The Hockomock League football race, which has been dominated by three schools for almost a generation, has as many as five schools in a position to contend for this year's title at the halfway point of the season.

The South Coast Conference race is practically unpredictable, with four teams jockeying for the top spot (including locals Dighton-Rehoboth and Seekonk) and upsets of the leaders already having been posted by two of the sub-.500 teams.

The Tri-Valley League has no clear favorite among the five teams currently above .500.

After decades of futility, the Tri-County Cougars earned a Super Bowl berth last year and appear determined to challenge for another in a tougher Mayflower Small schedule that counts both meetings against divisional foes instead of just the second.

And with five weeks gone in the schedule, all 10 of this area's football-playing schools have records above .500. I can't remember that happening before on my watch, and that watch extends back to 1977. The close races and exciting games against traditional rivals have local football fans buzzing with excitement - especially in the Hockomock, where King Philip and Franklin have joined perennial contenders Foxboro, Mansfield and North Attleboro for what should be a memorable stretch run, the best in decades.

Are you enjoying it? Make sure you do, because it could all be gone in 2011.

On Dec. 2, when the MIAA Board of Directors is next scheduled to meet, they might vote to tear the football world apart under the premise of "creating more playoff opportunities for student-athletes."

This is not a new push for a statewide playoff system. But it seems to have momentum, especially among those coaches who seem to feel slighted by not having won enough games over an 11-game season to win a league title and qualify for the current postseason format. So, they have managed to convince a number of their peers that they can't survive without having more rounds of playoffs and attacking traditional rivalries and existing regional alignments to achieve that.

Under the current proposal that is likely to be recommended to the Board of Directors by an ad hoc football committee, the scheduling of Massachusetts high school football would be reconfigured to the point that it will be unrecognizable, and out of the control of local school systems.

In a nutshell:

**All existing football leagues and conferences would be disbanded. All schools would be thrown into pools determined by enrollment and geography.

**Scheduling for the first seven weeks of the season would not be performed by local athletic directors, but by a "commissioner" - although I prefer the term "football czar" - who would dole out schedules determined primarily by enrollment.

**After those seven games, the playoffs would begin for the top eight teams in each of the 16-team "divisions." Schools not qualifying for the playoffs would have games assigned to them on short notice by the football czar, drawing from the pool of non-qualifying teams. As the playoffs proceed, teams that are eliminated from the playoffs would be thrown back into the scheduling pool to round out schedules for other unfortunates.

**The semifinal round of these expanded playoffs (North vs. South, Central vs. West) would be played before Thanksgiving. Thus, some existing Thanksgiving rivalries would be put at risk of cancellation because teams would still be active in the playoffs. I've given this plan a lot of thought since it was first proposed, and I tried to be open-minded about it. But after further review, I've still got one just word to describe this plan: RIDICULOUS.

The first thing I dislike about the plan is the dissolution of the leagues. I appreciate our high school leagues, especially leagues like the Hockomock, the Tri-Valley and the South Coast, where athletic parity and geographic convenience have merged to create competitive harmony.

Maybe I'm showing my age, but those leagues have stood the test of time. The Hockomock has been a viable football league with stable membership for more than 40 years (its roots in other sports go back to the 1920s), the TVL for more than 30 and the SCC for 20-plus. Yes, there are flaws in some of the other local leagues, but they have little bearing upon how the football playoffs are conducted.

Great rivalries have formed in these leagues, but because some disparities in enrollment have emerged over the past decade, they would end under a football czar's rule. Franklin and Mansfield might find themselves forced to play the largest schools in the commonwealth and say farewell to their traditional foes from neighboring towns.

Personally, I can't understand why any athletic director would want to surrender control of his scheduling to anyone else.

Many local schools face severe budget constraints. That's one of the reasons why Attleboro wanted so desperately to join the Hockomock League (and will next year), because it's a lot less expensive to travel to Canton or Stoughton than it is to Barnstable. But as the largest school in the area, with nearly 900 boys enrolled in grades 9-12, Attleboro's football diet would be steady courses of Brockton, New Bedford, Durfee, Barnstable, Taunton, Xaverian and a player to be named later.

What's more, after the seven-week schedule compiled at the start of the season, what would follow has the potential of being complete chaos.

Over the next four weeks, schedules would be filled on the fly, and on very short notice. I already know it will be an incredible inconvenience to the media; we already have enough trouble getting up-to-date schedules from some of our schools even though the schedules have been finalized for months in advance. So I can't wait to see what it will be like for the coaches and ADs to not know who they're playing after Week 7, and all that entails - field and bus schedules, practice, swapping game films, junior varsity and freshman games, and so on.

Some have said that ADs already have to make those decisions on short notice when it's tournament time. Indeed, they do - at the end of a regular season in which all games were already in the books, not with a third of it left to be scheduled on short notice.

I also still fail to understand exactly why it's so important to expand the football playoffs or to crown state-wide champions. One plan that would have extended the football playoffs well into the winter sports season was mercifully euthanized by the MIAA a few years ago. This isn't Texas or Florida, where they can play football outdoors as long as they want.

But the bottom line for me in this current debate is the dissolution of the leagues. They're not perfect, but they represent stability, continuity and tradition - and those are qualities that should not be so easily dismissed in order to thrust undeserving football teams into a watered-down championship circumstance.

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com. Read Farinella's blog, "Blogging Fearlessly," at thesunchronicle.com/farinella.