Football2002, thank you for your response but respectfully disagree that I made a point for 3 11-man classifications within Class C. I think there are bigger issues that can be solved and options that need to be considered than adding a class and trophy. Let me take a stab at further explaining.
In my part of the woods, two years ago Homer fortified a good portion of their season. This year Laurel/Concord/Coleridge did the same thing. I'm guessing there were others that struggled with numbers but were able to continue but not at a competitive balance. For the schools that struggle with low numbers another classification of 11-man doesn't help them.
From a competitive balance stand point I feel that increasing the 8-man cutoff could help. Consider that 26% of D-1 schools this year were over the enrollment limit. If these schools all stayed in 11-man, C-1 would have had 54 schools and C-2 55 schools. 25% of these 55 C-2 schools elected to play 8-man and 15% of these elected to play 8-man knowing that they have no chance of playing in the postseason.
For the sake of argument let's use a cutoff of 94. (8 D-1 schools actually have an enrollment of 94 or higher this year, 17 C-2 schools have an enrollment of 94 or less). With this cutoff there would have been 39 schools in both C-1 and C-2 with an enrollment of 136 being the cutoff between the two. The current enrollment cutoff is 123. With 16 making the playoffs in each class 41% of the schools would get their t-shirts.
Now back to 8-man. With the 17 schools added from C-2, D-1 would have 62 schools and D-2 would have 63 schools which was pretty common just a few years ago. The enrollment cutoff would be 62 instead of the current 61, virtually unchanging the size of enrollments within D-1 and D-2. With 32 schools making the playoffs in each class just over 50% would get their t-shirts, less than the current 60%.
Doing this I think accomplishes a few things. First, it gives C1 and C2 a higher % of schools in the playoffs but not at an absurd amount that the current system would with 32 teams or a 3 system Class C would with 16 playoff teams in each of those 3 classes. This seems to be what you want to have accomplished Football2002. Second, it levels the field in D-1 to a degree. No schools added would have higher enrollments than schools that are currently competing. Third, the playoff situation in D1 and D2 gets a little more balanced out hopefully getting the schools with 2-6 and 3-5 records out. It can be debated if the 5-3 or even 4-4 schools should have a shot at the playoffs but I think most people agree that 2-6 or 3-5 is just not necessary.
Some of my other thoughts were; if a team wanted to elect up to play in C-2 then let them. This would be very important as I'm sure there would be a good amount that would. Giving them the ability to move up makes more sense than punishing a team that goes down, especially if that team, ala Laurel this year, really needs to be in D-1 anyway. Also, by expanding D1 and D2, some of the schools that have really struggled to compete may choose the 6-man route, which would strengthen their numbers. Again, I'm assuming here, but I'm guessing there are quite a few D-2 schools that had issues with having enough kids and could have benefited from playing with 2 less kids.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on "competitive balance". Feel free to dissect this and tell me why I'm right or wrong, just please provide your logic. That's what makes the board good. All right, time for bed!