KY Buckeye

As a voter, I'll try to give a little bit of insight here. I honestly have as many problems with the list as most of the people who have posted complaints here. While I feel like the voters themselves did a decent enough job with what they had to work with, I think the process itself is flawed. - To start things off, every AP outlet in the state has a chance to nominate players for the all-state ballot by a certain deadline, which was around the end of the regular season. One problem though, is that if there's no media outlet in an area, one just doesn't report or somebody makes a mistake and forgets a kid, those kids are already left out. If you're not nominated by somebody, you don't even make it on to the ballot to begin with and can't be on the team no matter how good you are. I won't get into specifics, but some big portions of the state were underrepresented or not represented at all. I can't even count how many kids I wanted to vote for who weren't even on the ballot. - When you get to the kids who are on the ballot, there are several more problems. If you cover one team every week like I do, you only see so much football. Glancing back at the schedule, I only saw 13 football teams in person this year. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with my statewide knowledge because I take an outside interest in it on my own time, but I doubt many other people are doing that. - When it comes to the kids I haven't seen or didn't already know about, you can only track down stats on about half, and then for some positions, stats are misleading or don't really matter anyway. In the absence of stats, I gave a little preference to those who were committed to good schools or were being highly recruited. That covers a few more kids, but after all that and hours of looking things up, you're still making decisions on half your positions with no stats or any point of reference. I think that's how, as somebody mentioned, so many players from state champion and runner-up teams end up on there. Voters just didn't have any information to go on other than "Hey at least this guy's team was good." - Another thing that skews the final list are how media outlets interpret the nomination and voting process. Personally, I'll nominate anybody from my area who is even close because I feel I owe it to the kids to give them a chance. I may not necessarily vote for them when the ballot comes out, but I've at least put it in the hands of all the voters. I'm not 100% on this, but I think any first team vote or two second team votes assure somebody of at least an honorable mention spot. So while some deserving players never even got on the ballot because their local outlet didn't nominate them for whatever reason, if some other outlet wants to be a homer, they can nominate 10 kids from a mediocre team, put them all on the first team and assure them all of being at least honorable mention. Not accusing anybody of doing this, but saying it can be done. - One other thing that I don't know if it affects the final team but is interesting nonetheless, players can only be nominated at one position. I see a lot of people upset about somebody being recognized at RB or QB, but it's really competitive because those positions are the ones most people notice. There may be 30 QBs on the ballot for 2 spots and 40 RBs for 4 spots, but then at DB there may be about 10 kids for 8 spots. So that's the process, and in my opinion, what's right or wrong with it. To be honest, I don't even really know what could be done to make it better, but I hope I've at least helped give some people a better understanding of how or why things end up a certain way.

Please, let it go.

Wouldn't blame this one on the loss of the QB or any of that stuff. It was just one of those games where everything that could go wrong did. Four turnovers vs., as mcpapa said, mistake free football. Having watched this one, I'd venture to say Mason wins this game 9 times out of 10. This just happened to be the one, but hey, that's football, and congrats to PCC.

I posted on twitter that Fleming was winning 0-0 at the half, which was pretty much true. The Panthers did exactly what they wanted to do at that point (run the ball, control the clock) and gave themselves a chance in this game. Mason County took a page from the same book and pounded away on the ground with Harris in the second half. Royals converted a huge 4th and 18 where Gilbert cut back and turned a minimal gain into a 23 yard TD. Really a great game to watch all around. Game story

Nice win there for the Panthers. Anybody have any details on this one?

Well said.

And so it begins.

Just a fantastic game in Mason County tonight. A shame either team had to lose this one. Game Story

That's a nice looking win for Ashland. When you match up a good Ky team with a comparable Ohio team it almost always means a loss. Good for Ashland for beating a team that had been doing some damamge on the other side of the river.

Big second half for the Royals. Game Story

Not going to go in any more detail, but let's just say a certain LI writer who went to the 7-on-7 at Highlands and both intrasquad scrimmages was extremely upset to not be able to go to Georgetown last Friday.

Was just going to copy/paste my post from a half hour ago, but might as well rephrase just to get this straight. So... It's cool, absolutely unquestioned, and so dominant a victory it should be put in bold type that Clark won because a foul was called on an off balance 35 footer when they were trailing as time ran out. Totally fine to question an eight point Mason County victory because GRC players (all but one of whom were back and participated in that game) had been banged up during the year. Awesome. I totally understand the ground rules now.

Surely we're not talking about two years ago when BB had to have every possible break go their way to only lose by six after getting stomped out 56-33 in the regular season. If it's before that you very well may be right but I wasn't even in the area at that point.

For what it's worth, I honestly don't have an alliance anywhere in KY. I live in Maysville, watch a ton of basketball in the area and would prefer to see the teams in Mason, Bracken, Fleming, Lewis and Robertson counties do well, but that's about the extent of it.

Just dropping in to make an observation... I'm disappointed, sad and my heart goes out to the players who try and give their all for 32 minutes all to see a game taken away from them on a blatantly awful call, only to see everybody tell them that's how it goes and they should suck it up and get over it. Of course, if a team gets a couple guys banged up it's absolutely something that should still be debated months later. Hey, if a team wins a region title and their region final opponent doesn't have the same starting five as they did the first week of December, maybe we should even petition the KHSAA to put an asterisk by their state tournament appearance. Honestly, I'm not from either school, or even this state for that matter. Just trying to call out a double standard for what it is.

Not to nitpick here, but predicting what MIGHT have happened under different circumstances is speculation, and by definition, pretty much the complete opposite of fact.

Pretty much going to be the greatest team in the history of ever.

I don't know... He'll get killed on here if he doesn't have GRC's starting five ranked 1-5.

LINK

And a little bit of Googling brought me to THIS.

Last year's squad was also at a size disadvantage and that turned out okay.

I think the other from the 10th is Dylan Hamilton from Bracken.

A 10th region graduate of 2008 might end up at a high D1 pretty soon.

Here's the Website. Not a ton of info yet, but probably worth checking back as it gets closer to gametime.

Not sure. There were six on the girls' second team also.