EDITORIAL: Our view: Welcome reversal on football
Jan. 15—Brad Dunten and Josh Cobb talked, and people listened.
The winners are high school football players in some of Oregon's tiniest towns.
Dunten, the athletic director at Powder Valley High School in North Powder, and Cobb, the school's head football coach, were dismayed by a recent proposal from a state committee to do away with eight-man football, the format that Powder Valley and dozens of other Class 1A schools have used for decades.
The Oregon School Activities Association's (OSAA) Football Ad Hoc Committee made that recommendation on Dec. 20. The committee's plan would have switched to either a nine-man or a six-man football format for the state's smaller high schools.
The proposal prompted immediate opposition from Dunten and Cobb, who had, less than a month earlier, watched Powder Valley play Adrian in a classic Class 1A state championship game at Baker High School, a thrilling contest in which Adrian rallied to win 46-38.
Dunten dispatched a survey to 95 Class 1A schools, which are fairly evenly distributed, geographically speaking, in the state, including more than a dozen in Northeastern Oregon.
The response was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the eight-man format. School officials who answered Dunten's survey mentioned, among other reasons for their preference, that the eight-man format is well-suited to the number of players who normally turn out for football at Class 1A schools, and that it allows schools to schedule games against teams from neighboring states that also play eight-man football rather than the nine-man format.
"Eight-man just feels right," Cobb said.
Dunten was among the Class 1A school officials who expressed their concerns during the OSAA committee's Jan. 5 meeting.
Two days later the committee announced that it supported continuing the eight-man format for Class 1A schools.
The six-man option, which has been in place for the past few years, would continue for the smallest schools or those that have too few players for eight-man competition. Baker County's three Class 1A schools — Pine Eagle, Huntington and Burnt River — already play six-man football.
The OSAA executive board has yet to approve the committee's revised recommendation. But it should be an easy choice.
Thanks to Dunten's efforts, the schools most directly affected by the committee's earlier proposal to do away with eight-man football have made explicit their feelings on the matter.
The committee acknowledged those schools' preferences, and the OSAA should make it official.
