It wouldn’t be football without a convoluted system for choosing the best teams.

Consider the major colleges, where roughly 56 polls and 38 computer rankings are fed into a super computer in Beano Cook’s basement to reinforce the reality that you’re screwed if you lose a game.

Here in Maine high school football, the arrangement is no less mathematically obtuse, no less frustrating as a fan, coach or athlete to understand, and surely no more satisfactory.

Three divisions – Western Class A, Eastern Class A and Eastern Class B – conclude their eight-game regular-season schedule this weekend.

Twelve teams strap up the helmets in each of those conferences, leading to an eight-team playoff that is logical even if it guarantees us, with few exceptions, a slate of painful-to-watch quarterfinal clashes next Friday and Saturday.

Bigger problem is, the sheer number of schools in the Southern Maine Activities Association and Pine Tree Conference makes it impossible to play a round-robin schedule and settle the weighty issue of who’s in and who’s out on the field.

So the leagues rely on the cryptic Crabtree Point System, one that is as unwieldy as it can be unfair.

Crabtree math is pretty basic. Take your team’s winning percentage, add it to the combined winning percentage of your opponents, and multiply it by 100 to make it look like a real number.

In other words, if Oxford Hills beats Cony tonight, the Vikings would be 4-4, or .500. And let’s assume their opponents wind up with an aggregate record of 28-36, which factors out to .4375. Oxford Hills’ final Crabtree point total would be 93.75.

Three obvious issues crop up here.

One, the system puts a staggering weight on strength of schedule, a factor over which your team has precisely no control. In fact, beating people makes your strength of schedule worse.

Two, the numbers are almost never that easy to figure out.

Three, the only ways to discern the final point totals are to have a computer spreadsheet that does it for you, or to sit down with a calculator and a copy of every team’s schedule.

Not fun, when you’re a coach trying to explain to the kids where you stand. Or perhaps more likely, a kid trying to explain to the coach. (No offense, guys, but I know I was much better equipped for figuring out all this gobbledygook when I was a 16-year-old taking physics and pre-calculus classes than I am now, and you’re no different.)

It’s not as simple as saying, “OK, if we beat Portland and Scarborough beats Kennebunk, we’re in.” More likely in Crabtree Nation, there is a series of three steps that must fall into place if you win and five events that must unfold if you lose in order to achieve a desired result.

In Eastern A, there is said to be a matrix of 64 possible playoff seeding outcomes after this week’s slate of PTC games. Sixty-four results for six games!

And let’s be honest: Most of those possibilities are as likely as shaking your Magic 8-Ball and getting, “I don’t think so, dude” to come up 99 consecutive times.

Lawrence, Bangor, Lewiston and Skowhegan have dominated the league this fall, quite specifically in that order. With the possible exception of the notoriously funky Skowhegan-Mt. Blue rivalry game, the thought of any of those teams losing this weekend is laughable.

Most of the drama tonight and Saturday will be poured into the fifth through eighth spots on each of those three tournament ladders. All of which means a lot of conjecture, sweat and tears to extend a season that’s destined to last only one more week.

Consequently, I’m not going to waste a lot of time crunching the numbers for us this morning.

I’ll leave it at this: While the Crabtree is a mess to calculate and put in real-world terms headed into the final weekend of competition, it is a heck of a lot more equitable over a small, eight-game sample than its cousin, the Heal Point standings. Nothing was worse than the Heals, which once kept a 5-3 team out of the Class B playoffs at the expense of a 3-5 team it had beaten in head-to-head play.

And round-robin isn’t always a cure-all, either. Consider Western Class C, where Jay, Lisbon and Livermore Falls could finish in a three-way tie for the fourth and final playoff spot at 5-4, each with a head-to-head record of 1-1 against the others.

How do you suppose they’ll settle that issue? With a three-way coin flip. Fun. And we haven’t even talked about what would happen if Dirigo and Old Orchard Beach went 5-4, too.

Ah, football. It’s a simple game. You just block and tackle. And pay attention in your algebra class. And if all else fails, pray.