Nevada Bill Would Ban School From State Playoffs -- Because It's Too Good

Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas is a national-level sports power, particularly in football, so much so that in 2012 the organization overseeing Nevada high school sports considered banning it from the state playoffs. That idea died, but the sentiment behind it hasn't.

From the Reno Gazette Journal:

Few followers of Nevada prep sports are neutral when it comes to the Las Vegas-based Catholic school, which has enjoyed unprecedented success on the playing field for the last decade or so.

Detractors claim Bishop Gorman recruits athletes and enjoys an unfair advantage with its state-of-the-art facilities and its many deep-pockets boosters. Supporters say the school has hard-working athletes who are well-coached and provided with opportunities to succeed.

Usually, it's just rhetoric from both sides. But the Gorman debate reached a new level last month when a state legislator, Assemblyman Harvey Munford, D-Las Vegas, said he planned to introduce what would be essentially a "ban Gorman" bill at the 2015 Nevada Legislature, which convenes Feb. 2.

Gorman's football team has won six out of the last seven big-school Nevada titles, and it hasn't lost to a team from the state since 2008. Under coach Tony Sanchez, who just resigned to take the head football coaching job at UNLV, the school has played a national football schedule befitting a college team, and it's attracted transfers from well beyond Las Vegas -- one notable transfer for 2014 was Cordell Broadus, one of the top uncommitted wide receivers in the class of 2015, who moved in from Los Angeles to take advantage of the better competition and coaching. Broadus was notable also because his father is Snoop Dogg, er, Lion. (Broadus isn't the only celebrity kid. Muhammad Ali's grandson also plays for Gorman.)

Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, a Republican who also serves as a volunteer assistant for his son's high school football team, says he doesn't support banning Gorman from the state playoffs. He told the Reno Gazette-Journal:

"What I want to do, I want to beat Gorman," Hutchison said after Gov. Brian Sandoval's State of the State speech. "That's what I want to do. I want to have the best football team in the country (Gorman) play Palo Verde. And as a coach, I want to get my athletes ready to the point where we can beat 'em."

Then Coach Hutch threw down a bold prediction.

"The days of Gorman's dominance are over," Coach Hutch said. "We're going to work our athletes, we are going to prepare them for next season and we are going to beat Gorman."

I appreciate Hutchison's competitive streak, and his not coming right out and saying the "ban Gorman" bill one more everybody-gets-a-trophy sign of how we're making our kids soft. However, his team lost to Gorman 49-0 in 2014, which Gorman followed by a playoff run with final scores of 63-0, 52-7, 56-6, 50-0 and in the championship, 70-28. There's no question that at least in football, Gorman has established itself as way too good for its Nevada competition. Hutchison is fooling himself, and if he's lucky, fooling the players he coaches.

That's not to say this bill will pass, or should. But it's indicative of the frustration in many states over schools that have cornered the market on championships, and how the advent of school choice has made banning sports-related transfers a thing of the past. Bishop Gorman, by design, is not on an equal playing field with the rest of the schools in Nevada. The question may not be whether to ban Gorman from the state playoffs. The question is, why does the school bother with them at all?