Last summer, I wrote a series of blog posts outlining the problems with Wyoming’s high school football scheduling, conference alignment and travel.
Part 1 addresses one of Wyoming’s longest road trips, the one from Evanston to Gillette; part 2 looks at the ever-increasing distances Wyoming football teams have to travel; part 3 looks at how the distance problems manifest themselves on the field; and part 4 looks at how smaller conferences might be a part of the solution.
The third post in that series addressed margins of victory, which have been steadily increasing in the regular season since the WHSAA took over scheduling and took a huge jump after 2009.
The numbers from the 2014 season continued to show that Wyoming’s regular-season football games are not nearly as competitive as they once were. Last year’s regular-season 11-man games had an average margin of victory of 27 points, tied with the 2012 season for the highest on record.
The median MOV was 24 points — tied for second highest in the past two and a half decades — with a standard deviation of 16.1.
As the WHSAA addresses reclassification and conference alignment this fall, I genuinely hope the board considers smaller conferences. As I mentioned last year, smaller conferences won’t solve every problem tied to distance and competitiveness, and they create some problems, as well. But the numbers show that smaller conferences sure could help address the regular season’s two biggest problems.
–patrick
Laramie County School District #2’s decision to go to a 4-day week for classes in order to reduce the amount of class time lost to activities travel needs to be a major signal to the WHSAA that the route cross-state road trips need to end.
Competitive equity is not important enough to justify this level of intrusion into the academic function of schools.