Are you ready for some football?
Welcome to the official forum on high school football for the 2018 season.
During the off-season let’s talk about players, recruiting news, teams and everything about high school football.
During the season each week let’s talk about match-ups and how teams did. Let us know what player(s) stood out each week.
881 Responses
I like to see stricter rules on transfers, but not separate playoffs.
@ Dennis
Bishop McDevitt or PCC
@Kevin……Southern Columbia unfortunately plays a ten game reg season schedule in the league they are in and have no open dates during the reg season. Most smaller leagues in D11 (Colonial) have no open dates during season unfortunately. However, I would love to see then play a good 5A team or even 6A team. I just saw in a addition to Fleming who has offers almost everywhere that southerns senior QB Stone Hollenbach has 8 D1 offers and just received a preferred walk on offer from Alabama.
@Colonial Fan….Let me go over your post point by point.
thoughts on Notre Dame Green Pond. The Colonial League will come down to Palisades and ND, but Southern Lehigh will also have something to say. At this point, I’m giving the edge to Palisades. Response: Fair enough, but it’s conceivable that ND could win based on your comment.
I hope to never see ND win a league championship after a local writer claimed a few years ago that they would change the league forever and referred to it as the “good old boys” league. Response: Notre Dame has only won one league championship in its history (1979, Centennial League as a Class A school) as well as two District championships (2015 AA, 2016 AAA) so I fail to see the relevance of the “good old boys’ comment. As an alumnus of ND, I hope they do win a few championships.
The fact that their team preview said they expect to have a roster of 75/80 kids is just ridiculous. If your roster is that big, you shouldn’t be playing 3A!
Response: Classification is based on male enrollment not roster size. You should not punish a school for having success in getting students to participate. I can only imagine that 75/80 includes a lot of JV’s. My guess is 35/40 are realistically Varsity.
Not even the bigger schools in the league have rosters anywhere near that size. Southern Lehigh is 5A and they are lucky to even have 50-60 kids in 9th-12th grade. It’s ridiculous. Response: Yet Southern Lehigh has had a great deal of success in football. Their problem is that Whitehall is 5A as well. Also, other league schools have historically greater success than Notre Dame. Notre Dame has never won a Colonial League title in football so I don’t honestly know why you’re complaining.
These are the reasons we are in the current predicament of boundary vs non-boundary. Response: Prep schools like St. Joe’s and charter schools like Imhotep Charter have greater advantages than a co-ed non-prep Catholic School could ever hope to have.
@Kevin X on that meeting at state collage what did you hear about it ? i heard a rumor the D7 along with D2 and 4 talked about going back to the old playoff systems and forgetting about the PIAA I thought is was just bull do you know if their any substance to it ???
@phillyboy Who would you like to see Southern play in 5A or 6A.? Just curious.
@Ndgp82….thoughts on Notre Dame Green Pond. The Colonial League will come down to Palisades and ND, but Southern Lehigh will also have something to say. At this point, I’m giving the edge to Palisades.
I hope to never see ND win a league championship after a local writer claimed a few years ago that they would change the league forever and referred to it as the “good old boys” league. The fact that their team preview said they expect to have a roster of 75/80 kids is just ridiculous. If your roster is that big, you shouldn’t be playing 3A! Not even the bigger schools in the league have rosters anywhere near that size. Southern Lehigh is 5A and they are lucky to even have 50-60 kids in 9th-12th grade. It’s ridiculous. These are the reasons we are in the current predicament of boundary vs non-boundary.
@Foleman….separate playoffs? Absolutely! Yes, some of the best games in history have been public vs Catholic, but those days are over. Catholic/charter schools have ruined it. Some public schools, that aren’t traditional powerhouses, only have one shot. I’ll use Saucon Valley from 3 years ago as an example. They had an outstanding team that did big things and were even able to knock Beca off in the district championship. One a game or two in states until they run into the Imhotep buzzsaw…they go into the game knowing they have no chance. Saucon a small public school who just happened to have a great core group that played together forever against a school that had 10+ D1 recruits. That’s BS.
It’s time for a change and more of a change than just the recruiting rules PIAA has put in place. You could get creative and have the public school champ play the non-boundary school for the end all, be all championship. Would be a little more work in football, but Jersey has the Tournament of Champions for basketball.
@ phillyboy
Also looks like Imhotep has an open date week 4. Julian Fleming v. Tykee Smith, might be worth the price of admission and little drive to a mid point neutral field……….
