TopCat
Well-known member
Manchester is a big reason competitive balance exists in Ohio. In the old D4 R13 days Manchester played in the same region as ASVSM, Mooney, Ursuline, CCC, and VASJ (Benedictine and Hawken for a number of years, too). Manchester would play a standard D4 public school schedule with typical D4 public school kids. They'd usually be ranked near the top of the region. Often in the first round or second round, they'd run into a private school that limited enrollment to maintain a D4 classification but "attracted" talent that played at a much higher skill level than D4. Those same schools generally played each other and then much larger (WGH, Fitch, Massillon, McKinley, Iggy, Walsh, etc) competition. I would argue that you don't play those sorts of schedules unless you know you have the talent to do it. When divisions were added and Manchester dropped to D5, similar things happened. Competitive balance was created to address that and Manchester was often used as an example for the need for competitive balance.If you're losing to the team that eventually wins the title in the first round odds are that you're coming in seeded near the bottom of the bracket, this is not the defense you think it is, if anything it adds strength to the notion that lots of those teams were products of soft scheduling. Don't confuse that with saying those teams were bad or that France was a mediocre coach, both the teams and France himself were very solid but the legacy is not this watertight, unassailable, behemoth that nobody can measure up to. They had some truly excellent teams in '96 and '97 and then again in '13 and '18 and '19 surrounding those five stand out years are a ton of pretty solid teams with a handful of just average ones lumped in. Definitely something to celebrate if you're a Manchester alumni and something to be proud of for sure but it's not that upper echelon of achievement in Ohio football. You just can't ignore a 23-27 all-time record in the playoffs