This year, the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) football playoffs featured a bye, with the top-four seeds in each region taking off the first round.

When the bye was announced in June as part of the OHSAA’s change from a 16-team postseason to 12, coaches were mixed on the idea. And nearly five months later and after experiencing it for themselves, coaches remain iffy on a Week 11 bye.

“I don’t know [what to think of it],” Girard head coach Pat Pearson said. “I mean, I was always a big proponent of eight teams making the playoffs. I didn’t like when it went to 16 to begin with. It is what it is. I guess we don’t have much control over things. We kind of just take it as it is. But I think that the top eight was the right recipe in terms of postseason.”

For Pearson’s Indians, in particular, a week off would seem counterproductive, considering Girard went 10-0 and won the Northeast 8 Conference for the first time this season. As a result, the longtime Girard coach was admittedly “super nervous” about how his team would react to their winning rhythm being interrupted.

“As a player in high school, player in college, coach in college and then coach in high school the last 20 years, I’ve never had to deal with it,” Pearson said. “I was a little nervous, I think, going into it. How would we react? We were playing pretty well and at a pretty high level. I was worried about our kids’ focus. … When you’re dealing with 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids, you never know where their minds can go sometimes.”

On their off week, Pearson said his team put in three hours of work each on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with the hours being split evenly between offense, defense and strength training. Thursday was “a lot of conditioning and stretching” and more time in the weight room.

When it came to Friday, Pearson said the team dedicated the afternoon to conditioning on the field, then ate together and loaded up the bus for an hour-long drive to New Franklin, where the second-seeded Indians watched Manchester, their Division V regional quarterfinal opponent, beat Edison.

MOVING ON

Canfield, which went 9-1 and took a similar approach to the bye week, having secured the top seed in Division III’s Region 9.

The Cardinals, under second-year head coach Joe Ignazio, cut back on their time on the field in favor of more film study during the week before driving 50 miles to Chagrin Falls on Friday.

“We kept it as normal as possible,” Ignazio said. “The only change for us was, instead of playing Friday night, we went and scouted our potential matchup between Kenson and Madison. So we hit the road to watch, and then we had our guys in for a walkthrough Saturday morning. And we do yoga, so they had yoga and about an hour walkthrough on Saturday. We thought, you know, it’s an extra day for us. We could get a little bit of an advantage, so that’s what we did.”

Unlike Girard, though, Canfield’s regular season ended on a sour note.

After nine consecutive victories, the Cardinals’ perfect season was spoiled in Week 10 by Boardman, which converted a game-winning two-point conversion in overtime and, in effect, gave Ignazio’s team a lot to think about for two weeks.

“I see it’s made our kids hungry to get back on the field and play,” Ignazio said. “Obviously, there’s, I call them, positive things that you see on film that you want to get in and correct to make us a better football team. We certainly did that. But it’s like any other loss. You got to get over it. You can’t let it beat you two weeks in a row. You grow and you learn from it and move on.”

The most obvious benefit of the time off for all of the top-four seeds has been in terms of health, and Ignazio said that his team after the bye is “probably the healthiest [they have] been since around Week 2.”

BACK IN ACTION

Cardinal Mooney head coach Frank Colaprete said his team was fairly well-rested and healthy coming out of their bye week as well. But Mooney did not have just one week off; they had two.

Due to Ursuline, Mooney’s archrival and Week 10 opponent, canceling its season in September amid controversy, the Cardinals were left without their planned regular-season finale. Like many local teams with the Irish on their schedules, Mooney did not pick up another game in response, making its Oct. 17 road game vs. South Range the de facto end to the regular season.

With Mooney (7-2) earning the first seed in Division V’s Region 17, Colaprete’s team went without playing in either Week 10 or Week 11.

“Good and fairly nervous,” Colaprete said of his feelings of playing after the break. “Twenty-one days before the next game while others were still playing was concerning.”

An intrasquad scrimmage was not feasible, Colaprete said, on account of the team’s roster size, which had 47 players as of the preseason. Instead, Colaprete, who leaned on his extensive experience as a college coach, including 12 years as head coach of the College of Wooster, opted for a different and lighter approach.

The Week 10 break was about getting back to the basics, while the bye focused more on different game situations and competitions to excite the team during an admittedly tiresome gap between games.

“The second week, you get bored, you know what I mean? So that was rough. Just human nature … when you’re doing the same thing over and over again,” Colaprete said.

“We treated it more like the summer practices when there was no opponent, and we just needed to get better at our techniques or fundamentals. Didn’t have them out there too long, so that they could kind of get a mental break too and kind of heal up physically and mentally. That’s how I treated it. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, good or bad, but that’s what I’m choosing to do.”

In addition to the unusual layoff, Mooney also has to contend with playing the same team in back-to-back games.

With South Range’s 46-7 blowout win vs. Berkshire last Friday, the Cardinals will face the Raiders in a rematch. Mooney won the first meeting 38-30 three weeks ago.

“It makes it a little bit more difficult, the fact that it’s not somebody new,” Colaprete said. “You get young guys’ attention when you’re playing somebody different or somebody you haven’t played. It’s really hard to beat somebody twice, especially a talented team, a well-coached team, a disciplined team, a team that’s played great the last two weeks and getting better every week.”

Despite the challenges it has caused for him, however, Colaprete is not among the coaches calling for the bye week to be punted out of the OHSAA playoffs.

“I think it’s nice,” Colaprete said. “It’s a nice reward at the end of the season. You can get a chance to mentally and physically regroup before going into a gauntlet stretch.”