by Ramsey Moyer
July 4th, 2026
The hope of this article is to put an end to the implementation of a remarkably nonsensical
and ill-considered idea that has governed the high school sports playoff system in California for a
number of years now. When it is considered that this is the same state responsible for ruining
youth sports across the country by turning them increasingly into a quest after a quick collegiate-
level buck, California being the first to have passed legislation disallowing freedom of contract
between universities and student-athletes on the topic of ‘NIL’-usage, which produced the
nationwide fall of dominoes resulting in today’s condition of millionaire college athletes1
– no one
should be surprised to find other instances of thoughtless adventuristic policy on the part of this
state in the realm of youth athletics. Indeed California can be said to have considerably ruined
youth sports at all three levels: collegiate, high school, and pre-high school. The focus of this
article is on its mishandling of the second.
The idea is called by its proponents ‘competitive equity’. In the title I claim, since more
diplomatic language was found to leave too much to be desired in point of accuracy, that the
playoff system based on this idea is foolish, perverse and fraudulent. Let us start with
establishing the third.
Playoffs have always been the tournament constituting the last stage of a sports season,
aimed at settling which team gets to say it won the competition between all participating teams
to be the best that season. ‘Champion’ has been the term used to designate the winner who can
therefore say that.
The competitive equity system makes both the playoffs and champion something entirely
different. Rather than a playoff bracket being filled out with the best teams among a class of
participants defined at the beginning of the season (traditionally, according to school size in high
school sports), the predefining is dispensed with and several separate playoff brackets drawn
from all teams are filled out each with teams having performed at a similar level of excellence.
The object of this is to have close games in the post-season. This ideal has been termed
‘competitive equity’ apparently because the teams facing off have some rough equality of
competitive merit.
While everyone has gone on using the traditional language of ‘champions’ and ‘playoffs’, it
is clear that in all divisions below the top division, these terms no longer apply. The teams are not
the best teams from a predetermined class, and for that reason no champion is decided by the
tournaments. The usage of these terms is therefore fraudulent. Its object is to retain the prestige
of ‘playoffs’ and ‘champions’ derived from their traditional meanings, while having utterly
transformed their actual meaning through the new system, in such a way that they are no longer
entitled to such prestige. If the system is to be retained, this needs to change. Instead of ‘playoffs’,
honesty requires calling these something like ‘post-season tournaments’, and their winners,
instead of ‘champions’, something like ‘post-season tournament winners’. Until then the
proceeding is justly called a fraud.
Let us now move on to discussing the folly of this system. That I have already partly done
that should be clear. To have post-season tournaments not designed to settle who the best team
is makes little sense. It can indeed be asked why play them at all, since what they are, under this
system, is simply a succession of additional games, settling only who is the best among a group of
teams placed together in a bracket but having no significance on a season-wide scale. The
1 This should be reversed by national legislation under Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce.
tournaments are an exercise in going through the motions of the sport for no particular reason. It
would be as fair to call them a pageant as a playoff.
To the extent this is picked up on by participants and by the public, interest in the
tournaments must be lost. It is quite the oddity of this system indeed that continued interest in
high school sports post-seasons under it rests on the public’s ignorance and lack of
understanding of what is going on. This puts the knowing in a perpetually awkward dilemma
between helping people out of error and confusion on the one hand, and abstaining from raining
on parades and dealing a blow to interest in and motivation for high school sports on the other.
What has happened is that something of value but less important has been arbitrarily
given priority over something more important. It is indeed nice to see close playoff games. But
that bringing these about is not worth demolishing the entire meaning of and basis for interest in
playoffs in the first place, should have been obvious. Uniformly close games are not as important
as meaningful playoffs and the opportunity for meaningful achievements.
Much as happened with Covid, when a disease serious only to a small part of the
population came to be regarded, through an ignorant collective habit of mind, as a most grave
occurrence when contracted by anybody, from toddlers to professional athletes, so the high
school sports community, by a gradual escalation of attention to the matter, came into the habit
of deeming it a disaster and proof of a failed system any time there was a one-sided game.
One reason there had come to be so many one-sided playoff games is that playoffs had
become too easy to get into, with too many divisions and too many teams making it in each
division. But rather than ameliorate the situation by making playoffs more meaningful by making
them more exclusive, a classic case of a cure worse than the disease was recurred to, the
‘competitive equity’ system here under discussion.
