The Little Glitch That Almost Shook Idaho High School Football Playoff Seeding

You know, sometimes the biggest dramas aren't on the field, but behind the scenes, lurking in spreadsheets and points calculations. And frankly, that's almost precisely what happened recently with the Idaho high school football playoffs. It was a moment of — well, you could call it a genuine head-scratcher, all thanks to one missing piece of the puzzle.

Picture this: the brackets are being finalized, the tension is palpable, and then, a hiccup. A rather significant hiccup, in truth. The culprit? A single game result, a forfeited one at that, that somehow didn't quite make its way into the official points system maintained by the Idaho High School Activities Association (IHSAA). These are the folks who, naturally, use a specific formula to rank teams for the postseason. It’s all about points, right? And when points go astray, things can get a little… wonky.

The team at the heart of this unintended drama? The Borah Lions. They'd had a game against the Meridian Warriors, a contest that ended in a tie. Now, later on, Meridian ended up forfeiting a separate game to Borah. And this, my friends, is where the trouble began. The points from that forfeiture—a cool 10 points, plus another 0.2 for the win factor—didn't get tallied into Borah’s official score in the computer system. They just… vanished from the initial calculation, it seems.

So, instead of a robust 84.2 points, Borah was, for a short while, staring at a slightly anemic 74.2. A difference of ten points, yes, but in the finely tuned world of playoff seeding, ten points might as well be a hundred. This numerical misstep meant Borah was initially pegged as the No. 5 seed in the 5A classification, a spot that, once corrected, rightfully belonged to the No. 4 position.

Honestly, it’s easy to see how these things happen. Someone’s inputting data, a detail gets missed, and suddenly, a whole playoff picture could shift. But credit where credit is due: once the oversight was identified, the IHSAA moved swiftly. The error was corrected, the points restored, and Borah’s true standing was reflected. In the end, the playoffs proceeded precisely as they were always meant to, with Borah where they should have been.

But for a fleeting moment, a missing game result threatened to rewrite the opening chapters of Idaho’s high school football postseason. It was a sharp reminder, perhaps, that even in our increasingly automated world, the human element—both in making the initial mistake and in quickly fixing it—remains absolutely crucial. A small detail, really, but one with big potential consequences.