Every team in an age group starts in one pool. Four Saturdays of like-against-like football rank the pool. Then the Cup and Shield flights, the Ladder Game, and a postseason in which every team plays for a championship.
Facts about your roster, your community’s recent history, a Strength Declaration signed by your president and head coach, and the scored Jamboree rounds. It sets Week 1 pairings and half of Week 2 — and nothing else. Every number is a team number: no child is ever rated.
Week 2 blends the Index with the Week 1 result, because one game is thin evidence. From Week 3 winners play winners, with no rematches. A team misjudged in July meets its real level within a week or two. Coaches rank the teams they have seen in a poll published by name.
On Realignment Sunday a published Placement Rating splits the age group into the Cup and Shield flights. Records reset. Week 8’s Ladder Game lets the best Shield team take on the last Cup team — two Ladder Games in age groups of ten or more. Both brackets are championships of equal standing.
Placement on Realignment Sunday is a published rating built from four things: how many games you won, how strong your opponents were, how well you controlled games (with margins capped, so running up a score earns nothing), and how the coaches who played you rank you. Point differential is never a tiebreaker.
Every formula, threshold and penalty is in the rulebook, Draft v4.1, available on request. Questions: president@mtfafootball.org.
A community with sixty ten-year-olds and three teams is exactly the community MTFA was built for. Every team you enter goes into the same pool and is placed by its own results. No top team has to be filled first, no draft is required, and no team carries a level label.
Teams from the same program in the same age group are never paired at the Jamborees or in the first four weeks. In Flight Play and the Ladder Game they meet only if there is no other pairing, and that game counts like any other.
You form your teams any way you publish to your families — by experience, by a supervised draft, by coach — and name them by colour or coach, never by level. Your president and coaches rank each team separately on the Strength Declaration, and a coach’s poll vote for his own program’s other team is not counted.
Your second team plays at 3:00 PM on the same field every Saturday. A community choosing twenty players from forty is deeper than one fielding the twenty-two it has, so the starting index counts registrants per team fielded. Each team can Opt-Up on its own.
Two communities each entered two teams, so the age group had ten. Each program ranked its own teams far apart on its declaration. The sister teams never met — not at the Jamborees, not in the Sort, not in Flight Play — and each found its own level.
| Team | Declared | Sort record (rank) | Flight | Season ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ironwood Orange | 1 of 10 | 3–1 (2 of 10) | Cup | Lost in the Cup semifinal |
| Ironwood Slate | 8 of 10 | 2–2 (7 of 10) | Shield | Lost in the Shield quarterfinal |
| Harrow Hill Blue | 2 of 10 | 3–1 (1 of 10) | Cup | Lost in the Cup final |
| Harrow Hill White | 9 of 10 | 1–3 (10 of 10) | Shield | Lost in the Shield final |
All four teams played eight games and a postseason. Harrow Hill reached both finals: its first team in the Cup, its second team in the Shield.