I can't stand it when schools use their lack of ability to get kids out as an excuse for "moving the goal posts" on this stuff. If you are playoff ineligible you need to take a good hard look at why you don't get the kids out to play 11 man. Maybe you need to rework your youth program (that is where it all starts), get serious about why the kids in your school don't go out (socio-economic, bad youth experience, losing culture and tradition, lazy kids pulling others along with them). Work on fixing that stuff and building a team and culture kids can be proud of and want to be a part of and it will fix itself. Constantly wanting to change the rules to accommodate mediocrity kind of goes against what we want our kids to get from playing sports right? Its taking the easy way out. To me the whole goal of sports is to teach hard work, discipline, teamwork, pushing yourself beyond your limit, etc. I definitely get you want the kids to have a great HS experience but the adults in this conversation need to pick up some of the slack and accept that they may be part of the problem.