Increasing Iowa tourism by re-ranking sports teams
February 18th, 2008One of the best draws to east central Iowa tourism has been the high school sports. The state of Iowa has two separate population centers one, of course, is the Des Moines area and the other is on the east side of the state. These two entities rarely meet except for the state tournaments. As such the rivalries are between schools in the local areas rather than the schools in the other population center. One idea that has been proposed is that instead of using the tournament system now in use is to use a seeding system. Currently it doesn’t matter where a school stands in their conference rankings everyone gets at least one game in the semi-finals. Conceivably a school could loose every single game of the regular season and still come out to be the state champ Seeding wouldn’t allow that to happen and would also have different matchups at tournament time. There is a strong feeling that this would treat all schools more fairly and allow the state champ to really feel that they are true state champions. That is probably true for the larger schools but not necessarily so for the smaller schools. There is also the problem of implementation, for instance who gets to choose how to rank the schools.