Though I have now shown the system to be foolish, in moving on to discuss its perversity
we do not leave the discussion of its folly but rather continue it, since everything about it that is
perverse is at once another aspect of its folly. By perverse I mean morally unacceptable to any
just mind.
The perversity of the system can be boiled down to the following: Becoming more
excellent does not make it more likely you will win a championship. The contrary ought to be laid
down as a fundamental guideline to be followed in devising any playoff system. If you improve, so
should your chances of winning a title. On the competitive equity system, what happens instead
is that you get moved up into a higher division. There, you are more likely to be ousted early, so
that getting better, instead of translating to longer playoff runs and improved championship
probability, tends to result in precisely the reverse. Getting worse, on the other hand, may well
result in a long post-season and championship banners and plaques for the program, moved
down to compete in an easier bracket.
Clearly on such a system the playoff division a team gets into means more than how the
team does in playoffs. By definition, the team eliminated in the first round of the Division 1
playoff did better than the champion of the Division 2 playoff, and so on down the line. It might
be thought then, that this is just another way of doing it, not a problem in itself but simply
different from the old way, and that the public just needs time to learn how the new system
works and to begin interpreting the merit of a team’s season differently, not by playoff runs and
championships as much as by which playoff division each team lands in and secondarily how far
they advance in it.
But this is unsatisfactory. In the first place, this adjustment by the public does not in fact
occur, for several reasons, including (a) the continuance of the old kind of system in most
spectator sports people follow, (b) vested interest by winners in perpetuating the confusion, (c)
that the people who might clarify the matter keep quiet from a desire not to hurt the feelings of
past winners on this system and not to seem like haters detracting from teams’ supposed
accomplishments2
, (d) how deeply ingrained the old outlook and the meaning attached to playoff
wins and championships are, etc. Instead, there is simply a perpetual condition of injustice in
which those who have achieved better are taken by a major share of observers to have achieved
worse, a reality in some degree on any system, to be sure. But the unprecedented scale of it on
this system is demonstrated by the fact that, because at every stage of the competitive equity
playoff each team is deliberately pitted against a team of comparable ability to themselves, a
middling team at the local level can very well go on to ‘win state’, and thenceforth go around
telling people they were state champions, while their local superior of similar school size has to
say they lost in the first round, simply because they were put in a better division because they
were better.
But even if there were not this eternal public confusion, and people did learn to
understand and correctly interpret team outcomes on this new system, the system would remain
unsatisfactory and perverse. First, the effect of having the division matter more than playoff wins
and losses is that playoffs become an anti-climax. The whole thing is trivialized, rendered of slight
and secondary importance, which results in less excitement and interest surrounding playoffs.
Second, it is simply not fair that better-performing teams might get to play one losing
playoff game while a worse team might get to play several including winning a nominal
championship. Playoff runs and championship opportunities ought to be a reward for a job well
done, proportionate to merit, not something accidental and often precisely inversely
proportionate to merit.
Third, this inversion in fact does an injustice not only to the deserving team deprived of its
opportunity for a playoff run, but to the program burdened with expending a lot of time and
effort on a playoff run of trivial meaning. Preparing for a sport like football, or many others, takes
a lot of time and hard work. By the end of a season, respite from it all can seem like the real
enticement as plausibly as a continuance of it can. In most eyes, happily this has not been the case
over the years when one’s team has made playoffs, for the reason that playoffs are exciting and
give one a chance to achieve something meaningful. But where, as on the competitive equity
system, this no longer holds true, the prospect of a long playoff run becomes a burden, not a
reward. Hence both teams are done an injustice: the deserving team, moved up and now quickly
defeated and deprived of what might have been an exciting, meaningful playoff run, and the
mediocre team moved down into an easy bracket and saddled with potentially weeks more of
work and preparation for what every informed mind knows to be (a) not of a nature to crown a
genuine champion and (b) of trivial significance as an index to how the team did that season.
The nature of the whole system can be illustrated by an analogy to boxing. If boxing
operated on a ‘competitive equity’ model, this would mean that instead of the excellence of
training, the acquired skill, the heart mustered on fight night, etc., of the likes of a Manny
Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather Jr. resulting in their winning title belts in whatever class their
weight put them in, the consequence would simply be that they were moved up to compete with
bigger fighters. The belts would go to a hundred mediocre heavyweights in lieu of them.
