Photo by Muyuan Ma on Unsplash
Cinderella never wore football cleats. So when the Nowata High School football team stared at the truth in the mirror of a 0-9 season, it did not see a team that deserved to be invited to the Gold Ball dance—in its case, the Oklahoma Class 2A state playoffs.
Under usual circumstances, the Ironmen, for whom I once played long ago, would not have been in the short line for an invitation. But this is no ordinary year. This is the Year of COVID-19.
Because of game cancellations caused by the coronavirus pandemic—including one of Nowata’s—the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association (OSSAA) relaxed its playoff criteria. Whereas the top four teams in each of eight Class 2A districts ordinarily earn playoff invitations, this year’s championship was thrown open to any team that wanted to compete.
Nowata did not—and it wasn’t alone in choosing mothballs over more football. Who can blame the Ironmen? I know what it is like to go through the type of season this year’s team endured. Ketchum also passed after being passed silly in a season-ending 95-7 loss to 10-0 Pawhuska.
Other football-crazy states also have altered their playoff formats, including Ohio, where I live, and Texas—at least with regards to its private and parochial schools. Texas public schools retained their four-teams-per-district qualifying standard. Ohio, for the first time since it began playoffs in 1972, is not using the Harbin computer ratings based on an algorithm created by Jack Harbin who was the Akron Beacon Journal’s handicapper at Thistledown race track. Ohio shortened its regular season and expanded the playoffs to include all interested teams.
These machinations raise this question: What is best for the players—playing on no matter what you’re learning or knowing when to call it a season. Circumstances may vary for each team and with them the reasoning to participate or opt-out. I will focus on Nowata, as an example of a team I think made the right decision. I come to this conclusion without knowledge of current circumstances but with a long memory that includes the experience of playing through a similar season—1-8-1—as a sophomore.
We were young and inexperienced, not bad. In junior high and as freshmen we had had success, in some victories reaching a happy territory just south of dominance. Even as sophomores, we were the heart and soul of the team. We knew we could be better. We had few seniors that fall of 1961. Some of the juniors were good to better-than-good. There simply were not enough of them and we lacked the depth, or the trust that would have allowed our two-man coaching staff to keep us fresh. Older, more experienced teams wore us down.
But our sense of the future proved right. I shared that feeling with my sophomore teammates, who play a significant role in my new book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. The team got better each of the next two seasons. It climbed quickly to 7-3 and finally to 8-2. I contributed by moving away to California, where my father, a veterinarian with the U.S. Department of Agriculture after ending his private practice, was transferred in the months after the 1961 season ended. The details are, I think, worth reading but most important for this post is how different a time it was in Nowata.
Football meant everything to little boys growing up and coming of age in a small town where sports created a sense of community and pride. That team could no more have left it at 1-8-1 than my friends could have walked away from one another and turned to other pursuits as seems more common today. The world changes, and we had no opportunity for an extended season. No expanded playoffs. In fact only one team, not four, advanced from each district.
We were not ready for the opportunity today’s Ironmen were offered but must know they had not earned. What could they have done with it? The coaches might argue it offered one more chance to succeed. But how much could they learn from repeating the experience of being outmanned and overmatched for a tenth time? They could not beat Class A Oklahoma Union, another Nowata County high school pieced together from the even smaller ones in the county that did play football in 1961, or Chelsea a longtime smaller rival from the neighboring county. They were outscored 97-20, which became a part of a 420-60 total.
If they had entered the playoffs, the Ironmen would have been matched against 7-2 Metro Christian, not only the No. 1 team in District 7 but also No. 1 in all of 2A, according to the Tulsa World. Every one of the last-place finishers in 2A’s eight districts chose to end their seasons.
While there should be reward for winning a district title, the usual playoff advantage is meeting the fourth and last qualifier from the district against which officials have matched the district. That is an advantage, not an execution. Most seventh-place teams also are not participating.
I propose an alternative that might have made another game more attractive. Retain the usual matchups for the top four teams (1 vs. 4; 2 vs. 3). And bracket the seventh- and eighth-place teams and Nos. 5 and 6 against each other. The two survivors from the top bracket would then meet the two winners from the bottom bracket, some of whom may have experienced winning for the first time. The usual format of best seed vs. lowest survivor would be resumed.
It is not a perfect answer to a most imperfect season where some teams were ineligible for the playoffs because of forfeits due, I assume, to COVID-19 issues. Nowata missed back-to-back games against Rejoice Christian and Dewey but only the Dewey game was made up, a 42-6 loss. In their 40-0 season-ending defeat at Salina, the team had only 13 players due to injuries, eligibility issues, and other non-COVID-related problems, the Nowata Star reported.
“Easily the strangest season I’ve ever coached,” said Graham Snelding, the man who came to Nowata this year with many seasons under his belt, some as nearby as Pawhuska, others as far flung as high schools in Texas and Florida. Snelding could have used his military training to save this Ironman season, if only he had had the tanks in which he once was a gunner.
