Preps Plus

Monticello suffered its first loss of the young high school football season on Friday, and it wasn’t pretty. But despite the 44-20 loss at Powhatan, the Mustangs still look like a potential playoff team in the Jefferson District. Winning the district would give Monitcello an automatic berth into the regional tournament after the Mustangs uncharacteristically missed the postseason a year ago, and winning the JD seems like a reasonable goal, but Louisa would still have to be considered the favorite at this point.

So when the end of the regular season rolls around, Monticello might be relying on the VHSL’s Power Points system to get in. If that’s the case, the Mustangs played the system perfectly. While beating Group AA powerhouse Powhatan would have been a big boost for the Mustangs, the loss was just about wiped away in terms of Power Points because Monticello already has two wins against Group AAA competition.

If you aren’t familiar with how the Power Points system works, don’t feel bad, it makes the BCS look like a simple and logical way to determine who plays for the championship. Basically each team can earn a certain number of points for each game. Beating a AAA team is worth 24 points, losing to a AAA team is worth 12. Beating a AA team is worth 20 and losing gets you eight. A win against a Group A team is worth 16 and a loss nets four. Points are then awarded for how well the teams you play against do. If you beat a team, then you earn two additional points for each of its wins. If you lose, you get one point for each of their wins. At the end of the season, you divide the number of points earned by the number of games played to get your power ranking. The top rated non-district champions make the playoffs.

In simple terms, Monticello earned 24 points for beating Albemarle, and then picked up four more when the Patriots beat Western Albemarle and Charlottesville. By playing up and scheduling Albemarle and Huguenot—a pair of AAA teams the Mustangs were favored to beat—Monticello has already picked up 12 extra power points, which equals the difference between winning and losing to Powhatan.

Losing to Powhatan likely won’t hurt much at all by the time the season is done. In addition to the eight points they get just for showing up, the Mustangs also earn a point for each of Powhatan’s victories. The Indians have averaged 9.25 regular season wins the past four years and there’s no reason to expect a significant drop off this year. If Powhatan wins eight games then losing to the Indians is almost as good as beating a team that loses eight games.

While it’s easy to say good for Monticello for scheduling well, it also highlights the flaws in the VHSL’s Power Points system. The League’s handbook says “The Rating Scale serves the further purpose of encouraging schools to play strong schedules so that they may achieve higher rating scores.“ The problem is bigger often doesn’t mean better when talking about high school football programs. No offense to Albemarle, which is making huge progress under new coach Mike Alley, but Powhatan was by far the toughest game on Monticello’s non-district slate, yet wasn’t worth as many points.

And there can be very little difference in the enrollments of AA and AAA schools. According to last year’s VHSL Handbook, Powhatan, which joins the Jefferson District next year, had an enrollment of 1350 students, which was actually listed as 50 more students than AAA Huguenot. Albemarle’s student population is only 1-percent bigger than Powhatan’s.

But at this point none of that matters. All that matters is that Monticello played a challenging non-district schedule and put itself in a great position if it continues to win now that district play is upon us.

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