High school coaches, administrators and parents will complain about almost anything. In a strange way, that’s what makes the whole thing special. Just when you think you’ve heard everything there is to whine about, something else comes along to remind you of why it’s so fun to be a part of it in the first place.

But there is one thing you rarely hear complaints about and it’s more than a little bit surprising.

As we near the end of the regular season in high school football, many teams will be looking forward to the playoffs. And that means playoff brackets.

In Louisiana, football brackets are done by the power point system that really isn’t all that difficult to figure out. Which is quite the contrast to figuring out which teams get in which brackets. (If you still don’t get the Select/Non-Select thing, don’t ask; it will hurt your brain.)

Power points have been around since 2000 and there have been a few minor tweaks to the system. But by all accounts, it works quite well. Before 2000, the bracket was pre-determined by region and based on how a team finished its district race. You could have a state-championship caliber matchup in the second round, which was nobody’s idea of fair.

Sure, there are a few schools who will try to work the system with their scheduling but it really comes down to this simple premise: you are rewarded for winning games and/or playing a good schedule.

There are the factors involved: (1) If you win, you get 10 power points (2) You get a power point for each win your opponents have (3) You get two power points for each classification you play above yours (no penalty for playing down in classification). You take all of that and divide it by the number of games you play.

There are some minor variables – mainly figuring into the equation when a team doesn’t play a full 10-game schedule – but it’s not something on the rocket-scientist level.

Yes, there are teams that are 7-0 and have played Sid & Sally Technical School and others who are 3-4 and have played a Murderer’s Row of opponents. There are – and will always be – outliers when the calculations are done.

Some teams will have a seeding too low and others will be too high. But guess what? That’s no different than sports at any level that have a “panel of experts” in charge of determining bracket placement. Since there is no provision for margin of victory, losing by a point in double overtime is the same as losing by 50.

There are wild fluctuations in the first half of the season, but now that we have entered the final stages, the math works against any team making a dramatic jump in either direction. Which is why coaches are really starting to pay attention.

This way is much better because there’s no one to yell out if you think you’ve the short end of it.

The numbers are the numbers.

With three games to go in the regular season, coaches will now start to pay particular attention to how it all shakes down. They’ll start narrowing their focus on who their first-round playoff opponent might be and start working in that direction.

For that matter, they started working in that direction before the season even started. There are just as many weeks this season in Caddo/Bossier without as a Thursday game as there are with. Do you know how there are in Week 10? Six!

Not counting Fall Break, that’s as many Thursday games as there have been in the rest of the season combined. And why are they doing that, you ask?

Answer – to get a head start on the playoff preparation.

The website GeauxPreps.com, which is tied into the LHSAA’s schedule portal, figures it up for you and updates it every four hours.

But if you want to get an even bigger jump on it, go get a decent math student with a calculator full of battery life and during Week 10, you can make an educated guess on who to start scouting. No need to wait for the “official” playoff pairings to come out on Sunday.

In the end, it all ends up looking about right. Sure, a team might have a lower power ranking than a team it beat during the season, but this is about the entirety of the season. Not just one game.

And the fact that you don’t hear people complaining about it oughta tell you that it’s working.

Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com