For decades, a common complaint among area high school football players, coaches and fans was the length of the regular season and the format of the Section III playoffs. They believed that seven games wasn’t long enough, and that, especially in the large-school classes where there were fewer teams, it was too easy to get into the playoffs.
These critics will find plenty to like about the changes in Class AA football for the 2020 season, with three-time defending champion Cicero-North Syracuse, Liverpool and Baldwinsville all affected by the new format.
Instead of seven games, now there’s nine, along with a full round-robin league schedule. And once it’s done, just four teams go into the playoffs, with semifinals Nov. 6-7 and the title game a weekend later under the new roof at the Carrier Dome.
Pooling Class AA into a single nine-team league was made possible when Fayetteville-Manlius and Christian Brothers Academy moved to Class A. And the longer regular season does not apply to any of the other classes, who will either have eight games (Class A and eight-man), or remain at seven, as Class B, C and D did, along with a group of Independent teams.
So now C-NS, Liverpool and B’ville are lined up with three Syracuse city schools – Corcoran, Henninger and Nottingham – along with West Genesee, Utica Proctor and Rome Free Academy.
The season opens on Sept. 4 as C-NS, going after a fourth straight sectional championship, hosts Corcoran at Bragman Stadium, while B’ville meets Henninger at Pelcher-Arcaro Stadium and Liverpool visits Proctor a day later.
One non-league game is slotted for each team. The Bees have it first, meeting Horseheads on Sept. 12, while C-NS has an Oct. 2 rematch with the Corning team it beat in last November’s regional finals and Liverpool also faces Corning two weeks later.
All the local rivalries are guaranteed to happen, too. The C-NS-Liverpool “Star Wars Cup” game is Oct. 9 at LHS Stadium, given even more weight by the Northstars’ come-from-behind win over the Warriors in the 2019 sectional semifinals.
B’ville faces Liverpool first, on Sept. 25, and doesn’t deal with C-NS until the Oct. 30 regular-season finale.