Simultaneously, inferior fighters from their own weight class would be moved down perhaps to
win titles against smaller fighters. Across the board these titles, with the exception of the top
division, would be going no longer to those who had made themselves into the best boxers in
their class, but simply to a random collection of people determined by chance and accident, the
accident of where everyone happened to fall relative to meaningless division cutoffs after the
shuffling up and down of fighters according to performance. This is what is the case in high
2 What these teams deserve credit for is finishing the season on a win streak against opponents meant to be
competitive with them. This is an accomplishment, but it is not to be confounded with winning a championship.
school sports today. Champions by excellence have been replaced with champions by accident.
This is a totally silly, unacceptable, and undignified thing for adults to continue to perpetuate
with a straight face.
The heavyweights winning the belts that would have normally gone to the Pacquiaos and
Mayweathers of the world suggests yet another aspect of this system’s perversity. Contrary to the
pretensions to fairness and equality conveyed by the term ‘competitive equity’, this system is
anything but fair and anything but equal. It favors big schools best positioned by their resources
(in the broadest sense) to be good, at the expense of smaller and less well-positioned schools. If
the schools of the first type have a good year, they compete as they normally would in the playoff
suited to their level. If they have a down year, they still get into playoffs but in a lower division
where they may now win at the expense of some smaller school that did an outstanding job
relative to its size and resources. The smaller school that does the most championship-worthy
job imaginable relative to the kind of school it is just gets moved up into a division it can’t win in
and summarily overwhelmed by some better-resourced program. Moreover, as coaches become
aware of the situation, the more capable ones are liable to gravitate toward these already more
favored programs, where they recognize they will actually have a chance to succeed, only
widening the gap between teams. The system is both inequitable in itself and has the tendency to
render things less equal.
Let the following be laid down as fundamental guidelines in devising any playoff system:
(1) The class of teams from which each post-season bracket is to be filled out must be fixed at the
beginning of the season, and the bracket must include the best teams from that class (this rules
out having an Open Division bracket, as ruinous of the meaning of every bracket from every
division from which one or more teams are drawn to the Open). If both these conditions are not
met, the winner of any so-called playoff cannot be said to be a champion.
(2) The fixing of these classes must be done according to something that in its nature correlates
with merit. In boxing this has been weight. Not every heavier fighter is better than every lighter
fighter, but there is a natural correlation between weight and prowess as a fighter. In the same
way, not every larger school is better than every smaller school, but there has existed and no
doubt still exists a correlation between school size and performance in the different sports, so
that this has justly been the traditional basis for classing teams.
(3) The fixing of these classes must not be done according to merit itself, neither merit in the
same season nor in preceding seasons. To class teams according to merit is to punish teams for
doing a good job and to violate the rule that excellence ought to improve one’s likelihood of
winning a championship. In addition to the problems already mentioned, this incentivizes losing
and renders teams ambivalent about winning, demotivating people’s efforts, and it can even lead
coaches to throw games, striking at the fairness of the whole system. Classing teams based on
merit in preceding seasons has the additional flaw of incentivizing coaches to leave; and once this
occurs, it often makes little sense to continue regarding a program as the same program.
So what caused this absurdity? It is the author’s belief that a variety of cultural factors
disposed the people of today’s society to blithely accept as sane and sensible what ought to have
been recognized as ludicrous. But discussing these would steer the essay away from its real
purpose, which is simply to see the system finally abandoned. One of these factors, however,
needs mention, since the discussion of the perversity of the system would hardly be complete
without it. This is the attitude of entitlement. A lot of people think that just because something
exists and some other people have it, they themselves or everyone in general is entitled to it. The
competitive equity model represents an extension of this attitude to close playoff games. To its
proponents, it doesn’t matter that one team is outstanding and another not very good; both
should get the same result: nail-biters from the first to the last round of playoffs. Everyone is
entitled to close playoff games. The job of the adults presiding over high school sports is to juggle
teams around to ensure everyone this weekly birthright. Here the world is to revolve around you.
