A creative new solution will decide the 5A SIC football championship in 2020
A taste of major college football is coming to the 5A Southern Idaho Conference next fall.
For the first time in its history, the 5A SIC will host a conference championship game the final week of the regular season starting in 2020.
The change comes as growth forces the league to return to its two-division format. The winners of the two divisions will meet in Week 9 to determine a true conference champion, a crown the league didn’t officially award when it previously split into two divisions.
“We all believe that football is a great game,” Capital football coach Todd Simis said. “(We should do) anything we can do to promote the sport in our valley and in our league. Having a marquee game or marquee event like that would hopefully do that.
“It’s an event that over time has a chance to grow. The talk was a district championship game-type atmosphere.”
WHY IS A CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIP NECESSARY?
The coming reclassification of Idaho high school athletics leaves the 5A SIC with 11 teams starting in the fall of 2020. That will grow to 12 teams in the fall of 2021 when the West Ada School District’s sixth high school, Owyhee, opens.
Idaho’s football teams can only play nine regular-season games, making it impossible for a full league schedule. So the Southern Idaho Conference will split into two divisions for football, which it also did from 2006-07 to 2010-11 and 2014-15 to 2017-18.
The SIC previously treated its divisions as separate leagues for the playoffs, rotating the top seeds between the divisions each year.
A conference championship game will instead allow players and coaches to decide the best team on the field.
“There’s not a guarantee that everybody’s going to play each other,” said Jason Warr, the activities director for the West Ada School District. “And the best-case scenario is at least we can play this out and not go, ‘Well, you were just the higher seed because you were in Pod A.’ ”
WHAT’S THE BENEFIT OF WINNING A LEAGUE TITLE?
The winners of the Foothills and River divisions receive first-round byes in the 5A state playoffs. But the conference champion gets home-field advantage until the state championship game.
WHO IS IN WHICH DIVISION?
The Foothills Division includes Rocky Mountain, Eagle, Boise, Timberline, Meridian and Skyview.
The River Division will have five teams in 2020: Mountain View, Centennial, Borah, Capital and Kuna. Owyhee joins in the fall of 2021, creating two six-team divisions.
HOW WERE THE DIVISIONS DECIDED?
The league sorted teams by enrollment with a snake draft. The largest school (Rocky Mountain) went into the Foothills Division. The second- (Mountain View) and third-largest (Centennial) went into the River Division, then the fourth (Eagle) and fifth (Boise) into the Foothills, and so on.
It then made a tweak to flip Capital and Meridian, leaving three West Ada schools, two Boise schools and Kuna or Skyview in each division, Warr said.
HOW DOES THE REST OF THE LEAGUE WORK?
Every team will play an eight-game schedule with Week 9 reserved for the conference championship and cross-division games to seed the playoffs.
The second-place team from each division will face the fifth-place team from the other division. The winners of that game — even a fifth-place team — will earn the SIC’s third or fourth seed in the state playoffs.
The third-place team from each division will also face the fourth-place team from the other division. Those winners will nab the league’s fifth or sixth seeds to state.
Tiebreaker scenarios for determining the third/fourth and fifth/sixth seeds are still being formulated.
Once Owyhee opens, the two last-place finishers will play each other in Week 9.
THAT SEEMS OVERLY COMPLICATED
It might be simpler to have the second-place teams face each other and just call the winner the third seed and the loser the fourth.
But that would require two of the conference’s top teams to face each other in the final week of the regular season, creating concerns they’d wear each other out a week before the playoffs start without a bye week to recover.
Instead, the cross-division set up still rewards regular-season success, gives struggling teams something to play for late in the season and allows the teams from a tougher division to play their way into the playoffs.
For example, Centennial went 7-2 but finished third in its pod in 2007. It missed the playoffs even though it beat the first-place and second-place team from the other pod during the regular season.
“We want to send our best teams to state,” said Jon Ruzicka, the activities director for the Boise School District. “That’s our goal. It’s not to get everybody into state. It’s when we send our teams into the bracket, we are as confident as possible that we’re sending our best teams.”
HOW MANY TEAMS MAKE THE PLAYOFFS?
The league will have six automatic qualifiers in the 2020 state playoffs, a boost from the five it received in 2019. Two at-large berths are also up for grabs, according to a first reading of the 5A playoff brackets passed Tuesday by the Idaho High School Activities Association’s Board of Directors.
The bracket will need to pass another board vote Jan. 22.
The league’s No. 3 and No. 4 seeds will host first-round playoff games. The No. 5 and No. 6 seeds will play on the road in the first round.
WHAT HAPPENED TO PODS?
The league’s athletic directors and coaches have grown tired of the antiquated term, Ruzicka said. It will instead call its separate groups divisions.
