Years of debate on how to assist high schools struggling to fill out their eight-game football schedules will end Thursday.

The Minnesota State High School League's board of directors is scheduled to decide once and for all the best way for schools to find and schedule football games.

The board will adopt a district scheduling concept created by the MSHSL staff ... or do nothing, which would maintain the current format of schools fending for themselves -- and effectively end the debate. Changes would be implemented for the 2015-16 school year and affect regular-season games only.

"This has been a topic of discussion since I started this job seven years ago,'' said Matt Percival, Eastview's activities director.

"It's really hard to say at this point what the board is thinking," said Kevin Merkle, the MSHSL associate director in charge of football. "A lot of our schools, coaches and ADs who haven't been around for a long time, maybe they don't have an appreciation for the history of the problem. They may be thinking: We don't have a problem with scheduling, so why are we changing everything? What we're trying to impress is that this has been a struggle for different schools at different times."

Most of the schools struggling to fill out their eight-game schedule are outside the Twin Cities area, in rural areas. But the five teams in the west-metro Lake Conference -- Eden Prairie, Edina, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Wayzata -- have problems, too.

With only four conference games, each school has to scramble to find four nonconference opponents every season. Eden Prairie, which won the Lake Conference and the Class 6A state championship in 2013, was able to find only seven regular-season games last fall. In 2010, the team had to travel to Winnipeg for two games to fill out its schedule.

The district scheduling concept, introduced last year, would divide schools into groups of 10 to 16 schools based on location, size and competitive balance, with an emphasis on preserving or renewing natural rivalries.

Such a concept could bring back storied rivalries like Cretin-Derham Hall vs. St. Thomas Academy, assuming those schools are placed in the same district.

"That would really be an interesting possibility," STA acting activities director Jason Sedlak said. "I think our alumni and school community would really enjoy that."

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High school football scheduling debate reaches crossroad