The state’s tournament management committee has voted down a proposal to lengthen the high school football season by one week in order to accommodate more teams in the post-season.This hasn’t met with overwhelming enthusiasm on the part of some, but I say hooray for the committee. Sometimes, less is indeed more, and this is one of those times.Football’s a tough enough sport as it is. It’s brutal and uncompromising, especially for high school kids. They have lives, they play other sports, and it’s unfair to ask them to play one more game, in weather approaching mid-winter conditions, regardless of what rationale people come up with.All you have to know about the folly of extending the season, and forcing kids to play more games as winter sets in on us, is this: In the National Football League, where players do this for a living, undergo rigorous year-round training, have highly paid training staffs and nutritional programs, and are under the tutelage of a myriad of coaches, games occur once a week. When teams do go from a Sunday to a Thursday, they don’t play again for a week and a half.In Massachusetts, you play on Thanksgiving, again on Tuesday and again on Saturday. That’s three games in nine days. It’s too much as it is.The reason this gets as complicated as it does, of course, is Thanksgiving. Somewhere along the line, someone decided it would be a neat idea to play football on Thanksgiving morning.This means skipping the final Saturday of the regular football season, and extending it through Thanksgiving ? thereby taking away one precious week that could have been devoted to the first round of a playoff system.By the time we finally do see a playoff game around here, we’re almost into December. In fact, this year, we will be in December for the first round of the football post-season.Without the traditional Thanksgiving game, we could end the 2008 season on Nov. 22, and figure out some kind of a three-tiered playoff system from there.I do not advocate changing the Thanksgiving tradition for the sake of an extra playoff game. It’s special for a lot of people. It’s always the subject of much fond reminiscence as the years go by, and it’s spawned some intense rivalries and memorable games.So, keep it. But just understand that you can’t have it both ways. If you want to keep the Thanksgiving tradition alive, then keep the playoff system the way it is.Football does need to be treated differently.Steve Krause is sports editor of The Itemu