The La Center Wildcats are headed to the postseason for football this season.
Nothing new there.
The COVID year of 2020-21 notwithstanding, the Wildcats have reached the postseason in football every year since head coach John Lambert first led La Center there in 2001.
For most of those years, Week 10 of the high school season meant a district playoff game for the Wildcats.
For years, the way state playoff berths are determined worked like this: the WIAA allocates berths to each district in the state, then teams in those districts play off for those berths.
Over the past two decades Week 10 meant La Center had a district playoff game against teams like Elma (six times), Forks (three), Hoquiam (twice), Montesano (twice) and Tenino (twice), among others.
But this year, the state coaches association lobbied for and won a change to Week 10.
This year, every district in the state would toss its state berths into a statewide pool. Then in Week 10, 32 teams from across the state — or 24 in Class 2A — would be matched up against each other, meaning the Wildcats could face a team from anywhere in the state.
So it came as a bit of a surprise that when Week 10 state preliminary pairings were announced Sunday, La Center learned that in Week 10 it would play … Elma.
It may not be an exciting pairing, but it could be very good news to La Center fans, particularly after the Wildcats had their 30-game Trico League winning streak snapped in a 29-21 loss to Seton Catholic on Friday.
For starters, Elma will bring a 4-5 record into its matchup Friday night against La Center at Kalama High School. The Eagles finished the regular season with a 45-0 loss to Montesano, a team La Center pounded 35-7 in the first week of the season.
So it’s safe to say that La Center would be heavily favored to win this weekend if any of those neighboring casinos in La Center took bets on high school football games. (Thankfully, they do not.)
The big question is when will La Center’s next game be should the Wildcats triumph this week? Next week in the first round of state? Two weeks from now in the quarterfinals?
The Class 1A state football playoffs are just a 12-team bracket. That means the teams seeded in the top 4 by the seeding committee on Sunday will receive a first-round bye into the quarterfinals.
Seton Catholic (9-0) is very well positioned to get one of those byes after beating La Center on Friday. Another bye is expected to go to four-time defending state champion Royal (9-0).
As far as the remaining two first-round byes are concerned, La Center (8-1) appears to be in a group of contenders that includes Cashmere (8-1), Life Christian (7-1) and Nooksack Valley (6-2).
The committees that set this weekend’s matchups are the same committees that will seed the state-playoff brackets on Sunday.
It is also important to note that teams were not seeded for this weekend’s games. The committee’s job was just to find reasonable matchups.
But it is interesting to note that there are only a handful of teams in this weekend’s 1A matchups that have non-winning records. And those teams are matched up against Royal, Seton Catholic, La Center and Nooksack Valley.
The committees will use results from these Week 10 games to help them decide on final state seeding. These Week 10 games can be very revealing. In many cases, teams will be playing their first games against a team from outside of their general geographic area.
These games can tell us a lot about which leagues are strong and which are not.
Don’t be fooled by win-loss records. One team’s 7-2 record may not be as good as another’s 5-4 mark.
But by pairing La Center against Elma, what does the committee hope to learn about the Wildcats that it doesn’t already know?
It could indicate that the Wildcats remain in good position to earn a top-4 seed. If La Center earns a No. 3 seed and Seton Catholic a No. 2 seed, those two teams would be in position to possibly meet in the state semifinals.
Now, I can already hear Coach Lambert saying that’s looking way too far down the road.
Perhaps. La Center has not won a state playoff game since reaching the state semifinals in 2017, so first things first.
And we may be reading way too much into these Week 10 matchups. But what else are we supposed to do between now and when the games kick off this weekend?
