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When the OSSAA needed a system of fairness and accountability for determining postseason playoff brackets, along came Larry Keese.

The Muskogee resident is co-founder of OkRankings.com, the system used in most of the state’s sports to give coaches an opportunity to rank one another’s teams.

And as the most recent basketball rankings show, it’s far from perfect.

Fort Gibson’s girls, which haven’t lost since Oklahoma’s Tournament of Champions in December, fell into a tie with once-beaten Anadarko in the Class 4A poll.

That’s not nearly as odd as Hilldale and Miami, teams that have a combined nine wins between them, coming in in a four-way tie for 19th. And Hilldale last week completed its only sweep of the season, beating Miami.

Here’s why it happened: The four teams at the bottom of the rankings simply voted. Not for themselves — they can’t — but they got 20 points for participating. Those points were enough to get ranked because only a third of the 4A coaches bothered to vote last week.

So obviously, it’s an incentive that’s inconsistently embraced, Keese said. And that represents the core of the system’s problems.

“The system is built to work, but the coaches have to do their part,” Keese said. “It’s frustrating to coaches who do because they see the impact it has when you have low turnout.”

Those two-thirds of schools that didn’t vote last week were assessed a 20-point penalty, which put them 40 points behind the four teams at 19 before the votes were even tabulated.

The apathy seemed to only impact the 4A votes, where the numbers were half of the others. On the girls side, Fort Gibson and Anadarko had 196 voting points each. All the others had anywhere from 300 to 557 for gaining the top spot. On the boys side, 4A No. 1 Oklahoma City Douglass had 259 points. The others ranged from 374 to 600.

Coaches know this — there’s two weeks that really matter in the voting. First, the week the brackets are determined and then the week going into regionals — the final week of rankings, which help to shape the state tournament seedings once teams have emerged from their area tournaments.

And, Keese said, if they don’t vote on at least half of the ballots during the course of the season, there’s another penalty.

“They’re locked out on the final vote,” he said.

But if they’re out of contention by that point, or know their chances are long of making state, why would they bother voting?

“I’ve heard from coaches who would like to see stiffer penalties, from barring the school from hosting a regional or area tournament to assessing fines,” Keese said. “I’d be all for it. But I’m going to go with what the OSSAA and the coaches associations want. When there’s a big enough groundswell there to do something, it will get done.”

Ed Sheakley, the executive secretary of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, has heard the complaints.

“How we’ve gone about determining brackets has ranged over the years from a combination of media polls to the so-called experts, meaning the coaches who are out there playing and scouting everybody else,” he said. “What we’ve found is there really isn’t a perfect system.

“From our standpoint, we have no preference as to what that system is. Our bracket formula is no big secret, just find a way to rank the teams, get them to us and we’ll place them. To me the biggest questions with the system as it is how do you go about legislating ethics and morality when it appears that coaches vote together in blocs and what do you do about the ones who no matter what don’t have the time or don’t take the time and effort to look at the records and make a fair assessment of teams. You would hope that with the coaches being able to see how everybody votes that they themselves would take the necessary actions to make it work right.”

Keese has a suggestion.

“Again, I’m not in the position to make any change, it has to come from the coaches or the OSSAA. But I think it would be interesting to make the votes public, like they do with the USA Today coaches poll that’s part of the BCS,” he said. “To me, that would be great for the fans. The whole process would be transparent and there would certainly be a degree of accountability there.”

Asked about his take on that idea, Sheakley replied: “I’d be uncomfortable with turning something like that loose where in an Internet world, coaches could get 50 anonymous emails from angry people. I think that opens up another can of worms. Really, the best way to handle this is if the coaches would be accountable to each other.”

But right now, that doesn’t seem to be working.