The best thing that can be said about the 2009 WIAA football playoffs is that we'll never again see them in their existing form.

Those pounding sounds you heard Friday were the final nails being driven into that coffin. While the selection of the 224 teams in this year's postseason field couldn't have gone more smoothly -- there were exactly 224 teams with .500 conference records or better around the state -- the process of assigning them to first-round games has never been so bungled.

We know this because the WIAA gambled its schools would recognize a tentative playoff bracket (e-mailed solely for their review) and resist the temptation to forward it to every Tom, Dick and Harry -- not their real names, but they know who they are -- with a high school sports Web site.

Unfortunately for staffers at the WIAA, they got burned. They learned the hard way what happens when immediacy meets irresponsibility and, thanks to the indiscretions of a few of those renegade Web sites, they are still defending the gaffes in the brackets -- both before and after changes were made.

If there was anything positive gleaned from the debacle that was Friday's pairings release, it was we were given a window on the world of this flawed process of determining the WIAA playoff brackets, not to mention more conclusive evidence it's time to ratify the WIAA's district plan that automates much of the process.

For example, we got to see for ourselves just how badly the process treated Cuba City -- the designated champion of the Southwest Wisconsin Activities League. The Cubans went from being a No. 4 seed with a home game against Palmyra-Eagle -- a beatable opponent with a sub-.500 playoff history -- to having to hit the road to play Lancaster, a program that is 30-4 in the postseason with five state titles since 2000.

And, as multiple people have told me, it happened because Cuba City challenged the seeds as they were assigned in the initial bracket. They felt they deserved the No. 3 seed ahead of Southern Capitol Conference co-champion Waterloo, which (like Cuba City) shared its conference title with two other schools, but (unlike Cuba City) did not win its conference tie-breaker for the highest playoff seed.

As it turns out, neither team got a seed. After a review of the Division 5 brackets, the final version came out with the No. 3 seed awarded to Darlington and the No. 4 seed going to Iowa-Grant -- teams that, in the eyes of the SWAL at least, finished behind Cuba City.

At this point, it doesn't really matter how the 11 criteria for "seeding" were used to establish that particular bracket. One game will pit two designated conference champions; the other three will not.

What is important, moving forward, is that the three pages of WIAA football playoff criteria and procedures find their way to the shredder by the time we convene to go through this process next year.

We've come a long way since last year, when I stated in this space on the eve of the playoffs that the WIAA should assign the 433 football schools into conferences of equal size. WIAA associate director Deb Hauser and WIAA deputy director Wade Labecki took it one step further last summer when they came up with their district idea that assigned teams to divisions based on enrollment first and then created districts.

If that were to receive the blessing of the WIAA Board of Control -- and it could happen as early as December -- something wonderful would happen to most of the administrative nightmares of the existing playoff process. In the words of one WIAA Board of Control member: "They would all go away."

If it doesn't pass, many fans will continue to look at the current system as the BCS of prep football. In fact, a few of them might not need three letters to draw their comparison.

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