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If we lose to Gainesville tomorrow I will retire from every message board for good

I am usually critical of professional sports franchises as a whole, but this is the kind of thing I love seeing. Good for the Jaguars! Hopefully they can do something like this for every school in Duval https://www.jaguars.com/news/former-jaguars-cb-rashean-mathis-the-jaguars-foundation-and-community-partners-s

Sorry HornetFan, but the Republican-led (anti Public Schools) state legislature explicitly said they didn't care why kids transferred. They made the arguments that we don't stop a kid from going to the best band program in the county why should stop a kid going to the best football, basketball, baseball program in the country. Now, the legislature still allowed the FHSAA to exist but they essentially neutered them. Should coaches be ethical, yes? But if your elected leaders are saying do what is best for you then they are going to do it.

With Suwannee dropping Columbia this year the rivalry between Columbia and Gainesville is most common active rivalry as they have played over 60 times in past 100+ years of the rivalry That on top of the demographic differences between Lake City and Gainesville makes this I75 rivalry a one that developed organically over time It's also a very good rivalry in Winter and spring sports which keeps this rivalry very intense all year long

Alot of College and Pro players i coached tell me that the competition in Florida during High school made them ready to excel the 1st Day they step on their College Campus. Even the coaches will tell you that Florida swagger is something different.

I don't like the argument of which state has the best teams, mostly because how teams are made is changing every 5 years. Teams in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area are not making their team the same way that a team in rural Alabama or Georgia is. Teams in North Jersey are not making their teams the same as a public school in inner city Dallas. The better question is not who has the best teams, but which teams have the greatest depth in terms of teams based on state size. Florida teams suffer from multiple problems. 1) We have a transient population who have few roots in the communities that they are in. As a result they less buy in from the community as a whole. 2) We pay our coaches and teachers very little. Coaches who are worth anything move to states that will pay them. Assistant coaches join them, young men who dream of inheriting that role of head coach know that while Florida offers the jobs, they don't offer the pay to stay. 3) Our communities don't support the teams that do exist. This is true of every level of sports here in level from pro to college to amateur. Florida stinks when it comes to support. Even when the Miami Heat were good during the Wade/LeBron years, fans still didn't show up until the 2nd quarter was half over. Stadiums are a 1/3 full at times (blame bad scheduling), Marlins have the lowest attendance in baseball, the Rays second lowest (despite playing good baseball this season). Bucs were in the bottom 3 last year in attendance. In other words, until we can keep quality head coaches and assistants and gain community support than it doesn't matter.

Pensacola Washington is 4-0 this season. The Wildcats were 0-10 last season.

Clearwater Cocoa Madison County Tampa Catholic Vero Beach Deland Sandlewood Edgewater Palmetto Vanguard

Clearwater Cocoa Madison County Berkely Vero Beach Deland Oakleaf Edgewater Palmetto North Marion

They don't have to beat superior teams, they just need wins to start building a program. If you have ever coached a sport where the players/community have no sense of what a winning team looks like or acts or does, it is really hard to create the culture. (Hate that word). Some of the hardest part is just getting teams to win several games (against any opponent, even if your school is over 2500 and you are playing a school with 750). Baby steps. Once you start winning then you start looking for quality wins against quality opponents, but if you dont get some wins in, you can't keep the players, if you can't keep the players, the sport dies. It is one of the reasons why I don't understand why people don't push more for a promotion/relegation system. Why would you want some of the bad teams playing some of these elite teams in a district match-up or even in

