So by now you know whether your team made the Nassau football playoffs or not.You can read my playoff advance here. But there were some lingering questions Monday night.
Conference I
Hempstead protested its 24-18 loss to rival Uniondale in three overtimes on Saturday. Lloyd Martin broke free for a 7-yard touchdown run to lift Uniondale after two scoreless OTs.
What Hempstead protested was the final play of regulation, a 19-yard field goal that allowed Uniondale to forge a tie at 18. According to Hempstead coach Antoine Moore, the Uniondale center threw the ball off the field once the team arrived at the line of scrimmage on fourth down, an apparent attempt to get a clean ball.
Hempstead contended that it counted as a play and the game was over. Uniondale said that’s not how it happened, and with no video evidence to back its claim, Hempstead’s protest was denied.
So at 3-4, Hempstead finishes ninth in Conference I and misses the playoffs for the first time in four seasons. Had Hempstead won, No. 8 Oceanside might well have been eliminated. Check out the final football standings here.
Conference II
This issue was officially called a clarification. Lawrence and Garden City finished with identical 6-1 records and identical 125.91 power ratings atop Conference II. The sides met on Monday to figure out who gets the top seed and a seemingly easy path to the conference title game and who is No. 2 and likely gets Carey in the semifinals.
Of three possible scenarios, Garden City held the edge in two. The most obvious one was to declare the two tied and then resort to tie breakers. The first is head-to-head play. Garden City beat Lawrence, 16-8, in Week 2. Advantage Trojans.
The next two involved the actual permutation of the power points. If you calculate out each team’s power rating to the thousandth point, according to Garden City historian Jack White, then Garden City finishes with a slight edge over Lawrence.
For some technical reason unknown to this reporter, power points guru Andy Morris opted to calculate some schools to the thousandth and simply added a zero to others. The result gave Lawrence a 125.912 rating to Garden City’s 125.910. The official explanation is Morris simply used the “values expressed in the football guide.’’
So that’s the backroom story of how Lawrence earned the top seed and Garden City ended up second. As a side note, White was told the football committee would consider amending its power points system during the off-season.
Conference III
The coaches and players at Clarke and Sewanhaka were forced to scoreboard watch on Monday – not to find out if they made the playoffs, but to see what seed they’d land at.
What game determined their fate? Great Neck North (1-5) vs. Jericho (1-5). Go figure. The game was moved to Monday because of Saturday’s blustery weather. Despite 24 points from Jericho in the fourth quarter, Great Neck North held on to win, 27-24.
That moved Sewanhaka (3-4) into the No. 6 seed and Clarke (5-2) to No. 7. Had Jericho won, the teams would have swapped seeds. It may not sound like a big deal, but that’s the difference between playing red-hot No. 2 Floral Park (6-1) and a solid but beatable No. 3 Lynbrook (6-1) in the quarterfinals.
