Golden Valley boys’ basketball head coach Chris Printz fully expected to be coaching his Grizzlies in the first round of the CIF Southern Section playoffs on Wednesday.
But when the brackets came out on Saturday, he realized he wouldn’t be doing that — and he didn’t really have an answer as to why that was the case.
“We were devastated. We were just devastated,” Printz said in a phone interview. “I don’t even know how else to describe it … I mean, all day, Saturday, even into Sunday morning, I just, I couldn’t even talk. Really just kind of stunned.”
The Grizzlies were in third place in the league heading into the final few games, but a couple of setbacks saw them needing a win over West Ranch in the regular-season finale to have a shot at the fourth and final automatic playoff spot.
They got that with a 60-56 win in overtime to tie the Wildcats in the league standings.
But due to a pregame coin flip that went the way of the Wildcats, West Ranch was granted the fourth-place spot, and Golden Valley had to hope for an at-large bid to the playoffs.
Printz had been confident that his team’s résumé was good enough for one of those spots. The Grizzlies were 99th in the Feb. 3 Southern Section rankings, but after the win over West Ranch, the Grizzlies actually dropped to 111th.
Had the Grizzlies been selected for the playoffs, they would have been competing in Division 2A along with league rivals West Ranch, Valencia and Canyon.
While he doesn’t know exactly what the cutoff was for an at-large bid, Printz said that his team’s competitive schedule may have had a hand in his team being in a higher division, and a slightly easier schedule may have dropped the Grizzlies down to a division where they would have been selected as an at-large team.
“I think we got punished because I made a conscious decision to increase the competitiveness of our schedule,” Printz said. “And in looking at it now, it backfired on us in a way that, you know, I think if our strength of schedule had been lower, we probably get into a lower division, which I can’t wrap my brain around.”
The Southern Section basketball rankings were formulated using a computer for the first time this season after football had been using a similar system for the past few seasons. Starting this season, all team sports in the section now have playoff divisions and brackets created using a computer system.
“Playoff groupings will be created using an average of the total number of automatic
qualifiers across all the divisions,” reads the Southern Section’s basketball playoff bulletin released on Jan. 28. “A playoff division will start with an automatic qualifier and include all teams until the automatic qualifier which begins the division below it. Once automatic qualifiers have been placed into a division, any remaining spots will go to the highest ranked, .500-or-better at-large teams in that grouping.”
In an email on Wednesday, Southern Section Assistant Commissioner Thom Simmons referenced that same bulletin in response to a request for further comment, which outlines that the rankings are formulated using SBLive’s “Colley Royalty” Method.
The “linear algebra-based ranking algorithm” was used by the NCAA from 2001 to 2014 to rank football teams for bowl games and the national championship, until the NCAA moved to a selection committee for the College Football Playoff.
Simmons then outlined the requirements needed to get an automatic playoff spot.
“Fail to do that and you place your fate in the hands of availability,” Simmons wrote. “That’s no different than it has been for the over 27 years I have been in this role.”
Golden Valley had been seeking an at-large bid for a third year in a row, and the Grizzlies were shut out for the third time, the first two coming via a selection committee.
But this year, Printz said the feeling is a little different because the Grizzlies seemingly earned a higher spot in the rankings than other teams, yet teams that were ranked lower got into the playoffs because they weren’t good enough to earn a spot in the division where Golden Valley was placed.
The Grizzlies were the first eligible team in Division 2A to be eliminated due to the number of automatic qualifiers. Only two-at-large teams, Lawndale and Dos Pueblos, made it in that division.
“It’s frustrating to be higher rated than a lot of teams and yet not get in because you’re too highly rated, but you’re not highly rated enough, and there’s no way you know that,” Printz said.
While nothing can be changed for this year, Printz is hopeful that both the section and his team learn valuable lessons from this situation.
For his team, Printz hopes that his players take this as just another life lesson. He said the goal every year is to earn an automatic bid, and the Grizzlies fell short of that — despite going 17-11 overall and 7-5 in the league, the best finish for the team in the league since 2010 — and their fate was then out of their hands.
“It stinks. Nobody’s happy,” Printz said. “But life has to go on, and we have to hold ourselves accountable for not getting done what we needed to get done.”
As for the section, Printz thinks all teams would benefit from more transparency on how teams are ranked and placed into divisions.
“I hope that they take some of the lessons from this year and they iron out some of the things that seemingly just don’t make sense,” Printz said. “I’ve not had somebody be able to explain to me how a team can be ranked below you, but get in above you, because them being ranked below you actually benefited them.”
Simmons noted that “there has been no proposal or request at this time to change anything by the membership, and since we are a voting organization required to act under Brown Act laws, any such proposal for next year would have had to have been made by last month as a first read for vote by the CIF-SS Council in March.”
