home field advantage

Well the past 24 hours have been full of anticipation. We've been awaiting scores from around the state from football games last night and then the brackets to come out this morning. Saratoga tied for the conference championship, but it was a 3-way tie. We won against Pine Bluffs on Thursday so we were hoping for a Sundance loss to guarantee a home game in the first round of playoffs next week. Didn't happen that way- despite the 50 mph winds in Burns Friday afternoon, Sundance won. Hence the 3-way tie. We were all thinking we'd have to go to Riverside (Basin) next week, but then this morning we learned that we might be wrong about how the tie-breaker works. We thought the criteria might apply to all three teams, but then heard that they might just use the tie-breaker to figure out who would be seeded #1 in the conference, and then the tie-breaker would start over for the other two teams: Sundance and Saratoga. That would give us a home game. This is what we read on Sports Goulash:

Lusk, Sundance and Saratoga are all tied for first, and we know that Lusk wins that tiebreaker on the third criteria — strength of schedule. From there, we’re not exactly sure if the criteria starts over between Sundance and Saratoga or not. If so, Saratoga wins the tie with Sundance because of the head-to-head win. If not, Sundance wins the tie by having a higher strength of schedule than Saratoga.Our first projection had Sundance as the (3) and Saratoga as the (5). We’ve since changed that to reflect Saratoga as (3) and Sundance as (5). Sorry about the confusion.

So we waited all day for the news, and finally the brackets were posted. We get a home game! WHOO-HOO!!!!!!!! Josh spent the next hour on the phone. :) We are hosting Tongue River Friday afternoon. Wear your purple that day!!

Here are the 2A brackets for anyone interested... http://www.whsaa.org/stateevents/football/2a/bracket.asp