DarterBlue2
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Posts posted by DarterBlue2
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3 hours ago, nolebull813 said:
Forgot to update this thread. Add 3 to the list.
2021 Chaminade beat Arizona champ Highland
2022 STA beat Pennsylvania champ SJP
2023 Vanguard beat Colorado champ Erie
Didn't Western beat Milton this year? Milton was 7A Georgia champ this year.
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5 minutes ago, Vero Indian said:
Weren't they the first catholic school to get ranked no.1 in the nation back then?, it was like the 80s or something
I am not sure about that. California and New Jersey have had Catholic powers for a long time.
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1 hour ago, Perspective said:
I lost all respect for the University of STA when I saw and heard their coaches at a 7 on 7 tournament openly recruiting the QB from my son's team to come play at STA. They had no shame. If this is what they were doing openly, I had to wonder what else was going on behind closed doors.
So, yes, they are good. They are good because they have bigger and better athletes than most every other team in the state . . . athletes that likely would not be able to attend or would not choose to attend that school were it not for football.
OK, someone give me a hand off my soapbox so I don't fall and break my hip like Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
My hand is readily extended. STA is one of the poster children of what is wrong with Florida High School Football. The STA of 20-25 years ago was very good, but it was not what it is today. Back then, it was a well endowed high school that built a strong football team by bringing in enough talent to be competitive most years. Today, along with a handful of other privates and public school, it makes a mockery of what the game at the high school level should be.
I am hoping that the recent trend (if two years even counts as a trend) in the state finals are a harbinger of better times ahead. No we will not revert to the halcyon days of yore, but maybe, just maybe, we will be able to keep the finals competitive.
- Perspective, Airek, Dr. D and 1 other
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40 minutes ago, Vero Indian said:
They lost lol, if they played a rematch in the 3rd rd of the playoffs, STA would of done them dirty
We will never know if that's true or not. STA had its back against the wall in its final. Cocoa, won comfortably though it did not blow out Bradford.
- KeemD321, Ray Icaza and Cat_Scratch
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8 minutes ago, Dan in Daytona said:
LOL, Why am I not surprised that you , an exclusionist, would omit a few billion humans from the coaching profession. Same old tried, ignorant Nolebull. SMDH
He is who he is. But at least he's consistent. A true believer. I do respect that about him.
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I like your set up a lot. We could quibble a bit about a few of the teams you currently have in 6A/5A, but for the most part, they seem accurate. And in any case, as there is active promotion/relegation, any discrepancies would be eliminated with the passage of time based on actual performance over the most recent years on a rolling basis.
Teams on the rise and those falling off would also be promoted and relegated to reflect current form.
The only thing standing in the way is the fact that this is too rational/logical for those with an agenda.
But I totally agree that it would lead to more competitive games both during the regular season and during the playoffs. Maybe you could adjust the mandatory number of games against teams in your class (5A and 6A) during the regular season from 7 to 6 or 5 instead to reduce travel costs and time as there will be significant distance at times among the teams in those classes.
If people of good will with the best interest of the game in their hearts got together, I can't for the life of me see why this could not be done with minor modification.
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1 hour ago, Longtime Observer said:
Unfortunately, in these disgusting times, it'll all boil down to his ability to recr...I mean "attract" players. If he attracts enough studs, they'll be decent mostly no matter what. Of course, I can't imagine anyone who could play for Osceola, Lake Wales, or even Haines City leaving to play for a 25 year-old coach at Poinciana. But, what do I know?
If he's charismatic and has deep connections in the community, they will come. With that said, given the fact administration at the school seems to have, at best, mixed feelings about the game and its success/failure, he's got his work cut out for him and may not be up to the task of navigating the land mines that lie ahead.
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5 hours ago, Nulli Secundus said:
For the sake of this discussion (**cough cough FHSAA), we should introduce population in terms of high school age kids, not the entire county. Your grandma won't be putting on those kind of pads, lol.
