Sykotyk;591145 wrote:Pointing out that a state gives out 8 championships to 330+ schools is a little misleading. Only two states give out fewer championships per number of participants than Ohio (Pennsylvania, 4 for 500+ and California, 5 for 1000~). Wyoming has five champions for only 62 schools. One for every 12.4 schools. Even if you take out the 8 schools playing 6 man, that's 4 titles for 54 teams, or 1 for every 13.5 schools.
See how fun it is to play with numbers?
Funny you mention this. The five states that are generally regarded as the best for high school ball are Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, and Florida. Ohio has ~720 schools and six champions, Pennsylvania 4 for ~500, California 5 for ~1,000, Florida has 8 for another huge number (I'm still trying to find the exact one), and Texas has 12 for another massive number that I can't find.
Ohio is becoming more and more of a statistical oddity in championship breakdown. I have no issue with publics and privates in the same setup. But to call a 142 student public equal to a 142 student private is disingenuous at best, and ignorant at worst. Of those 142 students in the private school, what percentage do you think excel at academics? How many "want" to be at school? How many like participating in sports? Extracurriculars? Now, out of that 142 student public school, those same parameters? How many potheads? How many delinquents? How many drop outs? How many who scrape by with a 1.0 GPA and then go onto flipping burgers at Mickey Ds? And now, those same numbers for the private?
It's easy to sit back and say 'a student is a student is a student', but there's a huge disparity in the amount of 'dead weight' the public school has pumping up their enrollment number that the private school just doesn't have to concern themselves with. And, additionally, a private school does not need to deal with a delinquent student for long before punting them back to the public school system. The public school has no such easy avenue. Expulsion is time-consuming and damn near impossible. The school must use their funds, by law, to try and educate the worst of the worst. The ne'er-do-wells, the delinquents, the downtrodden, the special needs, etc.
....and the freakishly athletic. You make it sound like there's a correlation between classroom conduct or academic excellence and athletic prowess. How many private schools are willing to tolerate criminal behavior outside of the classroom from anyone, and how many are willing to let it slide if the kid happens to play football or basketball? How many tolerate disruptive conduct, academic negligence, and outright stupidity just because a kid can play football? We hear all the time about what a huge disadvantage Notre Dame is at in football because of their academic standards...how many private schools in Ohio REALLY are willing to risk their reputation to win a few games?
They have to. By law, they have to. The private is not required by law. They get the cream of the crop. The students who WANT to be there. The students who will excel and make their school look like a shining example of academia. While public school's GPA and standardized test scores are going to be dragged down by the student who thinks it's clever to fill in 'None of the Above' for every answer. And there's nothing the public school can do about it.
Key word: students. You've provided the parameters for having a good student body that gets academic scholarships, which has nothing to do with whether they can play football. Private schools have plenty of academic achievers who couldn't run without tripping over their own feet, and public schools has plenty of would-be dropouts who could be All-Ohio without being able to pass a private school's remedial English class. I'm of the opinion that there's no way to actually account for these differences.
Give a public school with 142 students who want to be there, want to participate, want to be educated, want to advance, want to make something of themselves AND the dead weight against a private school of 142 students who want to be there, want to participate, want to be educated, want to advance, want to make something of themselves AND their meager amount of potential dead weight, and then we have closer to a fair fight.
And public schools have plenty of boneheads. I mentioned Andy Katzenmoyer. Remember a guy named Chuck Jones? He was a defensive tackle at Chillicothe...all-conference, All-Ohio, All-American, All-Time All-Ohio. I knew one of his old teachers fairly well, and the Chuck Jones stories he had were both funny and sad. His pathetic academic performance and effort sure never caused him to miss a game, and it never caused a college team to back off of recruiting him.
Private schools do not take advantage of their position. They do not have to recruit. They enjoy the advantage simply by existing.
Want to hear about the advantages that the CCL has? I figure that, out of five teams in the conference, two won a state championship this year and one always contends, so....
Bishop Ready - doesn't have their own field, so they play an inordinate number of road games and Saturday games at neutral fields. Usually plays the non-OHSAA Columbus Crusaders as well as at least one non-Ohio opponent every year.
Hartley - Located in one of the most dilapidated and dangerous areas of central Ohio; I never go into that area unarmed. In the middle of an area spanning a few square miles that could be totally razed, which would do much to improve the area.
Watterson - Doesn't have their own field; home games are played at the field of the long-closed Columbus North HS. Draws primarily from wealthier areas, meaning that their competition for kids isn't the other CCL schools, it's the Dublin schools, the Hilliard schools, and Upper Arlington.
DeSales - Located directly across from Brookhaven, and draws from the two poorest feeder schools in the diocese (St. Matthias and St. James the Less).
St. Charles - From an academic standpoint, they try to be closer to Columbus Academy than the other CCL schools. Tuition is staggeringly expensive, and despite this, their football field was actually the outfield of the baseball diamond. It's the only place where winning the coin toss to start was a huge advantage, because rather than taking the wind, you could take the sun and have your opponents blinded by the end of the first quarter.
You also forget a very important advantage that publics have that privates do not. The average public school kid, by the time he hits 9th grade, has been playing football with his new teammates for a number of years. Not only that, they've been playing in the same systems, with the same terminology, and with the same way of doing things. The average private school kid, by the time he hits 9th grade, has to learn entirely new systems and terminology, entirely new ways of playing positions, and also has to set aside the mutual negative feelings that have developed over the previous 8 years for the kids who are now his teammates.