Blake: A quick fix needed for football postponed game policy
Posted August 23, 2022 9:47 a.m. EDT
Editor's note: Everyone has ideas for what rules they'd like to see changed. However, many of them in high school sports are either incompatible with the set-in-stone bylaws or too wide-ranging to ever have a shot at being implemented. This fall, HighSchoolOT Contributor J. Mike Blake will be focusing on practicality and utility when offering 10 ideas for what he believes would be well-received and simple changes to certain NCHSAA rules and regulations — things that would not require an overhaul of existing measures, yet could have an important impact.
The first of these columns that takes a micro-not-macro view of NCHSAA football and offers a simple solution to an unaddressed problem: implementing a rule that establishes protocols on all types of postponed football games. As Blake writes, what's currently on the books can leave a negative impact on several games that don't reach halftime when Mother Nature barges in...
It took no time at all for thunderstorms to affect the high school football schedule, didn't it? The last few weeks of August in the southeast and the first weeks of football aren't an ideal combination, so it should surprise no one when they collide.
When a game gets interrupted by severe weather, there are usually two outcomes. Either the teams finish the game — whether that be Saturday, Monday, or a mutually-shared bye week — or the game is so out of hand that both sides agree to let the score stand as the final one.
I used to think there were other options, like if a game was just 7-0 a few minutes into the first quarter, you could just agree to not make it up? Inclement weather policies for other sports state that you must reach halftime (or a certain inning, if you're talking about baseball and softball) in order for it to go down as a finished game. If both teams agree, they don't have to make up a game that's been interrupted before the cutoff point and can just "abandon" it. No stats are saved from those types of contests.
That's not the case for football.
Its options are much less forgiving than just "abandoning" a game that's already been started, as shown by three high-profile games in the last five seasons.
In 2018, Southern Nash visited Wake Forest. Wake Forest led 14-10 in the first quarter when lightning ended the game. It was never made up, the game was struck from their records, and both teams went into the postseason undefeated (Wake Forest won its third straight title that year).
In 2019, Rocky Mount visited Tarboro. Tarboro led 6-0 when lightning ended the game in the second quarter. The first reports were that the game was also not going to be made up. However, early the next week, Tarboro was awarded a 6-0 win despite the game not reaching halftime.
In 2021, Chambers visited Cardinal Gibbons. Chambers led 21-9 when lightning stopped the game. The two resumed the game after an abnormally long three-hours-plus delay and finished a 35-29 Chambers win in the early Saturday morning hours.
All three high-profile games had the same circumstances, but all three had different endings. Why?
It took me until the last one — where I had a front row seat as a member of the Gibbons faculty, and not as a media member — to finally understand why.
Unlike other sports, there is no National Federation of High Schools "completed game" cutoff for football. The NCHSAA is allowed to have its own, but the football coaches association has yet to propose one.
Which means that when it comes to football, once the game begins, it must be finished. You could finish that game by mutually agreeing to let what's on the scoreboard stand as the final — which often happens. You could pick it up where it left off on another day, which also often happens.
But there is no mechanism by which both schools can say "Hey, we didn't make it to halftime and these make-up options don't work for us, so let's agree to just cancel it."
They're not allowed to agree to go their separate ways. If one team agrees and the other doesn't, it could even go down as a forfeit.
Not even if the score is 0-0! By rule (or the lack of a more specified rule) that should go down as a tie if play never resumes.
And that's unfortunate — not only because other sports can "abandon" a game when football can't, but because sometimes abandoning a game is the most reasonable solution.
When Southern Nash and Wake Forest wiped the game from history, they were actually doing something that wasn't allowed. And I'm not picking on either school — both athletics directors at that time are incredibly knowledgeable and respected. Everyone thought they were following the rules when they did that, including me.
Which brings us back to Tarboro and Rocky Mount. Rocky Mount may have thought they could've done the same thing. I thought they could too. But instead, the Gryphons were handed a loss for allowing one touchdown in less than 24 minutes of football.
And now you know why Chambers and Gibbons finished the game that early morning hours.
It was not ideal, but it was still more preferable to have both teams wait things out for that long rather than A) have Chambers drive home and drive back a day or three later, setting up three round-trips to either Raleigh or Richmond, Va. in an eight-day span B) have Chambers forfeit a game they led by 12 at the time of stoppage or C) have Gibbons forfeit a game they led 9-0 at one point and ultimately lost by just six.
None of those were right.
Playing at 1 a.m. isn't "right" either, however, and we should be doing what we can to avoid this again.
The football coaches have some options if they'd like to make their own rule.
They could simply adopt the soccer/lacrosse rule as their own — it's not an official game unless it's reached halftime, and any contest stopped after halftime goes final no matter the score (Unlikely this would be to popular, because of that last part — coaches would want the option to finish out a game that's still in the early third quarter).
So maybe the rule gives coaches and athletic directors discretion for games stopped in the first half, but doesn't automatically call the game "done" if lightning hits in the second half, instead allowing the games to be made up.
They could try to take distance between the two schools into account.
They could try to take the point differential into account (But this seems unlikely for board approval — the NCHSAA board gets squeamish when point differentials are even latently incentivized).
Or they could, either singularly or in addition to some of these other ideas I've bandied about, just simply write a rule that allows two schools to let bygones be bygones and abandon a game that hasn't reached halftime by filing the proper paperwork with game officials.
Late-summer football and late-summer weather don't get along, and nothing's going to change that.
But we can change the stakes surrounding those yearly thunderstorm threats.
