The issue of reducing individual competitors is dicey because the NYSPHSAA's fear of litigation is not unfounded.

   I mostly like the proposal the wrestling coaches put forth last year to create regional qualifiers for the state tournament as a way of smoothing out the allocation of berths across the 11 sections (plus the PSAL and CHSAA), but let's be realistic. The idea would have never gotten out of the starting gate had one coach not bent the ear of state Assemblyman Joe Morelle from the Rochester area.

   Morelle huffed and puffed and essentially threatened the NYSPHSAA with legislation that would have forced a change had the organization not allowed the wrestling committee to recommend changes to the current "at-large" system.

   The good news for the NYSPHSAA is that Morelle is hip-deep in bigger problems these days. Aside from the $15 billion hole that elected officials in Albany need to fill in (but probably won't) by the April budget deadline, Morelle faces political challenges at home. As chairman of the Monroe County Democratic Party, he game-planned a strategy in which the party refused to put forward a candidate to take on a well-funded but flawed incumbent county executive and instead put all of its resources into winning control of the county legislature.

   It didn't work, costing Morelle clout locally, where he already was playing third fiddle within the party.

The final two

   That leaves us with two proposals, fairly closely related and definitely not no-brainers.

   It's fairly certain that rules on scrimmages will be revised to a maximum of one per modified team and two apiece for the higher levels. Personally, I think there

should be at least two scrimmages across the board. But I also think that coaching can compensate for lost opportunities in these "non-game games."

   The same cannot be said for the proposed changes to the regular season. Sports with 24-game maximums would be reduced to 20; those with 20 would drop to 18; ones with a max of 18 would drop to 16. Wrestling would undergo a corresponding drop, varsity football would lose one game and all sub-varsity programs would lose two games.

   The current maximum length of the football season is 13 games, which feels right for a snowbelt state with only one domed facility even marginally larger than a tennis bubble.

   I suspect that some people came to their senses after the original proposal took shape and realized that condemning a large number of schools to a seven-game local football season is not right athletically or financially. I would go so far as to label such a cut as unconscionable.

   But I also suspect that these same delegates will be reluctant to spare football at the same time that cuts to the other schedules seem to have enough support to be approved.

   Albany-area coordinator Gary VanDerzee posted a note of the Section2football.com Web site to the effect that a typical Class B school will save perhaps only $10,000 from a blanket reduction in the number of games. That brings us back to "deck chairs on the Queen Mary" territory, because $10,000 for a school district facing a seven-figure deficit isn't going to get the job done.

   Hacking up schedules might fool taxpayers into thinking that meaningful progress is being made, but it's far from the truth. It's a 1 percent solution to a $1 million problem inside a $15 billion crisis. We can only hope that ex-Gov. Brown's words are heeded this week, because there aren't any Ernie Shores out there to save the day.

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