Kicker and defensive back James Rogers is a senior, as is holder and quarterback Carson Blair – and due to an unexpected and highly controversial midseason rule change by the North Coast Section, they may not get to participate in postseason play in their last year of competition.
There will be 56 football teams in the North Coast Section playoffs, and even though the MaxPreps’ computer ranks Miramonte 22nd, the Matadors may not be one of them.
The reason? The byzantine politics of the North Coast Section (NCS), which led to a mid-season change in the way teams earn a spot in the playoffs.
Up until the Oct. 3 NCS Board of Managers meeting, the MaxPreps’ computers – which combine results, strength of schedule and margin of victory to rank teams – were used to determine which teams moved on to postseason play.
But a proposal put forward by smaller schools from the northernmost areas of the state passed despite objections from Miramonte’s league, and abruptly shifted the criteria for advancement to the playoffs. The new criteria focus primarily on the number of wins, regardless of the quality of the opposition.
That change, which goes into effect this year, benefits smaller schools who seldom come to the Bay Area to play the stronger teams in the section. The governmental structure of NCS favors those smaller schools, as it gives two votes to each league, regardless of the number of teams or enrollment in the schools.
“This is just a travesty,” said Miramonte coach Nick Safir, who made up his schedule believing the previous rules would apply. If he had known that wins would be the primary way his team was evaluated, with no consideration for strength of schedule, he never would have scheduled a very strong team like Windsor, which is No. 12 in the NCS rankings. Instead, he would have looked for a weaker team that would have given the Matadors a better chance to win, and a better chance to advance to the playoffs.
“I learned about it right after the NCS meeting,” he said. “It was the first I’d heard of it. It’s just not right.”
The justification for the change, from the smaller schools’ point of view, is that the computer unfairly favored bigger schools that played stronger opponents. For example, Willits High School was 8-2 in 2024, but by the computer rankings, was left out of the postseason. Meanwhile, Dublin, at 3-7, got in, primarily due to its strength of schedule.
Now, it’s all about wins. “If 56 teams win six games,” said Safir, “we’re out.”
That, however, is probably not likely, but still the Mats will be sweating out the final weeks of the season. One of Safir’s assistants feels Miramonte will wind up about 50th on the overall list under the new system, which would be just enough to get in.
And ironically, once the 56 teams are chosen by wins, then the computer rankings will determine which division they’re in. So even if Miramonte is the 50th team in what’s called the “tier system,” which would put them in the lowest eight-team division, they would wind up playing in Division 3 against the stronger teams in the section.
It’s unlikely that the tier system will change any time soon, given the fact that the smaller schools have a preponderance of the votes. For example, the Bay Counties League has four divisions of small schools in the Bay Area, and each of those divisions gets two votes. And none of the Bay Counties’ League schools has a football team.
This decision, however, may trigger a realignment of larger East Bay leagues in the upcoming realignment cycle. For example, the DAL has 13 teams and thus has two votes. But if the league were split in two, it would have four votes. The same is true of the West Alameda County Conference, which has 12 teams and only two votes.
Even if realignment resulted in more votes for bigger schools, however, the earliest those new leagues could vote on how football selects its postseason teams would be for the 2028 season. (The tier system only applies to football, which has fewer postseason slots than other sports.)
Another impact will be on future scheduling. Now teams will be looking for wins, rather than relying on the computer to reward them for playing a difficult schedule. This means it will be difficult for Miramonte, an up-and-coming program, to find games, because local teams won’t want to play a team that might beat them. And the schools from the northern part of the section, which promoted the change, won’t want to play teams that would likely beat them either.
“I’m going to have a hard time getting games,” said Safir, who must fill three non-league slots each season.
And with the new system, and the strength of the DAL, he now must schedule teams that Miramonte has a good chance to beat – or a very solid Miramonte football team might get shut out of the playoffs. At the same time, a team the Matadors would likely beat on the field by a significant margin would get in due to having more wins against much weaker opponents.
