By CRAIG HALL
Every time I turn to an artificial intelligence agent to ask something, I get a message something artificial intelligence can make mistakes.
Yes, I can vouch for that after last month I asked for an image to be sharpened and it changed softball to “fartball” in a photograph. That was not one of my better moments.
Just like artificial intelligence, the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association falls into the same boat. It can and does mess up.
Ever since some cruddy private schools filed a lawsuit over bumping a school a class if that school won state, pretty much all the private schools were dumped into 2A in football and 3A for other sports.
In Saturday’s state cross country meet, four of the top six boys teams were private schools. In football, it gets worse.
I looked at the Oklahoma’s top 10 yesterday, Lincoln Christian is ranked first, which makes sense after a school wins 3A, then drops a class because of a silly lawsuit the OSSAA did not seem to worry about what it would do to public schools,
So now District 2A-I-3, which should be for schools in southeastern Oklahoma, now has three of the 32 teams in Class 2A-I ranked in the top 10. In addition to Sequoyah-Tahlequah, Victory Christian was also assigned to the district.
Proposed 64 team Class 2A based on geography instead of power.
This goes along with Checotah, Heavener, Hugo, Roland and Spiro, which dropped football halfway through the season. This was after Spiro went 0-10 last year and was moved up a class in the off-season.
So now you have Lincoln, Sequoyah and Checotah all ranked in the top 10. We have teams like Sequoyah and Checotah demolishing 3A schools. This is how the districts are ranked: 1 has three teams ranked; 2 has two teams ranked; 3 has three teams ranked, as we mentioned previously; and four also has two teams ranked.
District 1 has two privates, only one competitive in Cascia Hall; 2 has two privates, neither competitive; 3 has the 3 privates with two in Tulsa; and 4 has two privates, both in the hunt for playoff spots.
Only District 2 consists mainly of western schools. Back when I was playing, there were only four team districts. It was Heavener, Hartshorne, Stigler and Wilburton. I look at our current district, and it would make much more sense if they were again divided to four-team districts. Now, it would be Heavener, Hugo, Roland and Spiro.
That wouldn’t space out the top teams like the OSSAA prefers, but it would make it more of a regional district, so teams wouldn’t be getting home at 2 a.m. on Saturday after making ridiculously long trips.
The OSSAA also screwed up when it divided Class 2A and A into two divisions. When Heavener visited Kiefer three years ago, we passed by six Class 2A teams we didn’t play. So instead of the teams Heavener has typically been aligned with, such as Antlers, Valliant, Wilburton, Hartshorne, even Hugo and Atoka, Heavener has been in districts with the teams mentioned above since the change along with Kingston, Prague, Bethel and Okmulgee.
I had some goober arguing with me about private schools on X a couple of weeks ago. He said private schools did not recruit or offer scholarships. I did a little research and showed him private schools did things the public schools didn’t and couldn’t.
The OSSAA should not allow this to happen. The privates should be in their own class or have a division in the playoffs set up for them. That would include some smaller schools with larger ones, but welcome to the world of the public schools in 3A and 2A.
Teams in Class 4A and up are lucky as they are not swarmed with private schools. If they were, something would change. But as long as it only hurts small, rural schools, the only thing that is going to change is if the public schools dropped out of the OSSAA and formed their own league.