High School Age Population
Miami-Dade 105450
Broward 81108
Hillsborough 68078
Orange 66525
Palm Beach 60972
Duval 36273
Polk 35018
Lee 31747
Pinellas 30006
Pasco 25428
Osceola 23286
Brevard 23254
Seminole 21798
Volusia 20396
St. Johns 16200
Manatee 15607
St. Lucie 15520
Collier 15394
Lake 14401
Sarasota 14318
Marion 13394
Clay 12801
Escambia 11196
Santa Rosa 10089
Okaloosa 9817
Leon 9511
Alachua 8782
Bay 7917
Hernando 7488
Martin 6156
Charlotte 5784
Indian River 5473
Hendry 4922
Citrus 4845
Flagler 4583
Nassau 3942
Highlands 3738
Walton 3306
Putnam 2851
Monroe 2649
Columbia 2644
Sumter 2629
Okeechobee 1918
Suwanee 1675
Jackson 1619
Levy 1501
Hardee 1449
Wakulla 1447
Baker 1426
Desoto 1303
Gadsden 1223
Holmes 965
Washington 964
Bradford 793
Gilchrist 709
Madison 701
Calhoun 676
Taylor 645
Union 633
Gulf 601
Dixie 536
Hamilton 498
Liberty 383
Lafayette 344
Glades 304
Franklin 301
Jefferson 217.....and GO!
Data pulled from DOE: Student EnrollmentBased on those stats, Metro should probably consist of Dade through Pasco, the top 10 population counties. That would be different than what we had before the latest decision on the part of the FHSAA.
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3 hours ago, Vero Indian said:
Well....they went through Norland twice
Went through implies that you won. They were stopped by Norland twice.
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6 minutes ago, Vero Indian said:
Still think MC beats Berkeley convincingly lol idc what anyone says
You can feel whatever you want. It does not make it correct.
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3 hours ago, nolebull813 said:
Bet on what? Lol
3 hours ago, nolebull813 said:What’s funny is I watched the game and was cheering for Berkeley to win the whole time. I’m a Hillsborough guy through and through. (Yeah I live in Pasco now but I’m a family man. Gotta put their safety over my own. Lol)
It’s Hillsborough vs everybody. But that is not gonna cause me to be biased and emotional when it comes to ranking teams
You are so dumb. You are talking about body of work during the season. But you are ranking the teams as of the end of the season. Well at the end of the season, BP was playing its best football and beat two south Florida powers one on their homefield and one at a neutral site and yet you can't acknowledge that they are a top 10 team because of your "perception" of their program.
Shaking my DFH.
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30 minutes ago, nolebull813 said:
Lol what is your opinion?
im sorry I won’t apologize for erasing an entire seasons worth of top notch A plus wins over a 1 score one off game.
im ranking the entire body of work.
I’m not a prisoner of the moment and I don’t rank off emotion. Sorry you can’t see it that way. But I won’t sway my thought process based on how you think it should be done
Fools are always blind. Why am I not surprised. I wish we could bet on this. I would take yours just for the fun of it. But I would give it back. There's no fun in taking candy from a baby.
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4 minutes ago, Dr. D said:
We should know something about the Open Division/1A-7A reclassification proposal later today: https://fhsaa.com/news/2023/12/6/about-us-board-of-directors-to-meet-on-december-12th.aspx
I appreciate you!
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3 hours ago, nolebull813 said:
They won by 1 score in the one of the biggest upsets in finals history. I’m not gonna discount everything Norland did up to that point. They beat Miami Central twice, Columbus and Lakeland!
They beat the 4S and 4M State Champions by a combined score of 64-37!!!
I am ranking a total body of work. Not just one epic upset especially when there are endless amounts of examples of teams losing a game to a team and then beating them later down the road. Meaning you can have a bad game but that not define your entire season of how good you are/were. Just because you beat a team doesn’t mean you should always be ranked higher than them no matter what.
You have confirmed my opinion of you, if you know what I mean.
But here you go, I will spell it out. You are not particularly good when it comes to serious analytical thought. I will leave it at that.
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10 hours ago, nolebull813 said:
Haven’t you guys learned that winning one game against someone doesn’t automatically mean they are better than them no questions asked? How do you justify rematches going the opposite way?
BP beat Norland in the state championship game. If you don't play your best when all the marbles are on the line, you will never play your best. Norland's coaching staff did not make any dumb mistakes. Could they have adjusted better to BP's running game? That is an open question I cannot answer. It's quite likely they just did not have the caliber players up front to stop BP's running game.