@ Phillyboy
Love to see that as well. I believe Archbishop Wood still has an open date week 2 (Labor Day weekend).
Foleman, are you sure the transfere rule keeps players out of playoffs this year? The article i read was confusing. It sounded like to me that if a transfere who
enrolled before rule went into effect (Aug 6) that the player would be eligible to play in districts and or state playoffs.
@Phillyboy….Southern Columbia is in the Heartland conference which plays a ten game league schedule which allows no no league matchups currently. All the games are in conference. Like alot of smaller leagues in D2 D11 and D4 they play a full 10 Game league schedule and there are no non league games until playoffs. I would love to see then play a good 5-6A team as I think they would compete with them but they do play some decent 4A teams in league schedule like Selingsgrove who had made state playoffs in 4A a bunch of times recently and almost beat Beth Catholic last season in state quarters. They would have won A and AAA last year in my opinion and they prob could win all three smaller classes this year as well. We all saw what they did to NG last year and with all the talent NG had
I don’t know if it’s too late but I think Southern Columbia should schedule one of the big boys in the regular season. That’s right, a legit 5A or 6A team. You want to do that when you’re at your peak. It’s high risk, high reward. You win that game and it creates a lasting community buzz.
Heard that Southern Columbia recently dispatched the third ranked team in the nation at a 7 on 7 at Penn State.
Do the majority of fans really want separate playoffs? I don’t think so, some of the greatest playoff games in PIAA History were Private VS Public, I could watch the Epic 2 game championship series between Erie CP and CB West all day, and would it be for all sports or just football and basketball? Do the Pubs really want Pa to turn into NJ where the Private School juggernauts get to recruit who they want? What really ticks me off is that its only a handful of renegade private/charter schools that are the reason for this mess. If the PIAA put the hammer down on the TEP’S, Beca’s, N Goretti’s and McDevitt’s of the world, we would not have this problem as most of the Private schools abide by the rules. Western Pa seems to do a much better job on reviewing transfers for athletic purposes than Philly/Eastern/Central Pa. The Parson’s transfer to Harrisburg was an absolute joke! The transfer rule will also hurt the Public’s too, one Principal at the meeting stated he had 40+ kids move into his district last year and now transfers this year wont be able to participate in the playoffs. Enforcement on this rule is going to be a huge mess. One other thing, several of those public schools at the PIAA meeting should be ashamed of even showing their faces as some of them benefit more from recruiting/transfers than most of the private schools.
Heard recently that Southern Columbia dispatched the third ranked team in the country at a 7 on 7 at Penn State.
What is the outlook for Notre Dame Green Pond as far as Colonial League, District XI, and States?
We missed all of the fun when the forum was down regarding the PIAA’s fast tracking changes to transfer rules with the sitting out of the following years post season (or something like that) and a formula for “playing up” based on recent past dominations. Any thoughts guys?? I believe this is just for football and basketball.
Also, the real fun IMO was the 150 or so AD’s, superintendents and other school representatives having their own meeting in State College. I do like the nuclear option mentioned about simply leaving the PIAA. Get off the pot and just do it guys, talk is cheap, we all know it. Someone may actually start paying attention and wake up.
Glad to hear you are back up and running!
Great to have you back and running Dave! I am lost without this site, even off-season!
Hi all. Someone signed in and deleted all the files and backups. But thank god we found the most recent backup. I have a weeks of work to catch up. We are backup and running.
Good to see you’re getting everything up and running again.
@Matt Looking at your 5A predictions, I’m going to say Whitehall is going to have a bit of a down year. Their starting QB transferred to Emmaus, they lost some quality starters and also have a brand new head coach. Those things point to possibly a rebuilding year, time will tell. Also, in 5A, district 11 and district 2 have now combined for a sub regional which will include Wyoming Valley West and Wallenpaupack making for a more competitive bracket with 7 teams vying for 4 spots.
@Matt, looking at your 5A predictions, I’m going to say that I think Whitehall I going to have a down year this season. Their starting QB transferred to Emmaus and they did lose some quality starters to graduation. Add in a new coach and this could be a rebuilding year. Also, making the 5A playoffs out of district 11 this year will be a little more difficult as there is now 5 teams from District 11 and Wyoming Valley West and Wallenpaupack from District 2 have been added to form a sub regional.
@Basketcase…thanks….then I would put West Catholic in their place. I would then put NG in the mix in AAA. They might have a better chance on AAA than AA with Southern in AA.