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LOS ALAMITOS – Tesoro beat Upland. Mission Viejo beat Tesoro.

Those three football teams qualified for the CIF-Southern Section’s West Valley Division playoffs. So which of the three is seeded No. 1 in the division?

Upland.

Illogical stuff happens on the Sunday that the CIF-SS releases its football playoff brackets.

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Related: See all 2014 CIF-SS football brackets

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The processes by which “at-large” teams are selected and how teams are placed in playoff brackets need to change, and just about every coach in Southern California high school football knows it. Coaches created the current structure, and they can change it through their coaches’ committees and their league representatives on the CIF-SS Council.

The selection rules have taken subjectivity out of the method. Bracketing regulations and a points system for identifying at-large teams keep the process too objective. Raw numbers, statistics and divisional rankings don’t always identify which teams are the most worthy of getting into the playoffs or how teams should be seeded or paired in the first round.

Margins of victory and knowing which teams are hot at the end of the season are not factored in. They should be.

Upland is the West Valley Division’s top-seeded team because Upland is No. 1 in the latest West Valley Division top 10. Section assistant commissioner Glen Martinez and others who help put together the brackets are required to seed teams, as much as possible, by those rankings created by a division’s coaches.

Following the West Valley poll, Mission Viejo is seeded No. 2, Tesoro No. 3 and Chino Hills is No. 4. That’s how they are ranked in the division’s top 10.

Servite finished fifth in the six-team Trinity League and has a 4-6 overall record. Alemany of Mission Hills, which finished 7-3 overall and fourth in the seven-team Mission League, might be the better team this week. But Servite was better than Alemany in the points system used to select at-large teams. The Friars got one of the Pac-5’s two at-large berths and Trinity mate Santa Margarita got the other.

Servite plays in a league rated higher, and correctly so, than Alemany’s Mission League, and the Friars’ opponents have a superior cumulative win-loss record than Alemany’s so they got more at-large points than Alemany.

The buzz among coaches at the CIF-SS office on Sunday was that Servite could have finished 1-9 overall and 1-4 in league and the formula still would have given an at-large berth to the Friars.

Servite has to play a first-round away game against third-seeded Long Beach Poly. The Friars will be underdogs. So would Alemany if it were in Servite’s place.

Los Alamitos might be underappreciated. The Griffins went 5-0 in the Sunset League and take a 9-1 record in the playoffs. They might be as good as any team in the West Valley Division, but they were ranked in the bottom half of the division’s top 10.

The Griffins got a first-round home game against an at-large team. That’s about right.

But that at-large opponent is El Toro. El Toro finished third in the South Coast League, but might have finished second if the Chargers were in the Sunset League.

Los Alamitos coach John Barnes tried to look at the bright side.

“Well, at least we won the coin flip,” said Barnes, referring to aflip that will determine the home teams for potential second-round games.

Los Alamitos is going to win more than a coin flip. The Griffins are as good as second-seeded Mission Viejo. They might be the best team in the division.

One surprise Sunday was devastating for an Orange County team. When the at-large teams were announced at 8 a.m., Sonora was on the list for the Southwest Division. An hour later, a revised list had Irvine in Sonora’s place.

The CIF-SS did not have an at-large application from Irvine on Saturday when it selected at-large teams. Later Saturday, the CIF-SS reached out to Irvine to see why the 6-4 team had not applied. Irvine said it had done so, and when the CIF-SS office reviewed the Irvine vs. Sonora points totals, Irvine got the berth.

Sonora coach Paul Chiotti took it well. He had notified only a couple of assistant coaches but none of the players that the Raiders were an at-large team. So he did not have to disappoint a bunch of hopeful kids.

“Luckily,” he said, “they found the mistake quick enough.”

The CIF-SS tries to avoid rematches in the playoffs, but sometimes they happen. The rules for creating the brackets must be followed, so Mater Dei is playing at Westlake in a Pac-5 first-round game.

Mater Dei traveled to Westlake on Oct. 2 and beat the Warriors, 28-27.

Coaches try to guess what the CIF-SS will do with their teams’ first-round assignments. Mater Dei coach Bruce Rollinson and his coaching staff guessed the Monarchs would play Bishop Amat in the first round.

“This is not the scenario we had,” said Rollinson, examining his bracket sheet.

Then he looked up, smiled and said, “Well, it’s not like we don’t know how to get to where we’re playing.”

No mystery there on a day that had plenty of it.

Contact the wrier: sfryer@ocregister.com