Deciding City League title could get complicated

8/24/2010

For those who thought the City League's championship points system for football was complicated or unfair or confusing in previous years - mainly because not every team plays every other team - this year's makeshift point system may add to that controversy.

With the closing of Libbey High School at the end of the 2009-10 school year, the CL now has 11 football teams, and seven of them had the Cowboys on their league schedules. Some of those teams were able to fill the schedule void with nonleague games to replace Libbey. But this exit left four teams with seven CL games on their league schedules, and the other seven with six CL contests.

To review, each win over a CL opponents earns the winning team two points. In addition, all teams receive one point for each league win recorded by the teams they have defeated.

The solution with the point system this year was that each team with seven games will simply not count the points it would have earned from its lowest-point victory.

In theory this adjustment seems harmless, but if the point chase is as tight as predicted, and every point becomes important, the controversy may end up outweighing the championship luster.

Further, as the season progresses, some points credited early are not sure to count at the end, and the final point calculations cannot actually be made until the final games are concluded.