Madison have first place in Pod 2,
and the other four pods go to the last week

Madison will finish first in Pod 2 of the NOVA Flag Football Conference whatever happens in the last week of the regular season. They are nine wins and no losses with one game to come, and Oakton, who are second on six and two with two games left, cannot reach them.

Pod 2 is the first of the five pods to be settled. The other four all go to Tuesday November 3 and Wednesday November 4 with first place still live.

Alexandria City are eight and nil in Pod 4 and Wakefield on six and two can finish level with them. West Potomac are eight and nil in Pod 5 and Hayfield on seven and one can finish ahead of them. McLean are seven, nil and one in Pod 1 and Washington-Liberty on seven, one and one can finish ahead. Centreville lead Pod 3 on six, one and one, and Fairfax on five, one and two can finish ahead.

Finishing first in a pod is a playoff place. Mr. Adams sent the playoff bracket and a seeding projection on November 2, and they answer a question this page has carried since August. Ten schools qualify: the champion and the runner up from each of the five pods. Pod champions are seeded one through five and the runners up six through ten. Seeding runs on a point differential that counts at most nineteen points in a game, so a win earns up to nineteen, a tie gives both schools nothing, a loss costs up to nineteen, and a forfeit is nineteen to the winner and nineteen against the school that forfeits. Inside a pod, head to head settles the championship.

Mr. Adams writes that the seeding will change with the last week of games. He also writes that Madison will be the Pod 2 champion whatever happens in week six.

Week five

Twenty six games went on the evenings of Tuesday October 27 and Wednesday October 28. The results and the standings come from Dick Adams, the flag football commissioner at Fairfax County Public Schools, who sent them on October 29 and added to them on November 1. Twenty two of the twenty six carry a score. Pod 3 did not play on the Tuesday, and Pod 1, Pod 2 and Pod 4 did not play on the Wednesday.

Edison won for the first time this season, 32 to nil over Mount Vernon at Edison on the Wednesday, and the 32 is the most they have scored in a game. Their scores through the season are 6, nil, nil, 19, 6, nil, 6, 13 and 32.

Hayfield won twice on the same night and their 40 against Mount Vernon is their highest of the season, ahead of the 32 they scored twice on October 20. Washington-Liberty’s 35 against Langley is theirs, and Annandale’s 29 against Justice is theirs. Madison, McLean, Oakton and Wakefield also won twice in the week.

Woodson and Fairfax finished level at nil at Woodson. It is the sixth drawn game of the conference season and the second to finish without a point, and Fairfax played in both. The other was Fairfax and Lake Braddock in the opening week.

Three results carry no score

Three of the twenty six games were won by forfeit, and they are the first of the conference season. Madison beat Meridian at Westfield, and West Potomac and South County both beat Lewis at South County, all three on October 27. Mr. Adams’s results sheet records a winner for each and no score. One of Madison’s nine wins is the Westfield forfeit.

A forfeit counts in the tables below as a win for one school and a loss for the other, and the points columns carry nothing from the three. Mr. Adams wrote on October 29 that for his own purposes a forfeit is worth nineteen points to the winning team towards point differential, and that he is preparing an early look at playoff contenders in each pod and a ranking of the schools on point differential.

One point, then five

The conference has played one hundred and twenty two games with a score this season. Six finished level. Five were decided by a single point. Nothing has been decided by two, three or four points, and the closest games after the five are three decided by five.

Week five produced two of those five one point games, and both went on the same night at Herndon. Marshall beat Herndon 7 to 6 and Langley beat Yorktown 7 to 6. The other three are Woodson over West Springfield 7 to 6 on September 29, and Annandale over Justice 13 to 12 and Annandale over Falls Church 7 to 6, both on October 13.

Two things we had wrong, and the commissioner put us right

This issue went out on Saturday October 31 saying that Mr. Adams’s week five standings disagreed with the scores on his own results sheet, and that his Pod 5 table counted a game more than the pod had played. His figures were right and ours were wrong.

West Potomac played South County inside week five, rather than on November 3 where the schedule had the fixture, and Mr. Adams had counted that game in his standings. So West Potomac are nine and nil, South County are four, four and one, and the pod has played twenty six games rather than twenty five. No score has been published for that game and we have asked for one.

Pod 4’s five games at Annandale were played on Tuesday October 27, not Wednesday October 28. Annandale was hosting field hockey playoffs and the night moved.

Both of ours came from following the June schedule where it differed from his results sheet. He told us on November 1 and the tables below are his.

Loudoun

Lightridge are the first Loudoun County champions. No score has been published for the final, and it goes up when it lands.

What is coming

The NOVA Flag Football Conference finishes its regular season on Tuesday November 3 and Wednesday November 4, with twenty four games across the two nights. Games go at 6:00, 7:00 and 8:00, two or three of them back to back at one host school.

Pod 2, Pod 4 and Pod 5 play on the Tuesday. Pod 1 and Pod 3 play on the Wednesday. Madison’s last game is against Meridian. Alexandria City play Jefferson and Annandale, West Potomac play Hayfield, McLean play Langley and Herndon, and Centreville play Fairfax and Robinson.

The playoffs are on Wednesday November 11 at Hayfield and Falls Church, and on Saturday November 14 at Robinson Secondary School, where the final is at 12:30.

The pod tables after week five

These are computed from the scores of all one hundred and twenty two games that carry one, with a drawn game counting as half a win. A forfeit adds a win for one school and a loss for the other and no points to either, and so does the one game played without a published score. The four schools without a loss are marked.

The tables are sorted by winning percentage, then by wins, then alphabetically. That is our sort and not an official ranking. The conference has not published a standings order, so where two schools are level the alphabet does the work rather than anything that looks like a judgement.

Winning percentage leads because the schedule is uneven. Twelve schools have played nine games and eighteen have played eight. Every school plays ten, so what is left runs from one game to two.

The conference page carries all one hundred and twenty six games with the source behind each week.

Report a score

Anyone can send us a final. The form takes about half a minute and asks for the two schools, the score and how you know. Coaches and athletic directors can send a photograph of the scoresheet instead of typing anything. Everything goes up free, credited to whoever gave it to us, and if we get something wrong we correct it and say in print that we were wrong.

Earlier: Issue No. 9, Four schools have not lost a game · Issue No. 8, Three one-point games · Issue No. 7, Head to head, then a coin flip · Issue No. 6, Three unbeaten, and Monday · Issue No. 5, Twenty-two shutouts · Issue No. 4, Three left unbeaten · Issue No. 3, Five still unbeaten · Issue No. 2, All seventeen, on the field · Issue No. 1, The whole fall in one place.