City Section to Consider Playoff Plan for Football : High schools: Restructuring proposal would establish 4-A and 3-A division brackets after conference play is completed.

The L.A. City Section next week will consider yet another football playoff restructuring proposal, a late-hour recommendation that would establish 4-A and 3-A division brackets but not until regular-season conference play is completed.

On Monday, the City’s Games Committee will study the plan, devised by Fairfax Coach Ron Price. If it meets with committee approval and a survey of the City’s 49 football coaches shows support, the proposal will be forwarded to the Interscholastic Athletics Committee for its May 20 meeting, the last of the school year.

The committee already had approved changes in its oft-criticized playoff format April 1 when it adopted a new structure that establishes two more evenly balanced football divisions. That plan called for a 24-team 4-A Division and a 25-team 3-A Division, each division consisting of six leagues. Each of the City’s six conferences would be divided into one 4-A league and one 3-A league.

The committee suggested placing teams in leagues based on the previous season’s conference records. In each conference, the four teams with the best records would form the 4-A league and the other four teams would compose the 3-A league.

The latest recommendation follows the spirit of that proposal by creating two 16-team playoff brackets, this time based on team records for the 1991 season.

The four teams with the best records in conference play in both the Southern Pacific and Northwest Valley conferences would advance to the 4-A playoffs. The Southern Pacific consists of traditional 4-A powers Banning, Carson and Dorsey, as well as San Pedro, Narbonne, Gardena, Crenshaw and Washington. The Northwest Valley, a 4-A conference last season, consists of Chatsworth, Cleveland, El Camino Real, Granada Hills, Kennedy, Reseda, San Fernando and Taft.

The top two teams in the other four conferences would fill out the 16-team 4-A bracket. The 3-A bracket would consist of the teams with the fifth- and sixth-best records from both the Northwest Valley and Southern Pacific conferences, plus the third-, fourth- and fifth-place teams from the City’s other four conferences.

City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness finds merit in the new plan, saying that it judges teams based on their performance in the current season.

“I consider that a plus and it gets the best teams in the 4-A,” he said. “We prefer to have this wrapped up before the school year is over, but we’re not under a time crunch as long as we do it before the first day of the season in the fall.”