My Only Hope For Football Success This Year (And All Years, Really).

While I look forward to the coming football season with great anticipation, I'm not expecting much from my teams this year. The Bengals? 7-9, 8-8 if they get lucky (which is doubtful). Virginia? 6-6, maybe, and no bowl game (not even the Poulan Weedeater.com Salsa Dip Bowl presented by AT&T). So that pretty much leaves me with my high school alma mater, St. X. Good thing they kick ass.

St. X (as in Cincinnati St. Xavier, not Louisville) is the defending D-1 state champs, they start the year #1 in Cincinnati, and are ranked nationally in a number of polls (whatever that means). Now, I've already written about the mess that is college football rankings (especially preseason rankings). But national high school football rankings? Ludicrous. There is no way anyone can legitimately rank high school teams from across the entire country. Now, its probably fairly easy to identify the best teams from each state (or even region- I can almost believe regional rankings, but a lot of those teams do play each other), but how can you possibly compare a team from New Jersey with a team from California? Texas with Montana? You just can't, and yet that doesn't stop people from trying.

I found 5 different national high school football rankings (CNN/SI has rankings as well, but I guess not in the preseason): USA Today Super 25, PrepNation.com, ESPNRISE.com, Rivals.com, and the Massey Ratings (which appears to be a computer ranking, like the BCS or the RPI, that I was unaware before today). A quick scan of these rankings show wildly different teams present throughout, top to bottom. Yeah, a few teams seem to be present in all the rankings (with Trinity, Euless, TX being a consistent choice at either #1 or #2 across the board), but some have teams in the top 10 of their rankings that don't crack the top 25 in another. St. X ranges from #1 in the Massey Rankings to #18 in both USA Today and PrepNation (note: St. X did finish last season at #1 in the PrepNation poll to win a "mythical" national championship)- how does that work? It just doesn't make any sense.

Look, I love high school football. Its huge here in Cincinnati, as big as it is anywhere in the country. Yeah, everyone talks about high school football in Texas and Friday Night Lights (I should put a picture of Minka Kelly here for Puddin', but I won't), blah, blah, blah- I don't care. The best football in the country is played in Ohio, and the best football in Ohio is played in Cincinnati. But high school football on a national scale has to stop. It not good for the game. Sure it was cool to watch X beat DeMatha (D.C.) last year on ESPN, but that doesn't it should have happened. Yeah its good competition for X to play teams from Indiana (Indianapolis Cathedral), Kentucky (Louisville Trinity), Alabama (Prattville), and New Jersey (Don Bosco Prep) this year, but what you lose is the localness and familiarity that is so much a part of the atmosphere of the high school game. Even playing teams from up north, like Cleveland St. Ignatius and Lakewood St. Edward's, is a stretch (seeing as how both Louisville and Indianapolis are closer to Cincinnati that Cleveland is) We can't be having high school athletes travel the country to play games like college athletes do,- its just not right. And this nationalization of the game doesn't help with rankings either because with so few games between teams from different parts of the country, you're left to rank teams using the transitive property (A beat B, B beat C, thus A can beat C), and that never works.

As I said before, the high school game is fueled by familiarity and proximity of the schools to one another. Road games are "road" only in name because the fan turnout is the same for every school home and away. How many fans from Prattville or Don Bosco Prep do you think will travel to Cincinnati for their games? The game may be better, but the atmosphere and aura around the game suffers. And its too bad.

Okay, rant over. Football is almost here. About damn time.

Go Bombers! Who Dey! Wahoowa! Don't suck!