This past Saturday, The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference ended its first regular season of basketball.\u00a0 And to the delight of the fans, the final weekend was loaded with games that had significant meaning for more than half the teams involved.\u00a0 Four teams were fighting for two playoff spots and others were battling for home court advantage by trying to upgrade their seeding in the first EPC tournament which will determine the overall champion.\u00a0 That tournament will be played this week.\u00a0 After Saturday\u2019s win by Allen, the tournament pairings are set: Parkland-Whitehall; Liberty-Easton; Stroudsburg-Central Catholic; and Allen-Emmaus.\u00a0 Parkland is the overwhelming favorite to win the title on Friday night, but there are no guarantees.\u00a0 Every sports fan knows the clich\u00e9, \u201cThat\u2019s why they play the games\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, one has to ask if these final pairings were \u201cfair\u201d.\u00a0 Is the new league set up in the best possible way?\u00a0 After this first year, is there room for improvement?\u00a0 And the answers are an emphatic \u201cYES!\u201d<\/p>\n
There are 18 teams in the EPC, broken down into three divisions of six teams.\u00a0 Each team plays their division opponents twice and three selected teams from the other two divisions \u2013 16 conference games in all.\u00a0 This system creates a schedule where each team does not play six teams in the conference.\u00a0 This allows some teams to play a much more difficult schedule than others if that team happens to get six of the stronger teams and another gets some of the weaker teams.\u00a0 This was especially true for the Lehigh Valley teams that had the much weaker bottom-echelon Mountain Division teams on their schedule while others did not.<\/p>\n
In addition, the Skyline Division was so much stronger top-to-bottom than the other two divisions that having to play those teams twice was certainly detrimental to some.\u00a0 It also means that some historically great rivalry games were lost \u2013 Allen did not play Central Catholic, their cross-town rival; Nazareth and Easton did not meet; Liberty and Parkland did not play.\u00a0 I think you get my point.<\/p>\n
Granted this league is in its infancy and certainly some growing pains were expected.\u00a0 But there is a quick and fair fix.\u00a0 Just eliminate the divisions (they really did not serve much of a purpose anyway) and have each of the 18 teams play each other once.\u00a0 Everybody plays everybody!\u00a0 That creates 17 conference games, allows five independent match-ups, and creates a regular season champion.\u00a0 The only drawback I see is that a team has a home-court advantage for that one game, but that will be reversed the following year.\u00a0 Choose your top eight based on the standings that were created where everyone is being judged equally because each team played the same schedule.<\/p>\n
We have all been told by parents, teachers, coaches, and bosses that \u201cLife isn\u2019t fair\u201d, but if there is a way to make it fair, then do so!<\/p>\n
ABOVE THE EARS (SOME MUSINGS)<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past Saturday, The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference ended its first regular season of basketball.\u00a0 And to the delight of the fans, the final weekend was loaded with games that had significant meaning for more than half the teams involved.\u00a0 Four teams were fighting for two playoff spots and others were battling for home court advantage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"Yoast SEO Relevanssi index exclude","inline_featured_image":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[44,177,572],"class_list":["post-76395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behind-the-mic","category-featured","category-sports","tag-basketball","tag-eastern-pennsylvania-conference","tag-epc"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n