Tonight is the final night of regular-season high school football in Wisconsin.

It is the first time the season has ended on a Friday in many years. (I may have announced the last Friday night season-finale game in the state, in fact, between winless Fennimore and winless Dodgeville in 1989.) Over the past couple of decades, teams have been playing their final regular-season games on Thursday or even Wednesday in anticipation of the first playoff game the following Tuesday.

Coaches didn’t like the Thursday–Tuesday–Saturday cycle of putting three football games within 10 days at the end of the season. This has become more of an issue since the playoffs were expanded to 224 out of the state’s 400 or so high school teams (including co-op or tri-op teams). The WIAA has eliminated that issue by moving the season back, which means that the regular season now starts two weeks before Labor Day and ends in mid-October, which means that more of the football season is played (and more importantly preseason practice begins) in what is traditionally hot weather. The 2012 season will feature just eight regular-season games lest preseason practice start Aug. 1 to get the nine regular-season games and five rounds of playoffs in before gun deer hunting begins the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

You might have figured out by that previous paragraph that high school football is an example of either Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — or the Law of Unintended Consequences, or a game of Whackamole — fix one thing and something else comes up.

High school football playoffs are 35 years old in Wisconsin. (But some states have no statewide football playoffs.) And for at least that long the WIAA has been fiddling with the football playoff format at the behest of coaches, school administrators and others. The playoffs started with four classes in 1976, went to five divisions in 1978, six in 1981, and seven in 2002, two years after the Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association was swallowed up by the WIAA. The playoffs started with four teams per class in 1976, went to eight teams per division in 1981, then 16 per division in 1987, and 32 per division in 1996.

And yet, football is the only WIAA-sanctioned high school sport in Wisconsin where not every team plays in the playoffs. I have yet to get a satisfactory answer as to why football is singled out other than some variation of “because it’s football.” (Which is kind of an after-the-fact justification of my not playing high school football … that and my lack of athletic ability and my disinterest in spending much of my sacrosanct summer getting my brains beaten in by someone bigger and meaner than me.)

One objection to letting everyone into the playoffs is what happens when a number one seed plays a winless team in the first round. (One athletic director from whom I heard this coached a team that went from a state championship one season to a winless season three years later.) Of course, the same thing happens now when teams on top of their conferences play their bottom brethren.

Football is the 800-pound gorilla in the room whenever conference arrangements are discussed. Conferences are arranged based on three criteria, the third being the sports offered among the schools. Criterion 1A is the size of the schools; criterion 1B is the distance between the schools. Whether 1A or 1B is more important depends on the decade; we appear to be in an era where 1A trumps 1B, which is odd in an era of gas prices approaching $4 per gallon and diesel approaching $5 per gallon and, by the way, a lousy economy. On the other hand, the sport in which the disparity of school size has the biggest impact is football; generally, the bigger the school, the more players you have available.

The WIAA proposed a radical change in high school football two years ago when it created a plan to replace conference affiliation for football with eight-team football-only districts. Teams that finished first through fourth would advance to the playoffs; teams that finished fifth through eighth would have one more game against a team that finished in its same position in another district. I still like the so-called district proposal, because it would allow conferences to be realigned based on geography while football districts would be based on enrollment, but apparently few others did.

The newest proposal leaves conferences where they are, but changes things more radically in other senses. The traditional formula of nonconference game(s) followed by conference games followed by playoffs would be rearranged. Each team would play seven conference games, followed by a playoff game. Playoff winners would move on, while playoff losers would go into an “extended season” of two more games (along with the losers of second-round games), so that every school would play at least 10 games. The “extended season” would be similar to today’s nonconference game(s) except that teams that lose their playoff game wouldn’t know who they would be playing in their final two games.

One advantage of the new proposal is that it treats football the same as all other WIAA-sanctioned sports. Another is that it would, I think, improve the lot of perennial non-playoff teams not because every team would get into the playoffs, but because seasons would be longer. One reason the same teams end up in the playoffs every season, I believe, is that playoff teams get more practice than non-playoff teams, since their seasons are longer. (Unlike in some football-crazy states, teams do not practice after their seasons end.) That’s helpful for the non-seniors, this season’s backups who become next season’s key performers.

My example is the Ripon football team between 2003 and 2006, when the Tigers won two state titles and advanced to the third round in two other seasons. Over those four seasons of nine regular-season games, the Tigers played 52 football games, which means they had (under the aforementioned three-games-in-10-days schedule) 12 more weeks of practice than non-playoff teams of that era.

The downside is that it would eliminate some of the great nonconference rivalries, such as tonight’s annual China Bull game between Omro and Winneconne. In the aforementioned 2003-to-2006 period, Ripon played Sheboygan Falls in each team’s last game before their conference seasons. The first three seasons, Ripon won 56–36, 15–8 and 12–6 in three tremendous games. Playing two games at the end of the season with not much at stake is not likely to generate much fan interest.

My suggestion is to move one of those “extended season” games from the end to the beginning — to give each team, as in the district proposal, one nonconference game followed by seven conference games followed by a playoff game, with the playoff losers then playing one more game, instead of two. That gives everyone 10 games and, more importantly, 10 weeks of practice when the season begins. The top two teams in each division would be back to 14 games instead of 13 in the current proposal, but that affects just 14 of the state’s more than 400 football teams. This isn’t a perfect plan, but I think it deals with the major downsides of the current playoff system and the current alternatives.

High school sports is supposed to be about the benefits of participating — learning how to work together for common goals, placing the team over the individual, learning how to prepare, the importance of doing well whether you’re recognized or not, and learning how to deal with adversity. It is also about working and preparing to win, even if you don’t win. I don’t believe any of that would be lost by letting all teams into the football playoffs, since every other team (and every varsity individual) in every other sport gets to participate in the postseason. And it might improve the state of football overall because teams would practice and play more.