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“Is this the new normal?”
I was asked some variation of this question multiple times in the offseason in regards to 4-win teams that managed to get into the playoffs last season.
The question became more prominent when one of those 4-win qualifiers, Nazareth, advanced through the playoff gauntlet to win the Class 5A State Championship.
Nazareth and five other teams made the 256-team field, which was a slight expansion from the lone 2022 4-win qualifier, Buffalo Grove.
Six doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but what if that number becomes 10? Or 15? Or 20?
20 might be pushing the envelope a little bit. But double digit 4-win teams seem to almost be destined to be included in this year’s field.
And here’s why:
After three teams announced in the preseason (Vienna, Riverton and Rockford Christian) that they would be forgoing playing varsity football this season that left the state with 494 playoff eligible teams. It is the lowest number of participating teams in the playoff era of IHSA football.
Less teams means less teams are even mathematically possible to reach the five-win threshold as on an average week there are currently about 235 to 240 games that pit Illinois teams against another Illinois team and another five to 10 games where schools play out of state opponents.
On average there’s about 240 total wins assigned to Illinois teams on a week-to-week basis after Week 2. (The first two weeks tend to feature a few more games against non-Illinois teams and non-playoff eligible opponents in Illinois). 240 isn’t exactly a huge gap to 256, but one must consider the fact that five to 10% of those wins are being accumulated by teams that will win less than four games.
And with that considered it’s easy to see how we won’t get to 256 teams that have won at least five games.
The Chicago Public League also changed the way this year’s field will be shaped. Once again the CPL tweaked its playoff qualification system.
The Red Division remains and plays home to the league’s more prominent programs. Last season, the CPL Red produced nine playoff qualifiers including one of the 4-win squads, Taft.
The league also had five White divisions last seasons. Four of those divisions held the standard of if you met win and point requirements and finished in the top four in the league a team could go to the playoffs while the fifth required that you finish in the top two of the conference race to qualify. This produced 18 additional playoff qualifiers giving the field 27 Chicago Public League schools in the field.
This year’s version of the CPL playoff qualification structure is substantially different and will allow for considerably fewer CPL teams being included in the field.
The Red Division remains largely the same and it’s reasonable to assume that group will send between eight and 10 teams to the postseason.
The difference comes in the White Division where divisions now use a tier system. There are two White Tier 1 conferences that have eight teams each. It’s very difficult to qualify more than four teams out of this type of format, but five is a possibility. Even so, the White Tier 1 will almost certainly produce no more than eight or nine teams.
Then there is White Tier 2 which is four divisions of six teams where only the division champion will be granted a qualifying spot to the IHSA playoffs. So essentially 20 teams in White Tier 2 have no path to playoff qualification as non division winners which really means we’ve got just 474 teams vying for those coveted 256 slots.
I had expectations that all of these factors would wreak havoc on the projection and it did. So much so I had to check my numbers multiple times to be sure I wasn’t missing an obvious oversight.
In the end the projection below reflects a whopping 18 teams projected to make the field with 4-5 records. After looking at how it all broke down my first thought was that number is certainly going to go down over the course of the season as teams claim unexpected wins or things don’t go exactly the way I project them (It is Week 1 after all). But I’m actually of the opinion in might climb even higher. These Week 1 projections are often the best case scenario for nearly every team in the state, and as everyone knows the best laid plans don’t always work out.
All things considered it looks like its going to be a bumpy ride for your friendly neighborhood playoff projectionist.
Here is the Week 1 playoff projection for all eight classes: