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GREENSBORO — The regular season ended, and the chaos ensued. After a tempest-tossed year in which Ragsdale beat Dudley, and R.J. Reynolds beat everybody else, all three somehow finished in a tie that created about what you'd expect: the perfect storm.

The imperfect system that is the N.C. High School Athletics Association football playoffs will begin again tonight on soggy fields of controversy stretching from the hills to the dunes and casting an ill-fitting shadow over the Triad.

Once again, a decision made years ago by the coaches themselves to open the playoffs to virtually everybody has come back to haunt those with the most to lose. In this case, the loser is undefeated and unsuspecting Ragsdale.

After a run to a conference title and an assumed top ranking in the state 4-A playoffs, Ragsdale found itself seeded third behind Winston-Salem's Reynolds and a team it had already beaten this year — Dudley. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing on Rick Strunk's desk at the NCHSAA offices in Chapel Hill.

"Phone calls and e-mails," he said. "They all started the same way. 'You idiots!' I knew it was coming."

It comes every year, in part because the football playoffs are so vast and because the only way to pull it off and get all 256 teams seeded and scheduled is to stick to predetermined rules voted on by the coaches years ago. And the most controversial rule of all is how to handle tiebreakers.

Years ago, before the NCHSAA decided to get all democratic about things, playoffs were handled pretty much by the conferences themselves. The teams that got out of their own conferences went to the playoffs, and those that couldn't, well, they didn't deserve it anyway.

That meant that every now and then, an 8-2 team or a 9-1 team from a strong conference was left home while some 5-5 pretender from another weak league got in.

The 1-A coaches moved first, voting to split the playoffs according to enrollment, then invite almost every small school in the state to compete in two-tiered playoffs. The coaches from the higher classifications decided they wanted that, too, so the NCHSAA relented and let the coaches have it their way.

There's been controversy ever since, mostly because of the endowment games the NCHSAA has allowed for years. Schools now schedule an extra nonconference game each season, an "endowment" game early in the year. Endowment is a better term than what it really is — a cash grab. The sanctioning body, however, only recognizes 10 games played. Thus, schools have come to count the endowment game as a win or don't count it at all if they lose. They can, in fact, drop any nonconference game they please at the end of the year to get down to the 10-game limit.

Yes, it's crazy, but that's the way it is. Dudley called the NCHSAA last week just to make sure. So the Panthers dropped their loss to Ragsdale, which made them 10-0, just like Ragsdale and just like Reynolds, thus forcing a three-way tie among three conference champions. Dudley had no control over the tiebreaker, which came Saturday morning.

"Right, wrong, good or bad, this is the system," Strunk, the associate executive director of the NCHSAA, said Thursday in between irate phone calls. "For seeding purposes there wasn't a two-way tie, there was a three-way tie. The head-to-head game didn't work in this case."

In other words, according to the rules by which the schools themselves play, since there was a three-way tie among champions from three conferences, Ragsdale didn't beat Dudley this year. Had there been a two-way tie, then yes, the head-to-head would've counted as it did in a case involving conference champions Matthews Butler and Richmond County, which had lost to Butler but was seeded higher before the NCHSAA resolved the matter.

There was no such matter here. A three-way tie, even one made possible by a team dropping a loss to another team involved in the tie, is handled according to the rules.

"We don't have anything to do with it," Strunk said. "It's a straight draw by the executive director of the N.C. Football Coaches Association. It's done alphabetically according to how the schools are listed in the directory."

The names of the schools were put in a hat. Jim Taylor, from the Cleveland County school system and the former Shelby coach, reached in and pulled out Dudley's seed number. The No. 2 came out. Taylor then reached in and pulled out Ragsdale's number. The No. 3 came out. Reynolds' number was never even drawn. There were 30 other ties to break before the playoffs were set.

"It's an onerous process," Strunk said. "But it's approved by the schools beforehand. I actually had an AD call and ask me why we can't just arrange the games."

In the old days, there were all sorts of arrangements to get schools in the proper regions and to make sure conference foes didn't meet in opening rounds and to make sure the regular season remained significant. But that wasn't good enough for the coaches, who wanted to extend their seasons no matter what, and for the schools, who wanted to make a little more money. So the NCHSAA relented, and now we have 256 playoff teams in eight classifications seeded according to games played and not played, with conferences split along enrollment and wiggly geographic lines and with boosters and coaches and ADs with no real idea how it all works.

It's a perfect mess. But there's nothing insidious about it. Dudley did nothing wrong.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com