MHSAA Announces Major Tournament Changes For Three Sports

The MHSAA Spring Meetings ended with some major tournament rule changes for next season.

The changes revolve around boys and girls basketball, soccer, and football tournaments. Anytime high school sports decides to change anything there is a risk of backlash from schools, parents and fans. These changes are being welcomed by most everyone so far though.

The basketball and soccer changes are now going to employ a seeding system for the tournament. The official press release outlines the changes.

girls and boys basketball and soccer will employ a seeding process to place the top two teams in every District on opposite sides of that bracket, guaranteeing those two teams could not play each other before the District championship game

These are changes that fans have been asking for a while now. It seems like boys basketball specifically has been bitten by this problem. Many of the top teams are located relatively close to each other, so they often meet in the early rounds of the playoffs.

This change should help to curb that problem, but will pose all new travel issues that schools will have to deal with.

The football rules are focused around getting rid of the six wins and your in rule.

Beginning with the 2020 season, eight divisions will be determined before the season, and 32 playoff qualifiers from each division will be selected at the end of the regular season based on playoff-point average – there no longer will be automatic qualification based on win total.

People started talking about this change as soon as the six wins policy went in place. The problem started when teams brought up the strength of schedule argument. The MHSAA did allow some five win teams in the playoffs, but it wasn't enough to solve the problem.

You can see the entire press release here, and read over a few other changes concerning 8-man-football and Lacrosse.

Do you like the rule changes?