Why De La Salle’s request to be in NorCal Open bracket is no big deal

The uproar about De La Salle being in the Open Division for the NorCal basketball regionals is much to do about nothing.

Seriously.

So what if De La Salle made a call to its section office and the state CIF and asked to be in the Open.

Is that really so egregious?

At that point, the ball was in the section’s and state CIF’s court. Not De La Salle’s. The North Coast Section and state CIF could have said thanks but no thanks, or they could have obliged.

They obviously went with the latter option.

Now let’s make one thing clear: There is no way they would have dropped De La Salle below its weight class – say, Division II – if it had requested such a move.

So all of this talk that De La Salle being in the Open sets a bad precedent is nonsense.

And let’s be honest. De La Salle’s chances of reaching Sacramento for the state championships would have been much more realistic in Division I – which is where the Spartans were projected to be – than in the Open.

Having been placed in the highest bracket, De La Salle now has to win on Wednesday night at Modesto Christian, which is never an easy task for Bay Area teams.

If the Spartans somehow survive, they’d have to travel to San Francisco on Saturday to play top-seeded Archbishop Riordan, which beat De La Salle in last season’s NorCal Open final when the Concord school had four-year star Alec Blair.

De La Salle finished third in the just-concluded NCS Open Division playoffs. Clayton Valley was the runner-up. Both teams lost to Open champion Salesian in similar fashion, with each leading in the second half before falling at the end.

Salesian beat DLS 54-51 in the semifinals and Clayton Valley 51-49 in the final.

The thought here was that Clayton Valley would get the NCS’s second NorCal Open Division spot, if the state chose to pick two from the NCS.

That it went with De La Salle was one of the storylines Sunday evening.

That storyline became a full-blown uproar in the basketball community when CIF associate executive director Brian Seymour had this response to a question from the Bay Area News Group’s Nathan Canilao about why DLS was in the Open:

“De La Salle contacted both the commissioner of the North Coast Section and our office and expressed that they would like to play in the Open Division regardless of where their finish was in the NCS Open Division,” Seymour told Canilao on Sunday night. “We don’t often get that. We thought that was really kind of a cool thing. We knew that there was going to be room in that division, and so we went ahead and did that.

“The decision to put in teams in the Open, or not to put teams in the Open, we have a whole metric of things to weed that out. So it just so happened that De La Salle wanted to do that. So we said, ‘No problem.’”

De La Salle is no stranger to the state Open. The Spartans will be making their eighth appearance since the division was added in 2013.

They lost in the NorCal Open semifinals three times and the final once. They won the NorCal Open title in 2016.

Clayton Valley, meanwhile, has the best shot of the remaining eight teams in the Division I bracket to advance to Sacramento.

Seeded second behind Buchanan, Clayton Valley is now the top team left after Buchanan lost on Tuesday night.

Had it been placed in the Open, which would have been its first appearance in the top bracket, Clayton Valley would have faced long odds to win it, just like De La Salle does now.

So, again, the uproar about DLS being in the Open is much to do about nothing.