Steve Soucie’s Week 3 playoff projection: Upsets big and small lead to substantial shifts

I’ve been doing this long enough to know how small things can often lead to big changes on a week to week basis in the work of trying to project the playoff picture.

Yes, upsets by Wheaton St. Francis and St. Rita did have a noticeable effect. But in the grand scheme of things, those were small ripples that largely involved the seeding of those schools and the schools around them.

The more lasting impacts came in games where a team emerged with a win over a favored team where the win actually gets them into the projection when they weren’t before. Oak Forest’s win over Hillcrest is one of example of that phenomenon. Paxton toppling Bloomington Central Catholic was another.

Those were significant because not only did it force a new team into the field, the team they beat is still staying in the projection. In the end there was some substantial pushback because of many of these games led to the need of four-win teams to fill the field swinging down to just six. Projections after the first two weeks had that number between 12 and 19.

I expected that number to change wildly for several more weeks. As of this moment, I have 68 teams statewide to finish with five wins and 56 teams to finish with four wins. Those numbers are going to change with upsets in either direction. How much they change is exactly correlated to how many four win teams we’ll eventually need.

The removal of a healthy chunk of the 4-win teams who tend to be from the large end of the school enrollment grouping led to the moving of several teams into different classifications. The most notable of the moves, Wilmington, has moved back into the Class 2A field currently as the largest school in the classification

Of the 29 new teams, six were Chicago Public League teams and four other CPL teams dropped out. CPL teams are heavy variable teams because rarely do CPL schools swapped in and swapped out come from the same classification.

Other complications have included some terribly difficult conferences to figure out. Conferences like the Kishwaukee River, Interstate Eight, Lincoln Prairie and particularly the Heart of Central Illinois (both Large and Small Divisions) have provided about as much clarity as your average mud puddle through the first three weeks. I’d like to believe some of them will clear up in the next few weeks, but I’m not holding my breath.

Here is the Week 4 playoff projection for all eight classes:

Class 1A

Class 2A

Class 3A

Class 4A

Class 5A

Class 6A

Class 7A

Class 8A