When Homestead’s Cruz Pursley picked off Kohen McKenzie to end Bishop Luers’ final threat with less than two minutes to go on Friday night in a 10-7 Sparty win, Blitz headed home firmly believing that the Knights, Carroll and Snider were sharing the Summit Athletic Conference championship.
After all, it’s what had been explained to Blitz multiple times over the course of the season. This despite reaching out to multiple coaches who had various degrees of confidence that they knew what the process to crown a champion was.
There were a lot of “I think” and “Pretty sure” that made Blitz wary, but still confident.
Turns out, everything we thought we knew was wrong.
Carroll isn’t a co-SAC champion. Some with the Chargers thought they were after Friday’s 51-14 pasting of North Side. Social media posts were made from those INSIDE Carroll thinking they had earned a piece of the Victory Bell.
Nope. Fake news.
Many forget, or don’t even know, that the SAC when it was created out of the Fort Wayne City Series was originally two divisions. In the bylaws of the league from way back in the late 1970s, there was a clear process laid out on what the tiebreaker scenarios were for the divisions.
Only recently did those bylaws come to light, which explained that ties in the individual divisions are broken first, THEN the tiebreaker between the division winners, if possible, decides the league champion.
By those bylaws, written over 40 years ago, Snider’s win over Carroll earns the Panthers the Division A title, while Bishop Luers wins the Division B championship. With no head-to-head matchup between Snider and BIshop Luers, the teams share the Victory Bell.
Blitz is confident in saying that the public cares more about the SAC championship and the Victory Bell more than the coaches. It’s nice and all, but if asked to choose between a league title and a sectional crown, no one is choosing the former.
But it is problematic when one of the most powerful conferences in the state doesn’t have a consensus on how a champion is crowned. This was still being discussed late Friday night on exactly what the processes were.
That’s unacceptable.
This all should have been down, in writing, prior to the start of the season. With an unbalanced league schedule with the addition of non-conference games, this was inevitably going to happen. Turns out, it didn’t take long in the new format’s inaugural season.
When media entities are trying to explain the situation to their readers and viewers, they trust that the information that is being given them is accurate. Turns out, no one outside of a select few knew exactly how it all worked. And even then, the league had to revert back to rules written in the 1970s to determine things.
This is not a column to call out an individual or individuals, it’s to call attention to a situation that should have been prevented.
Blitz has been following the SAC for over 25 years now. Never has there been any doubt on what a team needed to do to win the league and the Victory Bell.
Until 2023.
It’s embarrassing. Fix it. Fix it now.
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As far as I am concerned, Luers won the SAC but had it stolen from them by incompetent goal line refs — not once, but twice.