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OK Red, OK White, (i'll make one cheaply, by saying the reogranized OAA has no division alone to qualify as clearly better than the CHSL, but prior to the realignment if we take the top 4 teams of the OAA since the CHSL takes it top 4 and puts them together then you get a third.) MAC Red is not far off, the top of the SEC is not far off. The point being if the CHSL continues to trend the way it is going, and if enrollments begin to shrink, it's not crazy to think that these mentioned leagues could all surpase the CHSL, if they haven't already. Again I'm not saying the league is crap it's just not "The Detroit Catholic Leauge" anymore.

I know the you are using the double count here, but I'd like to use raw stats.

DCC first....if you go back to the 80's you'll see numbers as high as 1,200 all boys (but I'll admit that's going back 20 years), by 2006 that number had dropped to about 880, that's a noticeable decline, as has been well documented the standards to get into DCC, along with the move to Wixom have played a role in getting that number up to about 1,000 again. How much has that area grown and we didn't see a huge jump in enrollment. Considering the forcast on the economy, moving west gave DCC a shot in the arm and prolonged the eventual fall back into the 800's or lower.

Rice next...if one goes back to the mid 80's you see around 1,050 in the school (again reaching in years but for comparison big picture) but as late as 1999 you could find 700 boys in the school. However by '05 the number dropped to about 640. With the move of DCC farther west Rice benefited from a few families going that way instead (as will DeLaSalle).

OLSM...it's been well documented how OLSM has grown and why, completly different standards than the other schools, and when the diocese closed schools they were there to scoop them up.

U of D from over 800 students in the early 2000's to under 700 by the late 2000's, looking into other divisions you'll find Foley dropping by over 50% over the last 15 years, PNDP who got a big boost in the arm with the school closings is already 100 less than it use to be.

But let's not forget the biggest factor of the apparent stabalization of the last few years, the closing of several smaller schools, and nearly 50% of those students blending into the remaining schools.

Look at the total number of Catholic League participation over this period. (since I don't know exactly who was all boys which years, I'll use MHSAA playoff number enrollment)

1985
13,107 students

2008
9,666 students

or a 26.3% drop.

Not fair you say to look at it that way because of all the schools...fair enough let's look year 1 after closing, to today.

2005 students
11,675....this is the scariest number of all. Since the year after the closing of the schools the student number has dropped by 2,009, or 15.3% of the 26.3% drop has occured in the last 3 years! The CHSL has dropped more students in '06,'07, and '08 than it did from'85-'05, by nearly 600 students.

With all of this comes compeition, rivalry, and quality, the glory days of the 90's through early 2000's have past, and sadly may not be seen again, at least not in the forseeable future.