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Fryer: CIF Southern Section’s new basketball playoff system has strengths and quirks

February 7, 2025

The CIF Southern Section boys and girls basketball playoff brackets will be released Saturday at noon.

There will be the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This time, the wailing and gnashing will not be because of human decisions. This year, for the first time, the creation of the basketball playoff brackets are being done by computer.

CIF-SS member schools voted 79-8 to approve the move to take playoff bracketing decisions away from committees in many sports and have computer ranking systems create the brackets. Football has used Calpreps.com (now called HSratings.com) for a few seasons and that has worked out fine, mostly.

The goal of this was to have playoff team selections and brackets based upon current season results instead of the results of the previous two seasons, which is the way CIF-SS playoffs were constructed in recent years.

Jerry De Fabiis is the CIF-SS assistant commissioner in charge of the section’s management of basketball. He said once the schools decided they wanted computerized rankings for playoff placement, the Southern Section looked at several options before selecting the Colley Royalty rankings system.

For one, the Massey Ratings System that is used for some CIF sports was rejected because that system did not account for CIF-SS teams’ games against out-of-state teams, and many of the top CIF-SS boys and girls basketball teams play in tournaments or showcases in other states.

The Massey Ratings System that was used for this season’s girls water polo playoffs had a problem that was discovered once those brackets were released last week. Massey Ratings confused forfeiture scores with actual game scores, so some teams’ ratings were wrong. The Southern Section had to scramble and revise several playoff brackets.

For basketball, some coaches say that the Colley Royalty system for ranking CIF-SS teams puts too much weight on strength of schedule. The teams in the top leagues will always get plenty of rankings points, even if they go 0-10 in a league if that is one of the Southern Section’s top leagues.

Servite went 0-10 in the Trinity League. The Trinity League is one of the top two leagues in the Southern Section, with the Mission League (Sierra Canyon, Harvard-Westlake, etc.) being the other. Servite is No. 42 in the Colley Royalty rankings of the 516 CIF-SS teams that play boys basketball.

Servite is No. 22 in our Orange County rankings. The Colley Royalty rankings have Servite ranked higher in the CIF Southern Section than Orange County’s Nos. 7, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 teams.

That is an example of the Colley Royalty system placing too much emphasis on league affiliation instead of how good a team is.

This is how it’s going to look Saturday when boys and girls basketball brackets come out, assuming the Open Division again is an eight-team bracket.

The Open Division’s eight teams will compete in a pool-play format, with four teams in each pool and the Pool A and Pool B winners meeting for the Open Division championship at the Toyota Arena in Ontario on Feb. 28 or March 1. There is a possibility that the boys or girls Open Division will be a 10-team group with a traditional bracket, but eight-team pool play was how it’s been recently and likely will be again.

Sage Hill's bench celebrates a 3-point basket by Sage Hill's Finley Callero (5) during a girls basketball game between Portola High and Sage Hill High in a Pacific Coast League contest at Sage Hill High School on Friday Jan. 21, 2025. (Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer) — Sage Hill’s bench celebrates a 3-point basket by Sage Hill’s Finley Callero (5) during a girls basketball game between Portola High and Sage Hill High in a Pacific Coast League contest at Sage Hill High School on Friday Jan. 21, 2025. (Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer)

If the girls basketball Open Division is an eight-team group again, that likely puts Sage Hill into Division 1. Sage Hill is No. 9 in the Colley Royalty girls basketball rankings, although Sage Hill did beat No. 7 Windward twice. If Sage Hill is a Division 1 team it would be heavily favored to win that division’s championship.

Division 1 will be a 32-team bracket in boys and girls basketball The first teams placed in the bracket will be automatic qualifiers, which are the teams that finished high enough in their leagues’ final standings to receive guaranteed entry into the playoffs. The number of at-large berths available will depend upon how many automatic qualifiers are in a division.

After the CIF-SS office completes its Division 1 boys and girls brackets it begins work on the next eight playoff divisions, 2AA down to 5A, following the same format – automatic qualifiers are placed first, at-large teams fill any remaining berths.

A look at the latest boys basketball rankings indicate that Division 1 boys basketball will have 28 automatic qualifiers. That means only four at-large berths will be available and there will be some very good teams in the pool of Division 1 at-large candidates. Among them are Mater Dei, Cypress, St. Paul, Chaminade, St. Monica and Loyola.

Mater Dei is in the at-large pool for the first time in Gary McKnight’s 43 seasons as the team’s boys basketball coach. Mater Dei finished fourth in the six-team Trinity League that has St. John Bosco, Santa Margarita and JSerra as its three automatic qualifiers. Those three teams will be in the Open Division.

Canyon boys basketball coach Nate Harrison, whose team beat Cypress on Wednesday to take the Crestview League’s third and final guaranteed playoff berth, sees that as a problem.

“The way they’ve done it is that they’ve pushed so many at-large (teams) up because they’re in power conferences,” Harrison said. “There will be a ton of great teams that will miss the playoffs.”

Canyon's head coach Nate Harrison gestures to the referee during a game at Sonora High School in La Habra on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024. (Photo by Scott Smeltzer, Contributing Photographer) — Canyon’s head coach Nate Harrison gestures to the referee during a game at Sonora High School in La Habra on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024. (Photo by Scott Smeltzer, Contributing Photographer)

Coaches are saying that head-to-head results don’t seem to matter as much as strength of schedule. San Juan Hills beat Cypress by 13 points, but Cypress is No. 32 and San Juan Hills is No. 54 in the Colley Royalty rankings.

“”I’ve heard that,” De Fabiis said. “The answer I have for people is that I don’t think one game is being weighed more than any other.”

De Fabiis and his team began compiling the boys and girls basketball brackets Thursday, with the regular season having ended Wednesday, based upon the Colley Royalty rankings that include Wednesday’s results. The CIF-SS office will release the final rankings along with its brackets Saturday.

CIF-SS by-laws require that teams enter all of their games and match results in its CIFSShome.org system so that the computer systems have accurate data to make their rankings. The Southern Section office on Thursday was still reaching out to athletic departments that had yet to input their complete results. Teams that do not enter accurate results can be excluded from the playoffs.

Leslie Aragon was Orangewood Academy’s girls basketball coach for many years and now is an assistant at Rosary. He sits on the CIF-SS Basketball Advisory Committee and likes the current concept.

“Any time you’re using same-year data, that’s good,” he said. “I’m all for this system.”

De Fabiis said the Southern Section is likely to retain the Colley Royalty system for the 2025-26 basketball season.

“I think it’s done a pretty good job,” he said. “As the data got better the rankings got better. I think it’s done what it was intended to do.

“We have the Open Division teams where they need to be and we have the power leagues up top. The emphasis on strength of schedule has worked. Are there outliers? Yes, but no system is perfect.”

The system, though, needs tweaking. You can’t tweak a system that does not exist. Still, more of a human element to the process would make the process better.

Computers have their strengths. But I’ve never seen a Colley computer at a high school gym. Seeing teams and players still is a good way to figure out how good they are.

Fryer: CIF Southern Section’s new basketball playoff system has strengths and quirks Orange County Register

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Fryer: CIF Southern Section’s new basketball playoff system has strengths and quirks

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