The week before Norland, BP went to AHP and whipped them on their own field. No one ever asserts that AHP is not well coached.
BP certainly did not start the season as a top 10 team. But in my opinion they ended the season as a clear top 10. It happens. In 2012 Apopka was 1-2 after three weeks and reeled off 12 consecutive victories to win the 8A title. They lost to DP by 17 in their first game of the season but beat DP by 19 in the state semifinals where it truly counted. The difference was that Apopka was a young team loaded with sophomore talent. Late in the playoffs, these kids had improved a ton. DP was a senior heavy team that did not have much room for significant improvement.
To me what you do on the field late in the playoffs says a whole lot more than what you did weeks 1-5.
I stand by my assertion that you are materially underrating BP in the final top 25 you put out. You are giving far too much consideration to the past (past seasons mostly) and ignoring the present.
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6 hours ago, nolebull813 said:
If the system wasn’t so screwed up these would have been semi final games.
STA should be playing Lakeland for the STATE championship.
Instead both won regional championships.
sad
@nolebull813 the system may be screwed up. I will agree on that. But the finals this year, with the exception of one or maybe two games, were super entertaining.
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If you are going to rank Norland and Miami Central in the top 10, by what logic can you exclude Berkeley Prep? No, seriously!
Norland beat Central twice. Berkeley Prep beat Norland fair and square in the final. There were no controversial calls by the officials; there was no trick play. They beat them fair and square by mostly running the ball down their throats.
You are either under ranking BP, or you are over ranking Norland and Central. I will say, in case you think I am a Norland hater: I have two nieces and two nephews that are Norland alumni.
There are a couple other things I could bring up in your final 25, but I will give you a pass as the BP ranking is the most egregious in my opinion.
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10 minutes ago, Manatee Magic said:
I know our attendance looks awfully light. There was a time in the 90s when if we had a home playoff game, it was pretty darn crowded. Now the place is like half-empty. Even the band is like 1/4th the size it used to be. The magic is GONE.
For now. But things run in cycles. Manatee has talent in the area. If you rebuild it, they will come.
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On 12/3/2023 at 3:42 PM, DarterBlue2 said:
Short answer is no, unless Cocoa gives the game away.
Bradford clearly exceeded my expectations and were competitive. They also brought a very good crowd to the game. In the end, they came up short. But no shame in losing to one of the five best teams in the state this year.
- imjustafan2, KeemD321 and Cat_Scratch
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On 12/9/2023 at 11:26 PM, Nulli Secundus said:
That's all I'll say tonight. However, thanks to all the Naught supporters and detractors. You know who your are, LOL.
I thought Venice had too much offense for Lakeland. I was wrong. Buchholz actually gave Lakeland a better game than Venice and but for two questionable coaching calls may have won. Venice, despite scoring a lot of points, never had Lakeland on the ropes and surrendered its best chance when they failed to get even a first down after Lakeland's punt early in the third quarter.
Congrats to Lakeland. They won this game despite the fact their QB was seriously impaired for a majority of it.
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3 hours ago, BigBoyBall said:
I wonder how much money FHSAA really made by placing this in Tallahassee? The crowds looked smaller, and why can't we just keep it in central Florida between Orlando (universal and WD) and Tampa (BG and Island) so it can be a family outing?
The crowds were smaller. But this has been a trend. There are a number of reasons for the decline in attendance. A few follow:
1. The overall cost of attending the games relative to incomes. High school football games are generally attended by friends and family of the players and rabid fans. It's generally not supported by the kind of individual that attends the college game, let alone the NFL. Most of these individuals are low income.
2. The demise of small town teams making the finals. Back in the day, a number of the state championship games, regardless of classification, consisted of battles which had at least one representative from a small town or semi rural area (Bartow, Suwanee. Sarasota, Belle Glades, etc.). Fans from those areas tended to attend high school football finals. Often, literally the whole town would make the trip to support the local team.
3. The rise of the super team. When three, four and five peat teams become the norm, as they have, attendance diminishes. No one wants to watch a game where the result isn't in doubt. And even the fans of the dominant team get bored and start to not attend.
