Illinois high school basketball playoffs are not always fair. Here are 5 reasons why

No. 9 state-ranked Lutheran beating No. 2 Orangeville in a Class 1A regional final Thursday should have ranked with defending Class 2A state runner-up Byron losing Friday to Woodstock Marian in double-overtime after three buzzer beaters as Rockford’s girls basketball game of the year.

Instead, it illustrated why Illinois high school basketball can be a frustrating playoff sport.

Let's take a look at five reasons why.

The wrong team had home court

Orangeville was the top seed in the regional. Lutheran was No. 4. But Orangeville had to drive 42 miles to play on the lower seed’s home court.

More: Check out the girls basketball power rankings for Rockford teams as playoffs begin

“We love our home,” Lutheran coach Joni Carlson said. “The fans are right on top. We’re comfortable here. We know our surroundings. When it comes down to pressure and handling the ball, this is where we want to be.”

Incentives to alter seeding

Roughly half the schools in Class 4A and 3A are seeded 1 to 18 for the whole sectional. In 1A and 2A, for distance reasons, they are split in half and seeded as sub-sectionals. This keeps the top two seeds away from each other until the sectional finals. And it prevents one regional from having four or five 20-win teams.

“This is the format coaches fought for several years ago,” said Matt Troha, an IHSA assistant executive director.

Not quite. They wanted to seed the entire sectional. They settled for this. But the IHSA continues to cling to having as little travel as possible, so only the No. 1 and No. 4 seeds in one regional and No. 2 and No. 3 seeds in the other are separated. Every other team goes to its nearest regional site. So Orangeville went to Lutheran even though Dakota Regional participants Aquin, South Beloit and Durand were all closer to that site than Orangeville.

More: Rockford-area boys basketball playoff schedule and results, updated daily

Coaches at the Dakota Regional knew that if Lutheran was seeded No. 4, Orangeville would go there and the only two state-ranked teams would be away from Aquin (24-6), Pecatonica (25-7) and Lena-Winslow (22-10).

Troha said they “have a system that flags all outlier votes” and votes that try to manipulate the system would be tossed out. That didn’t happen here. All four teams involved had been state-ranked at one point. But Lutheran (25-8) clearly looked more dangerous, having played larger schools all year and having home-court advantage for regionals.

“If you had any basketball IQ, you would know that Lutheran is not a No. 4 seed,” Orangeville coach Jay Doyle said. “The answer is to do it like Wisconsin, where the higher seed has the home court until the sectional championship. We go 30-2 and we have to play in their gym.”

Seeding too soon

Lutheran would also not have been a No. 4 seed if coaches had voted a week later — after Lutheran beat Class 3A No. 2 seed Boylan by 15 points. But that was only four days before regionals began. The IHSA's Troha said athletic directors want early seeding for logistics reasons and coaches want it later to be more accurate. "We moved them back a few times in the last few years and are probably just about as late as we can be with those," Troha said.

Multiplier removed

Lutheran has won 10 regional titles since 2008, six of them in Class 3A and three in 2A. This is the school’s first-ever basketball season in 1A. That’s because the IHSA took all the teeth out of its 1.65 attendance multiplier. Private schools now only multiply their enrollment if they reach state in one of the previous two years, or win at least a regional and a sectional title in back-to-back years. There is no more multiplier for the vast majority of private school teams. Byron’s loss was also to a private school getting a waiver from the multiplier.

More: Playoff schedules and results for all Rockford-area girls basketball teams, updated daily

Orangeville, even though it is 85-13 in the last three years, has one regional title in 25 years. It doesn’t seem right the Broncos had to play a private school with a 2A pedigree. Their coach doesn’t see it that way. He just disagrees with how early they played and where they played.

“I don’t care about the divider,” Doyle said. “Rockford Lutheran, I will play them any time. I would rather lose to a program like that than somebody I beat twice during the season.”

Best players may not finish

Boys are bigger and handle contact better. That means more touch fouls are called in the girls game. Which leads to players trying to draw those fouls. The result: star players in girls basketball foul out far more often than in the boys game.

Many teams play zone defense, which makes it easier to officiate, but Lutheran switched to an aggressive man defense this game. It worked so well the Crusaders held Orangeville to 5-for-37 shooting the first three quarters. Orangeville guards resorted to driving into crowds and hoping for foul calls. Lutheran sometimes did the same.

The refs did a good job, but there’s always going to be debatable calls that way. Two or three of them went against Orangeville’s 6-foot-3 Tulsa recruit Whitney Sullivan. The Broncos had only five fouls at halftime, but she had three in the first 12 minutes. She, as well as Lutheran’s top two players, eventually fouled out. On two of her fouls, she didn’t even challenge a shot. Standing still with both arms in the air and still getting whistled is a foul you see only in the girls game, when the refs determine the arms weren’t straight enough in the air or the defender moved an arm or their feet at the last second.

“We got a lot of fouls where we’re standing there and their girls are driving and dive in and throw the ball up,” Doyle said. “When the refs come over to talk to me I say, ‘What do you want her to do? She’s standing there and going straight up.’ The ref will say, ‘She came down.’ ‘Yeah, because she took a shoulder to the chest.

“I don’t know,” Doyle said, “what you want a girl to do when she’s standing there.”

Even Lutheran star Soraya Parker left the game in tears. Her team was up by 10, but she fouled out with over six minutes to play and was completely distraught, pulling her jersey over her face.

"That was all passion out of Soraya," Lutheran coach Carlson said. "This is her life to play basketball. To not be out there with her team for the last six minutes was devastating."

And that was for the winner. Imagine not seeing Michael Jordan or LeBron James on the court while a title hung in the balance. That never happens in the NBA. It is one of many things that happen too often in the IHSA girls basketball playoffs.

Contact: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com, @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City.

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: IHSA basketball playoffs not always fair. Here are 5 reasons why