TERRY COLUMN: Getting the bad side of bye weeks

Class AA football is seeing a shift in its schedule for the first time in more than a decade.

The top division in Montana hasn’t seen a drastic change to its schedules since 2007, the year Glacier High School fielded its first football team. With the addition making a 14-team league, the state switched to a 10-game schedule in Class AA that season. Nine games were played against Class AA opponents from 1986-2006.

This year’s change comes from subtraction instead of addition, and from one of the state’s oldest schools. Missoula Hellgate, in an attempt to regain confidence and roster strength in a program that had lost 33 straight games over the course of four years, announced in July it would shutter its football program for the 2016 season. The late notice meant that all 10 teams on the Knights schedule would only play nine games this season.

Officially, the games against Hellgate go in the books as forfeits, a 14-0 victory to account for the most possible points awarded towards tiebreakers at the end of the season.

Unofficially, they’re bye weeks, giving all but three schools an extra week of rest and preparation in a usually hectic schedule.

Early in the season, Glacier is on the other side of those bye weeks: playing a pair of schools in the next two weeks that have two weeks to prepare for the Wolfpack.

The first is defending state champ Bozeman, which will now open its season at home against Glacier on Friday. Under a new head coach and with a lot of roster turnover from last season, what the Hawks will actually look like is a bit of a mystery to Glacier.

A week after that, perennial power Helena Capital will come off two weeks rest to play Glacier in the Wolfpack’s first home game of the season.

It’s a quirk of the schedule that Glacier head coach Grady Bennett and his coaching staff are folding into their gameplan over the next few weeks.

“While it is a big deal, it’s probably not as big as it could be,” Bennett said.

“Bozeman hasn’t played yet, so they’re going to have a lot of kids that are just getting their first action. We have (played one week), I feel like we can use that to our advantage.

“With Capital only playing one game and us having two really tough opponents, we need to turn that into an advantage instead of having it go the other way.”

On the bright side, Glacier will get its own bye week right in the middle of the season in Week 5.

Flathead will also get a mid-season break, with a bye in Week 6.

However, the Braves catch the bad end of a bye in the most pivotal time of the season. Missoula Sentinel gets a bye in Week 9, one week before the regular season finale against Flathead, a game that could have playoff seeding implications.

While the scheduling works out poorly for Flathead, Butte gets the shortest end of the stick this season. The Bulldogs host two teams that will get an extra week of prep — in Week 7 against Flathead and Week 9 against Helena High — and get no break to show for it with Hellgate off the schedule for the next few years. The Great Falls schools also will play all 10 games.

On the other side of that, Billings Senior is likely to get the biggest benefit from the Knights absence. The Broncs, a favorite to win the state title this season, get the final week of the season off to potentially prepare for the playoffs. If things go wrong, however, their season would end short.

“I feel bad for the kids,” Bennett said. “Football is so time consuming and you only get 10 games, then hopefully you make the playoffs. It’s tough to not get to play that many games and then have one taken away.”

For his part, Bennett said he plans on using the extra time to rest and let players loosen up in a normally stressful part of the year.

“For us it’s perfect,” Bennett said. “It’s right mid-season, we get a break and can try to get healthy if we need to. And really try to plan something fun with the guys that week. Do some team building or something that you couldn’t do normally.”

The scheduling quirk could extend to next year. The Montana High School Association rules would typically force a team that forfeits more than a third of its schedule to play a junior varsity season the next year, though Hellgate can reapply to play a varsity schedule in 2017.

If Hellgate does have to sit out one more season, some of those schools, especially in the first few weeks, could find outside competition to fill the hole in the schedule. More than likely, it won’t have as big of an affect on the season.

The next scheduling change isn’t likely until 2020, when Bozeman is scheduled to open a second high school.

By then, the quirks and wrinkles in the scheduling process should be able to be ironed out ahead of time.