4. The cost of attending versus watching a quality broadcast from home.
5. Despite having some of the best players in the entire nation, Florida fans, due to a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that so many residents are recent transplants, just don't support the game the way they do in: Georgia, Alabama, Texas, etc. This is just a sad reality.Even in a central location such as Orlando, attendance had been dwindling over the years. The move to Tallahassee this year, probably accounted for a percentage of the decline, but we were already heading in that direction. The irony is that this year's championship games were very competitive with the exception of the Chaminade blowout and actually very cheap to attend if you excluded travel costs. Each game cost only $20 which included parking. And if you bought your tickets the day before, $17, including parking. Moreover, if you were willing to stay in the stadium between games (about a two hour wait), you were not asked to leave. Therefore, for the princely sum of $51, you could have watched the entire nine games if you were willing to put up with a little inconvenience. At $51, for the mathematically challenged, that amounts to less than $6 a game including parking which is less than the cost of attending a regular game today in most parts of the state. In some cases, a lot less.
From a competitive standpoint, this may be the best games I have ever attended. I only got to watch the last six games (Friday and Saturday) as I had personal matters to attend to on Thursday. I was more than happy with the size of the stadium, which was adequate; the quality of the field, which was artificial turf; and the parking which was right next to the stadium with four ways to enter and exit which minimized bottlenecks entering and leaving.
In recent times, the best attended games were held in Daytona Beach at the municipal stadium where BCU plays its home games. But the reason for the large attendance was to a degree a one off. 1. There were three Orlando area teams in the finals: Apopka, Edgewater and Jones. The trip from Orlando is about 45 miles, so it was not much of a hike for Orlando area fans to make it. 2. Miami Northwestern was in the finals. The Bulls fans, to their credit, always travel well. But for parking issues, and the overall management of the games played there, Daytona Beach may have represented the best place to have the finals. The stadium size was adequate and the venue was centrally located.
As I make the move to life elsewhere, Florida high school football will always be a very fond memory in my heart. I was blessed to be an Apopka fan during the period of the school's greatest success. My interest in the game at this level started in 1998 when a neighbor's son was on the Dr. Phillips roster. He looked up to me as an "alternate parent" and nagged me to come watch DP play from the beginning of the season that year. I told him if the team won its first five games I would attend game six. They did and I kept my promise and was hooked from there on. It helped that in 1999 my first son began high school and that in 2001 when Apopka won its first state title both my sons attended high school there.
- Cat_Scratch, KeemD321, Ray Icaza and 2 others
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On 12/9/2023 at 12:54 PM, Vero Indian said:
I think Miami Central would of beat the snot outta Berkeley
They would not. Berkeley's run game is for real. Rick Darlington would agree with that statement and he knows something about run games. Norland had trouble all game stopping their running attack. I have watched Central of film 4 times this year. They would have had the same problems. Not saying Central wouldn't have won, but they would, if they did, have been in a dog fight. My guess is that BP improved significantly over the course of the season.
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2 hours ago, Perspective said:
Congrats to Lakeland.
Interestingly, if my quick scan of the archives is correct, Lakeland became only the second team since 1963 to win a state title while giving up 48 points or more in a non-OT game. I suspect Darter saw the first time in 2012 when Apopka topped Cypress Bay 53-50. The only other time that it happened in any game (since 1963) was in 2010 when Trinity Catholic (Ocala) beat University School (Ft. Lauderdale) 56-55 in triple OT.
I did. The Lakeland vs Venice game last night, bore some similarities to the 2012 game. Wider margin of victory, but a game in which the offenses dominated the defenses for the most part.
Lakeland is the reason we have super teams in Florida
in The Huddle
Posted
Implementing a mandatory (non voluntary) open division could actually be the best way of dissuading schools from recruiting all star teams. For if it's large enough, but not too large (maybe 24 to 32 teams), these schools may well say wait a minute, do we really want to have to beat each other up every year for one title, year in and year out?
On the other hand, a smaller open division determined at or near the end of the season with 8-16 teams, may encourage teams to recruit heavily in a bid to "compete for the best in Florida title." But it would also give solid teams who currently don't have a real shot, a legitimate shot at winning one of the remaining 5, 6 or 7 titles.