In D-2 action Elk Grove will host St. Mary's Friday. If the Herd wins that means they'll be in the Section championship game for the third year in a row. They lost to Folsom two years ago and to Del Oro last season.
In Div.I, 13th seeded Monterey Trail will travel to top-seed Folsom. Monterey Trail hopes to be back in the big game for the first time in four years.
But, this past week the social media was ablaze with reports that the crowds were quite small, virtually void of students, in stadiums where the second round games were played.
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| The home bleachers at EGHS Friday during its playoff game vs. Wood |
Fox 40’s Mark Demsky posted a photo of a mostly-empty bleacher at Elk Grove High School during the Herd’s second round win over Will C. Wood High School.
Lots of fans and coaches weighed in via Facebook, even the
head coach of Division I’s top-seed, Folsom, who had been packing the stands
with fans at their Prairie City Stadium most of the past five years.
“We went from a packed student section to nobody in the
student section,” Kris Richardson wrote. “Let the kids in free with a student
body card!!”
The same kind of reports came in from the Tracy-Jesuit game
on Saturday along with the Vacaville/Del Oro playoff contest Friday.
All playoff games operate under the auspices of the Section
and admission prices rise to generally $9 for adults and $7 for students. Most schools allow their own students in free
or with a small charge during the regular season. But, in the playoffs, the
gate revenue statewide goes to the area Section office.
“Currently, an adult can watch a high school football game
for less than the price of a movie,” the Sac-Joaquin Section’s director of
communications Will DeBoard wrote in an email. “I don’t’ think that is totally
out of line.”
But, DeBoard does admit he is concerned that the student
attendance was down.
“It’s fair to say we’d like to see more kids at the games,” he
wrote. “They bring an atmosphere that adults don’t. The bottom line is charging
for admission is something we have to do to keep going as a resource for our
schools. We take the vast majority of our budget from the playoff games …”
On their website, the Section writes that 90 percent of its
revenue is derived from gate admissions with football its biggest revenue
source.
But, the Facebook comments went beyond ticket prices,
claiming that some early round matchups were just plain not attractive.
“Sixteen teams qualifying for the football playoffs in each
division is just too many,” Karl Grubaugh, a journalism teacher at Granite Bay,
wrote. “In round one there were a ton of blowouts because so many teams were so
mismatched, so cut down to eight teams per division.”
But, the playoffs were expanded by the Section a few years
specifically to make certain all deserving teams got in, according to DeBoard.
“Does this mean some undeserving teams get it? Yes, they
do,” DeBoard wrote.
“The playoffs used to be much smaller than they are now and
we had 8-2, even 9-1 teams not making team. Max Miller (former Cordova H.S.
coach) had a 9-1 team that didn’t make the playoffs one year.”
“I’m sure there’s a happy medium somewhere, where every game
is a great game and only evenly-matched teams are playing, but we had a lot of
league champions get blown out in the first week, too,” he continued. “When you
have the Olympic model of every league receiving a certain amount of playoff
berths, you are going to have ugly games because not every league is created
equal.”
In the first two rounds of the playoffs, four games in
Division I and four in Division II were decided by 40 or more points.
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