Leading off today: Tim Paske's suspension has been cut to a single game less than 72 hours after the school district superintendent said the Greene football coach was done for the year.
Paske will resume his coaching duties Monday as Greene prepares for its regular-season finale vs. Whitney Point, the Press & Sun-Bulletin reported.
Paske on Tuesday was suspended in what Superintendent Jonathan Retz said was “a personnel issue” on which he declined to elaborate. It was widely reported that Paske, in his 10th season in charge, was disciplined for not insisting that his players participate in the homecoming parade last weekend just hours before kickoff. Public sentiment was overwhelmingly in support of the coach.
“Following several meetings and meaningful discussions, the Greene Central School District and its Varsity Football Coach, Tim Paske have reached an understanding regarding an ongoing personnel issue," the district announced in a release Friday signed by Retz and Paske. "Mr. Paske will resume his head coaching responsibilities Monday, October 15. Please respect that this issue has been resolved and allow the Greene Football Team to focus on the remainder of their season.”
Friction over fractions: Once or twice a month, the New York State Sportswriters Association email inbox receives a note from someone unhappy with othe way we have a team ranked -- or unranked -- in a particular sport and class.
Some of these emails are out-and-out nastygrams while others are more civil in tone. One frequent common demoninator, though, is the observation that rankings during the season are meaningless because the tournament at the end of the season is what actually settles matters.
I'll quibble with that somewhat because at the very least the regular-season rankings keep the conversation going at times when there might not be a heck of a lot else going on. In general, though, the sentiment is factual because the sectional, state and Federation tournaments will sort out some of the drama.
However, there are regular-season numbers that sometimes defy explanation and can determine whether a team even gets the opportunity to prove itself in the postseason. In Section 1 football, those numbers are known as the Piner System.
To the uninitiated, many leagues across the country use the Piner System to determine standings -- and therefore playoff seedings -- when simple head-to-head criteria doesn't work. That's especially true in situations like Section 1, where more than a dozen teams are lumped into one division, making it impossible for teams to anyone to play everyone.
Step one is to rank teams best-to-worst before the season in order to slot them into pre-formatted schedules, the idea being that good teams don't feast on pushovers but also don't get handed a schedule so tough that they struggle to reach .500 while a mediocre team runs the table against inferior competition.
Points are added/subtracted based on the winning percentage of teams you beat or lose to. That in itself isn't bad, but it plunges the participants -- the players, coaches and fans -- into the world of decimal points. That becomes a bit more intimidating than sorting out full points (and the
