ursuline, Coldwater, DSJ, St. Henry could all voluntarily move up into tougher competition without penalizing the teams who struggle every year. Not only that...but it also doesn't penalize a school just for being private.

It's a way to generate a more competitive spirit among the teams that constantly do well.

But the haters don't like that idea. They want ALL the evil private schools moved up or out. They want the lower level divisions wide open for the MAC to take every single championship.

We mostly agree here. I think a 'play-up' could work well. Maybe it's always available optionally (for those who want to move up voluntarily), would also be 'forced' (ala the promotion/relegation) concept for those teams who do really well on a consistent basis (maybe two straight titles or four straight final fours), who would have to move up. And maybe to put some energy in the system, a handful of teams with consistently low computer rankings could move down. (Form what I know about the data that might have less practical effect, but, hey, hope is a good thing.)

But as you so correctly point out, the whiner hater crew won't care; they need a state championship, just for them, independent of all other variables. Sherm I admire your command of the facts and how you've laid them out on here. Must be frustrating to see them go whizzing right past the heads of the entrenched. Keep up the good work.

Alma_Parker;590808 wrote:We mostly agree here. I think a 'play-up' could work well. Maybe it's always available optionally (for those who want to move up voluntarily), would also be 'forced' (ala the promotion/relegation) concept for those teams who do really well on a consistent basis (maybe two straight titles or four straight final fours), who would have to move up. And maybe to put some energy in the system, a handful of teams with consistently low computer rankings could move down. (Form what I know about the data that might have less practical effect, but, hey, hope is a good thing.)

But as you so correctly point out, the whiner hater crew won't care; they need a state championship, just for them, independent of all other variables. Sherm I admire your command of the facts and how you've laid them out on here. Must be frustrating to see them go whizzing right past the heads of the entrenched. Keep up the good work.

Thanks. This has become my project. If I can just get one of these guys to stop and go, "wow, that makes sense" it would be a win for me. But the longer this thread goes on...the more it's apparent that these guys will never change their mind.