Better was the old assumption that if a team is a dominant team, precisely what it
deserves is to dominate games, while if a team is mediocre, what it deserves come playoff time (if
it is lucky enough to squeak into playoffs), is a curt reminder of the fact in the opening round. In
this way youth learn lessons about life and the realities of the world. Hopefully the experience
motivates them to ask what they can do to get a better result the next time. The human truth is
that we have a way of adjusting our hopes and expectations to our circumstance, so that often
such teams are quite satisfied with their season. Youth do not need the coddling condescension of
a mock playoff about whose true nature and significance people can only be fooled for so long.
Most to the point, the premise that the excellent and the not good are to reap the same fruits is an
injustice and another aspect of this system’s perversity.
Though we forgo any further discussion of cultural factors, what remains as a necessary
part of a treatment of our topic is a look at the circumstantial factors that lent a plausibility to the
idea that a change was necessary. For several circumstances have indeed rendered school size a
less satisfactory basis for classing teams than it used to be. These include the following:
(1) To some extent unknown to me, schools have been broken down into more and smaller
schools through the proliferation of charter schools. But since for some sports, whether a school
offers the sport is of sufficient importance to those who play it to determine whether they go to
the school, whichever school continues to offer the sport continues to draw just about all the
players of that sport that it used to before the splitting up of the original larger school; but it now
has a way smaller overall student body. This is an unfair advantage if the school is classed
according to size.
(2) In some degree unknown to me, there is, I’m told, more choosing of schools on the basis of
athletics by students than there used to be. Transfer rules have been relaxed, more students are
transferring, and more families are moving or putting their kids into private schools specifically
to play a sport there. This trend is only likely to intensify so long as universities continue to be
forced to allow athletes to be paid for use of their NIL (if indeed there isn’t an exodus from high
school sports altogether in favor of year-round training in club sports). Sometimes this results in
schools that are not very big attracting a number and caliber of athletes that results in their being
among the best teams.
(3) No doubt the biggest contributor of all is diversity. The racial demographics of this state’s
schools have changed dramatically in recent generations. Since the different groups, having
different cultural backgrounds, do not play the different sports in the same proportion (to leave
aside the more invidious question of each group’s potential in the different sports), school size as
such is not as reliable an index to how favorably circumstanced each school is for a sport as it
was when the state was more culturally homogenous. For one stark example, Mission San Jose
High of Fremont was long placed according to school size in the division for the largest schools in
the North Coast Section. But as the school was around 90% Asian, it could barely field a football
team let alone hope to be competitive in that division, and indeed finally folded its program in
2015.
Nevertheless, for all the reasons I’ve laid out, a competitive-equity-based playoff system is
not an acceptable answer but worse than the sum of the problems here enumerated. It is hoped
that those charged with devising the system can arrive at solutions mitigating these problems.
Schools broken up into charter schools can have all the different campuses counted for sports
like football where students would choose their school based on its being offered. Transfer rules
can be tightened back to what they used to be. A flexibility in classing private schools and
perhaps open-enrollment public schools is possible. For example, if it is known that athletes go to
a private school in considerable number to play a sport, there can be a provision for multiplying
by some factor what their school size is taken to be for that sport, or if it reaches a certain scale,
for automatically placing them in the top division. As far as the differing demographics, unless
people are ready to start counting people of different backgrounds differently, which is not likely
to happen, it needs to just be accepted that some schools are not as well positioned to be good at
certain sports as others. Sports are never able to control for all variable factors going into
competitive merit outside of the competitors’ control. In boxing, weight is controlled for, but
things like muscle fiber composition, wing span, head size, upbringing and the like are not. These
are simply treated as part of each athlete’s talent for the sport. So it must always be, and some
schools are simply more talented for certain sports than other schools are. Hopefully as groups
newer to this country have more time in the society, the difference in participation levels in the
various sports will gradually decline. In the meantime, perhaps in extreme cases like that of a
Mission San Jose, a petitioning down into a lower division can be allowed if it meets with broad
approval.
But whatever solutions be arrived at, let the guidelines laid out above be followed, lest we
live through another chapter as embarrassing to this state’s high school sports history as the
‘competitive equity’ chapter has proven to be.
Ramsey Moyer is a philosopher and lifelong resident of California. He played football at UC Davis
and coached for six years at his former high school, Alameda High, including in his final two as
varsity head coach.