Editor's note: This opinion piece was submitted to the Journal Star before the last week of the IHSA football regular season.
High school football teaches the young men of the larger Peoria community great things. Perseverance, toughness, teamwork, belonging, discipline, strategy, consequences to actions, resilience, accountability, hard work, sportsmanship and commitment, to name a few.
We want our boys to learn these lessons, so that they can become the best men they can be. After working through the heat of each summer, fall means it is finally their time to thrill the crowd — from the brutality of a clean quarterback sack to the deep ball reception for a touchdown, crowds in Peoria roar with exhilaration every Friday night.
But as great as high school football can be, the Mid-Illini football conference is a travesty. It has an open secret. The conference’s three small schools with enrollments under 850 (Limestone, Canton, and East Peoria) have played the five bigger schools (Dunlap, Pekin, Washington, Metamora, and Morton) in 74 games over the last five seasons to date. Out of those 74 games, the small schools have won a grand total of zero games. Zero out of 74. The average point differential in those games over those five years is 48.0 to 8.4.
These contests within the conference are not football games. They are industrialized slaughter.
When Washington played Canton on Friday night, that record will have become zero out of 75 games (or something extraordinary will have happened).
This lopsidedness is not a new development. Expanding the observation to the last decade, the three small schools have had a grand total of only three wins out of 142 games against the bigger five schools. The 10-year average score is 45.3-10.0.
It’s hard to blame the coaches. Canton has a deep sports tradition. Limestone has a two-time state football championship coach. East Peoria has ex-college coaches from Eureka College completing their third year.
I’ve watched these games for many seasons. The boys from these smaller schools play for years telling themselves: maybe this year will be different; maybe this game will be different. I then watch as these boys from the small schools come off the football field at the end of their games, broken, beaten-up and shell-shocked. Their hope of a fair fight dashed, and they wonder what went wrong. What they did wrong.
But the fault is not in the boys. It’s in the system upheld by the adults. The enrollment distributions are enormous. Pekin’s (6A) official IHSA reported enrollment is 1,674. Canton’s (4A): 600. Dunlap’s (6A) enrollment is 1,471: East Peoria (4A): 822. Washington’s (5A) enrollment is 1,377: Limestone (4A): 834. Metamora (4A) reports 893 and Morton (5A) reports 1,056. The smaller three schools are usually playing teams 1.5 to 2.5 times their size.
Why does the line around 850 matter? Schools over 850 can usually attract enough athletes who only play one side of the ball. If your athlete is playing both offense and defense, they are exhausted by the second quarter. If your athlete plays only one side of the ball — only defense or only offense — they get constant breaks and can play at 100% speed the whole game. School size is a decisive advantage.
Metamora, with its deep football roots, has so many players come out that very few athletes play both offense and defense. They punch far above their enrollment. But they are the exception that proves the rule. There are not a lot of Metamoras out there.
Why don’t we see quite the disparity of win-loss records in other sports among these schools? The answer is football’s unique need for many athletes to be competitive. Basketball can compete with one or two ringers. Baseball or softball is competitive when they have one or two good pitchers. But football needs to cover 33 positions with its best athletes on offense, defense and special teams. Put simply: in football, bigger schools have disproportionate advantages over smaller schools relative to other sports.
No reasonable onlooker would ever suggest a 6A school should be playing an 8A school in the playoffs. If we have such a strong sense of fairness for the playoffs, why does that sense of fair play not extend to the regular season? Schools should be playing schools their own size. Exceptions should be rare, not the rule.
Problems with size disproportion
In the face of these odds, hats off to the small team coaches that have kept their teams from forfeiting. They continue to recruit kids like lambs to the slaughter because football is a good thing to experience, despite a stacked deck. But as the years go by and the divide becomes more cemented, how are these smaller programs going to attract and retain even minimally competent coaches? How will they attract players trapped in a hopeless conference situation? Will families of current junior high and elementary schools from the small school towns want to send their kids into this buzzsaw?
Hats off also to the players that persevere, even as their hearts are broken and their cynicism grows. I recall a September 2023 article about a 14-year-old Canton freshmen who got a “small brain bleed” after playing up to a JV game. Playing older kids will continue to have an impact on injuries. The smaller schools by definition will have a lot more 14- and 15 year-olds playing varsity against the 17- and 18 year-olds of bigger schools. You can’t tell me their bodies are ready for that.
A further ugly undercurrent to conference misalignment is that fact that the three smaller schools with a 0-75 record are also the three lowest income areas in the Mid-Illini. This difference in socio-economic status means fewer opportunities overall for young athletes such as access to individual specialty coaching, transportation, etc. Some of these kids overcome serious obstacles just to show up for practice. The wealth gap exacerbates the enrollment size differences.
Districts proposal
There have been statewide proposals to address the inequities the Mid-Illini conference exhibits: Districts. Moving to a district model would put all schools into a conference based strictly on school size, leveling the playing field.
Districts are widely used in other states. It is a no-brainer for fair play. But in Illinois, entrenched powers vote self-interest over fairness. If you’re a big school in a conference with small schools, you don’t want to give up those automatic wins. You’ll call those mis-matched games “rivalries” and you’ll “hate to break from tradition.” The districts model was voted down by IHSA high schools most recently in 2018 and 2023 by relatively thin margins.
In November 2023, the PJ Star quoted a local big school coach regarding changing from conferences to a district model: “'We are against the proposal for various reasons’ … noting the proposal doesn't benefit them, ‘but the biggest issue is that we'd hate to see the Mid-Illini Conference (for football) disbanded. The atmosphere for our kids and community each Friday is electric.’" Perhaps the reason the atmosphere for their kids in the Mid-Illini is electric is because they can count on pulverizing three small schools per season and padding their wins. Maybe you can’t fault him though, as his school’s fight song is entitled “Loyalty” and not “Justice for All.”
More: What Peoria-area high school football coaches are saying about the potential change to districts
Breaking away
If the big schools are not going to be an ally to the small schools in seeking an equitable resolution, the only conceivable solution for the small schools is to take matters into their own hands. If Canton, Limestone, and East Peoria break away, they can and should start their own conference. There are more than two dozen conferences in Illinois with five or fewer schools. Several more dozen with only six schools. Perhaps they can find an interested school like Lincoln (732), IVC (593), Streator (721), Manual (697) or Pontiac (587). Perhaps they invite Metamora and/or Morton — at least the enrollment in those schools is more reasonable and not a two-to-three conference size differential.
What would happen to Washington, Dunlap, and Pekin if the other schools leave? The Big 12 would have no problem picking them up. These schools would finally be playing a full schedule that matches their enrollment. It might even prepare them better for playoffs since they will not be spending half their season playing down.
What about the potential for some increased travel? Travel is not an insubstantial consideration to weigh, but it should never trump providing young men and women fair and equitable competition. The Illinois high school closest to Soldier Field doesn’t play the Chicago Bears just because they’re the closest team and it will save on gas.
What about non-football sports? It is hard to argue that these programs will not be benefitted by equitably playing schools their size.
The decision makers on conference alignment are the athletics directors, the superintendents and the school boards of the various schools. Families in East Peoria, Bartonville and Canton that see the futility of staying in the Mid-Illini Conference would need to encourage their administrators and board members to get out of the conference and start fresh. If they don’t, we can all expect a year from now that the three small schools will have grown their record from 0-75 this year to 0-90 next year. That would be a disservice to those young men.
Bill Bailey is an East Peoria resident and Bradley University professor.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Mid-Illini Conference football is broken. Here is how it can be fixed | Opinion