Jamie Johnson’s in her first year of coaching girls basketball at Porter. Her team stands at 0-22 heading into this week. The good news? Its magic number for winning a state championship is six games.

Rest assured, Johnson’s not naive. There’s a better chance of a love fest in Congress than there is of Porter’s girls hoisting a gold ball in March. But give her credit for having mustard seed-sized faith that the postseason could pack some miracles for her young squad.

“I haven’t been focused on the record for some time and I haven’t wanted our girls to either,” she said. “Our preparation for some time has been on games starting this week. Our slate is clean from this point.”

Thanks to a system that 10 years since I came here makes me pull hairs to translate – a modified double-elimination bracket broken into puzzle parts – Porter has a shot, just as much as a 25-0 Oktaha team that’s beaten it twice by a combined 97 points.  

In a tweak by the OSSAA because of the increased number of 2A classified schools, Porter must win Friday to guarantee itself two more games and an extra week of practice because most of the districts are three-team groups rather than simple one-game matchups between pairs.

The extra week of practice, or more if they advance, is a prize in itself, says coach Jerry Walker of No. 1 Fort Gibson.

“You get the benefit of experiencing playoff pressure, regardless of how good you are, and learn from it,” Walker said.

Walker’s team will play Glenpool in 4A districts on Saturday, just as the Fort Gibson boys will. The OSSAA still mandates that boys and girls teams from 4A and 3A schools play the same district opponents to avoid splitting the gate and doubling travel costs statewide.  

But back to Porter. The three-team districts allow one team a first-round bye and by virtue of that and unlike their male counterparts, a guaranteed two games. Porter’s boys, ranked in or near the top 15 all season, was rewarded with one of those byes.

From this vantage point, that makes the 2A system a bit more fair than 3A or 4A. But overall, the system remains flawed.

No matter the class, the objective is to separate the top eight teams in each class, courtesy of the Okrankings.com coaches poll and select committees who draw up the brackets. In 2009, Wagoner was matched against Fort Gibson. Fort Gibson won and went on to the state tournament, as did Wagoner, who by losing was forced into a six-game march to get to the quarterfinals.

Compare that to OSSAA’s system of six- to nine-team districts in football and soccer, where half the teams advance to the playoffs and the others go to the weight room; or fastpitch or baseball this season in the state’s two largest school classifications, where similar-sized districts play a round-robin schedule to determine seedings for everyone, based on their finish in their district.

In basketball, those seeds are assigned on records through the first few days of February, which hurts a team like Muskogee. The Lady Roughers had to count January road losses at Bixby and Union and toss out decisive wins last week over both teams and consequently, will go to Bixby for its regional in 6A, where incidentally, the “both teams play together” rule doesn’t apply.

Inconsistencies everywhere, in other words.

“I wouldn’t trade to do that job,” Walker said of the process. “But then sometimes you scratch your head and wonder why it happens the way it does.”

Walker points out that the voting that determines seedings continues to be used in March when the state pairings are made. It’s a voting process that is often regionally-biased because coaches will vote on what they see. Some, though, don’t even vote.

“The highest concentration of coaches ranking is the week before the brackets come out,” he said. “The week after that we were still in first place, but our total voting points drop off 200 points, so our margin of being there was cut 10 to 12 points. When teams get eliminated, some of those coaches are moving on to coach another sport and they don’t have time to think about voting. Why don’t we stop voting when the brackets are done?”

Better still Jerry, why not stop voting at the end of the regular season and allow all games to count?

“Because the OSSAA has to have time to secure locations,” he said.

Part of that makes sense because the association wants to avoid sending teams to one point and having that school host another group. A best example of that flaw was in football when Jenks and Union played their 6A semifinal in Stillwater in November and Broken Arrow played Owasso at Indian Bowl because the most likely sites in Tulsa were each other’s stadiums.

In that case, you’re telling those schools that they have to keep some of their support behind to run stadium operations for two teams not their own. Chapman Stadium at TU was still occupied by the Hurricane, so the alternative of college gyms which may be impacted by postseason tournaments isn’t a good alternative either.

Which brings me back to the format being used this year in the two biggest classifications for fastpitch and baseball.

Modifying those, you could create an eight-team district tournament or two sub-district tournaments of four teams each, based on complete records. The top-ranked boys or girls team in the group plays host and if the best of both genders are ranked the same, flip a coin to determine the site. Boys and girls teams go to the same location, and it really doesn’t matter if they don’t play on the same night. They only do that now in districts. After that, it depends on their spot in the bracket whether they’re playing on different days, different times of the day or not at all. That way you can avoid the Fort Gibson-Wagoner types of first-round games and the other inconsistencies that flaw the system.

See, the BCS isn’t the only mess when it comes to finding champions.