Western A: compelling, mystifying

High school football’s regular season is winding down across Montana, and in this corner of the state, the second-highest classification has some explaining to do.

That’s because what used to be the Northwest A and Southwest A is now just, “The Western A,” playing an unbalanced schedule that has the league coaches and athletic directors consulting a four-page tie-breaker to decide which six teams make the postseason.

Add in the slight possibility that five teams could end up 4-4 in league games — Libby could wind up 5-4, though it needs to knock off unbeaten Dillon to do so — and you have quite the bottleneck for fifth and sixth.

What we do know: Dillon (7-0) and Corvallis (6-1) are in, as well as Hamilton (5-2) and Corvallis (5-2).

Polson (4-3), which plays a pretty banged-up Hamilton squad Friday, controls its own destiny. If the Pirates win, they (probably?) knock Bigfork out. Whitefish, which lost to Polson but beat Bigfork, could then sneak in.

There are a lot of ifs and maybes. The tie-breaker starts with head-to-head results, but then it gets into a lot of strength-of-schedule, good win-vs.-bad win, “party of the first part and party of the second part” stuff that we will leave out for obvious reasons.

“If there was a way to not set up a conference, and have the most convoluted playoff scenario?” Bigfork coach Jim Benn asked. “It has been achieved.”

Benn’s Vikings have a bye this week, another unhappy byproduct of a 13-team league. All they can do is practice as if they’re going to play — at Columbia Falls, possibly — next week. This week they’re Hamilton Bronc fans.

The Western A’s other Broncs appear to be on the outside looking in, after starting 0-3 against Columbia Falls, surging Corvallis and Dillon.

“Frenchtown could be having a sour taste,” Benn said, who added that Whitefish’s schedule — with Hamilton, Dillon, C-Falls (a win), Corvallis and Polson all on the docket — was most brutal.

First-year Bulldogs’ coach Brett Bollweg tends to agree, but also rues a 7-0 loss to Corvallis in September and an overtime loss to Polson last week.

“It’s just a lot of moving pieces,” said Bollweg, whose club has to beat Browning while getting help from Polson. “At the end of the day if we’d have taken care of ourselves we wouldn’t be having this conversation. One TD against Corvallis, a couple plays against Polson…”

The conference realignment was brought to the MHSA by the Class A athletic directors, and Whitefish’s Aric Harris is one of those ADs.

“Do I like it? No,” Harris said. “My personal opinion is have it northwest-southwest, top three teams in each conference go.”

While the idea was to get the best six Class A teams from each side of Montana — implying that the fourth-best team from the Southwest might be better than the third-best from the Northwest, or vice versa — traditional rivalries have been skipped.

Whitefish and Havre like to play a preseason game for a traveling BNSF Railway Trophy; that didn’t happen. Libby didn’t play its closest rival, Whitefish, and the Bulldogs didn’t play Ronan.

Out of this weirdness we will get six playoff teams, though it could take until Saturday morning to crunch all the numbers and get all other possibilities eliminated.

Fine. But all things considered, the coaches would like to learn it under the Friday Night Lights.

“You want it to be exciting like this,” Benn said. “But you also want to have it make some sense.”

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.