At the stroke of midnight Saturday, Liberty and Central Sallisaw moved into the A-II playoffs and Gore was sent home after a coin flip settled a three-way tie for third place in District A-II-3. The decision came after all tiebreakers were exhausted, leaving the postseason spot to chance.
The teams gathered at Catfish Round Up just off Interstate 40 at Exit 200 outside of Seminole, east of Oklahoma City, where OSSAA Associate Director Trinity Johnson met with the three head coaches and supervised the simultaneous toss. Each coach flipped a coin at the same time, with the school’s primary color marked on it, and the two coins that landed on the same side advanced. Liberty and Central Sallisaw came up tails. Gore came up heads.
That result mattered because Oklahoma sends only the top four teams from each district to the playoffs, except in Class 6AI and Class 6AII. In a three-way tie for third, one team has to miss out, and this one was decided in the most direct way possible after the Friday night games were finalized.
The unusual part is how far the process had already gone before the flip. The tie had survived every standard separator, which is why the district race reached a coin toss in the first place. A possibility of that ending had even been floated earlier in an email shared by T.J. Eckert, an anchor at KJRH, before the schools met Saturday night.
For Liberty and Central Sallisaw, the coin settled a season that continues next week in the A-II playoffs. For Gore, the same toss ended the year on a single head at midnight, a reminder that even after the standings are sorted and the rules are applied, one playoff berth can still come down to a coin turning the wrong way.