Miami-Dade County high school football has its very own version of “A League of their Own” this season. With county powers Northwestern, Central, Booker T. Washington and Columbus, to name a few, having taken over the landscape in terms of domination and stacking rosters with top talent on an annual basis, the likes of Reagan, Goleman Coral Park, Varela and other programs have been left in the dust. Rather than get discouraged, the “little guys” who weren’t so little in terms of school size, went out and did something about it. With Reagan coach John Lopez, assistant coach Jorge Rojas along with the GMAC leading the way, months of contacting other schools to get them on board, along with informing the FHSAA that they would not be participating in the state series when it came to football, eventually led to the berth of the Miami-Dade County Football Conference. All 12 schools will still continue to be very much a part of the GMAC, they simply will not participate in the FHSAA state football playoffs come November. “This gives us a chance to be competitive and to be honest a sense of fairness since the entire county has now kind of become an entire group of either ‘haves’ or ‘have-nots,’ ” said Lopez who is the only coach the Reagan program has ever known, starting it from scratch 12 years ago. “Speaking just for Reagan, being capped out enrollment-wise, we’ve always taken pride in just simply figuring out how to play with whatever comes in the doors. Obviously we weren’t the only ones with this problem. Other schools were in the same boat and that’s when we started to put together the idea of doing something like this.” A total of 12 programs joined up to form the conference that is split into two divisions of six, a south division and a north. Forming the south are Braddock, Coral Park, Sunset, Reagan, Varela and Ferguson. Goleman, Hialeah-Miami Lakes, Mourning, Krop, Hialeah Gardens and Westland Hialeah are in the north. Both out of the gate with 3-0 starts, Goleman and Krop would appear to be the two best teams in this group of a dozen. “Our kids are excited for it, our coaches are excited for it I’m excited for it and our school is excited for it,” said Goleman head coach Ariel Cribiero. “I’d like to think that teams and programs that do it the right way and build with their own kids that this is our way of rewarding those kids. We’re a magnet school, our kids are smart, going to Ivy League schools, not necessarily to play football. We want to give them a great experience and going to this independent league will give them that opportunity.” The set up will be relatively simple. Each team will play the other five in its own division and then four other games against teams from the opposite division for a total of nine games. The 10th game (including a bye week) will be played the final regular season week (Oct. 31-Nov. 2). “We will pair up the two sixth-place teams against each other, then the fifth place and so on up to third place,” Rojas said. “Whoever finishes first and second will qualify for our playoffs on that weekend as well. The two semifinals will be first place from one division playing second from the other division and vice versa.” The two semifinal winners will then meet in the championship game, scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 9 at a neutral site, possibly Milander Stadium. “This new conference, it’s not going to be any different in that we’re going to come out with the same attitude every week play football the way we know how to play,” said Reagan senior quarterback Johnny Vega. “It’s a matter of knowing that we have to beat whoever is in front of us. But now we’ll shoot to win the championship in our conference and that’s going to be pretty cool.”

This is 100% the O'Bannon's brother fault. Had they never caused NCAA Football to be dropped by EA Sports, people wouldn't be forced to carry out their create-a-player and create-a-team dynasty mode in real life. Damn you Ed O'Bannon! #bringbackncaafootball

From a strictly football perspective I agree with you. Wake Forest, Vandy, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Rutgers, etc. were grandfathered in. They belong to the establishment and to the conferences that hold the 81% advantage in head to head competition. You can thank those grandfathered institutions for helping keep the margin at 81%. If those schools were in the G5 it would be more like 90%. But the answer to your statement lies in the revenue those schools generate for their conferences from other sports and other sources. Not just football. Otherwise, we would wouldn’t be having this conversation.

If the rules allow for transfers then everyone could be adding transfers. Everyone could be creating "superteams." But in order to get a transfer to come you need to have something to offer. A winning program, a winning coach, and a chance to compete for a title. Lakeland has all 3 boxes checked. Ultimately if the student's parents decide to transfer their kid, who am I to decide what is in the best interest of that kid? Lakeland's success is not recent, a overall winning program since 1979. That said as a Lakeland fan I cannot control who transfers to LHS or why. Nor can I make the schedule for the program. Not sure many fan bases wouldn't take Lakeland's 1979-2019 success and be happy to have it.

This is exactly what high school football is supposed to be about; playing for your neighborhood school against another neighborhood's high school football team. It's not supposed to be about who can assemble the best all-star team by raiding programs and recruiting their best players. Rather than make a new conference for 30 or so schools that respect school boundaries, why not have the recruiting schools establish their own conference and leave the FHSAA state tournament to the traditional high school football programs? This way the kids would be playing each week against competition that they actually have a chance of beating, and the recruiting programs can play for the national ranking and play the IMGs and St Frances' of the football world.