Lopsided outcomes have motivated considerable conversation and frustration within the state’s high school football ranks in recent years.
Offenses have grown more complex since the turn of the century, making defense a much more challenged aspect of the game with higher-scoring contests the inevitable result.
And with more and more schools aspiring to varsity football status, the gap between traditional powers and newcomers often still in the process of establishing themselves as a viable sports option within their communities has in some cases widened.
Some conferences have tinkered with their master schedules at times to match teams of like skill levels as often as possible when there are more teams in a league than weeks in a season and such an option is available.
And the 2013 move by the Maine Principals’ Association to expand the sport from three to four classes statewide was done in great part to address the competitive balance by reducing the enrollment margins between the largest and smallest schools in each class.
But the issue of competitor balance lingers. During the recently completed 2014 campaign, 92 of 291 regular-season games statewide, or 32 percent, were decided by 35 points or more.
Another 19 games were decided by 33 or 34 points, and 12 more contests had margins ranging from 30 to 32 points.
In total, 123 of the 291 regular-season contests, or 43 percent, were decided by at least 30 points.
At least one league, the Western Maine-based Campbell Conference, is studying several options for enhancing the competitive balance among its football-playing schools. They include scheduling crossover games between member teams in different classes based on strength of programs or having struggling teams play each other more than once in a season to avoid potential noncompetitive games against the top rivals within their division.
The Maine Principals’ Association is considering another statewide step in an effort to reduce the prevalence of lopsided scores, with one of its panels already giving preliminary support to an adjusted timing rule that would provide automatically for running time with limited exceptions during the second half of games if the margin between the participating teams is at least 35 points.
That proposal, which would allow the game to revert to regular timing if the trailing team reduced its deficit to fewer than 35 points, has gained the unanimous backing of the Maine Principals’ Association’s football committee, according to the Maine Principals’ Association assistant executive director Mike Burnham.
Burnham said the proposal will be referred next to the association’s Interscholastic Management Committee for its perusal before being forwarded to the Maine Principals’ Association’s full membership next spring, likely as part of the football committee’s full report to that body.
“It’s not a situation that comes up all the time,” said Oxford Hills of South Paris assistant principal Paul Bickford, chair of the Maine Principals’ Association football committee “But if anything, it’s come to light more now that some of the games are noncompetitive, and when that’s the case, we want to see what can we do to move things forward.”
The proposal being considered by the Maine Principals’ Association had its origin in the state’s football officiating community, which is tasked with applying an existing rule that allows for running time during the second half of lopsided football games only with the mutual consent of both participating head coaches,
“It’s in the books right now,” said Bickford. “It’s allowed that after halftime we can move to running time if both coaches agree to it, and the feeling coming from the officials was that it was something they’d like to see instituted instead of having to go to both coaches.”
The current standard can make for some awkward conversations between officials and coaches when the potential for applying running time arises.
“It is kind of uncomfortable because you don’t want to embarrass the coach who’s on the short end of the score,” said Allen Snell of Orrington, a longtime Maine high school football official and liaison to the Maine Principals’ Association Football Committee.
“If you have 55 players on your team, you can make some adjustments to try to control the score, but some of our teams that have been really good in the past few years have only had 20 or 25 players, so they don’t have many players to substitute in to try to settle things down.”
Snell said the southwestern chapter of the Maine Association of Football Officials originally researched the issue and found that about 40 states have some sort of adjusted timing rule for football, with 35 points as an average differential for applying the rule.
The Maine Association of Football Officials’ executive committee subsequently offered unanimous support to making such a rule an automatic part of the game in Maine and tasked Snell with approaching the Maine Principals’ Association football committee with the proposal.
“It really is pretty close to what we do in a lot of games anyway,” said Snell. “The timing is right.”
Taking steps within the confines of a sporting event to minimize lopsided outcomes isn’t unprecedented in Maine, with baseball’s 10-run rule and softball’s 12-run rule the most noticeable high school examples.
Whether the football proposal would apply to postseason games remains to be determined, but this year’s playoffs weren’t immune to blowouts.
The four state championship games were decided by an average margin of 28.8 points, led by Class C Winslow’s 62-14 victory over Leavitt of Turner Center. None of the state games were decided by fewer than 20 points.
This year’s 45 postseason matchups in all four classes were decided by an average of 18.6 points. Just six games were decided by 35 points or more — four of those in the first round.
“During the discussion the question came up as to whether we’d do it in the playoffs, and they do use the 10-run rule in baseball playoffs,” said Bickford. “There’s further discussion that needs to be had on that part, but the 10-run rule was definitely the comparison of where it happens in other sports.”
