Steve Soucie: The road to the 256 teams that will be announced on pairings night

Football is the only sport or activity in the wide array of things offered by the Illinois High School Association that requires qualification for the postseason.

It is one of many unique wrinkles that only the football season provides.

495 teams started the season with the hope of being one of the 256 teams invited to the postseason fracas. Some of those journeys to the field have been relatively smooth and have been locked up for a few weeks. Others could be waiting it out until the last minute.

Let’s walk through that journey that creates the field of 256 teams.

The first teams placed are conference champions.

There are 69 conferences in the state of Illinois that include teams that are eligible for the playoffs.

But all of them do not receive that automatic bid designation. The IHSA standard for conference champions to receive bids is that a minimum of six teams be involved in a conference to earn that bid. As such, no divisions of the CCL/ESCC or the SouthWest Valley leagues are eligible for the automatic bids. The South Seven, Southern Illinois River-to-River Ohio Division and Chicagoland Prairie also doesn’t qualify for a bid as the leagues have just five teams.

Teams that have already clinched conference championship berths are Mahomet-Seymour, Byron, Chester, Breese Central, Glenwood, Quincy Notre Dame, Maine West, Maine South, Prosser, King, South Shore, Kennedy, Chicago Marshall, Wheaton Academy, Cary-Grove, Tri-Valley, St. Joseph Ogden, Wilmington, Sycamore, Farmington, Richland County, Washington, Prospect, Palatine, Triad, Williamsville, Oak Lawn Richards, Nashville, Plainfield South, Oswego, East St. Louis, Monmouth, Newman Central Catholic, Glenbard East, West Aurora, Bismarck-Henning, Lyons, Quincy, Camp Point Central and Hardin Calhoun.

Teams that are on track to claim conference championships with victories in Week 9 are Normal Community, Johnston City, Chicago Sullivan, Geneva, LeRoy, Richmond-Burton, Arthur or Sullivan (they play each other), Stark County, Libertyville, Wauconda, Lena-Winslow, Pana, Lemont, Kankakee or Crete-Monee (they play each other) and Downers Grove South.

In all, 56 automatic bids will be awarded to conference champions, leaving 200 bids yet to be filled.

Next up are any teams who are not conference champions or from leagues (or independents) that do not qualify for automatic bids which have already won six or seven or eight games on the season.

There are 147 teams that have reached the six-win standard already, 109 spots to fill.

There are 77 teams that have already reached the 5-win group. Maine South is the lone team that has definitely claimed a conference title from the 5-win group and earns an automatic bid because of it.

So there are 76 teams at the five-win level but not all of them are in line for at-large berths. Two teams, Carver and Noble/Rauner, in the CPL White Divisions that require a top-two finish in their conference did not finish in the top two are ineligible to qualify for the postseason.

Also in those same divisions, runner-up teams will playoff in Week 9 with the winner of games between Clemente and Phoenix and Noble-Comer and Agricultural Science earning a playoff spot. The loser of those games regardless of win total will not be playoff eligible.

After those subtractions are made and factored in that leaves 222 teams with at least five wins at this point.

Working on the presumption that all five win teams will make the playoffs (we’ll get to the alternative later on in this story) that leaves 33 spots for teams to make the playoffs.

There are 60 teams that enter Week 9 with four victories. Two of those teams, Military/Bronzeville and Collins are ineligible via placement in their CPL division. Another, Taylorville, is set to receive a forfeit victory this week to reach the five-win group.

That makes 223 at the five-win group with 57 4-win teams trying to join them.

In a huge statistical anomaly, no 4-4 teams are playing one another in Week 9.

The breakdown of 4-4 teams in Week 9 is as follows:

Of those 57 teams, 29 are playing opponents with records below the .500 mark, 28 teams are playing opponents with records above the .500 mark.

Here’s a breakdown of those games:

Whichever teams win from each group will join the 256-team field. If all of the teams playing teams with losing coupled with all of the teams playing teams with better than .500 records recording a defeat – it would leave the field four teams short of 256 teams with at least five wins.

In reality, there’s probably a blend of the two groups with a few of the 4-4 teams losing to teams with below .500 records and a few of the teams playing above .500 record teams pulling off an upset to try to work their way into the field.

Let’s start with what happens if we don’t get 256 teams at five wins or better.

The remaining spots have to be filled with four-win teams with the highest amount of playoff points (opponents’ victories).

Here’s a look at the teams with the most amount of points in the four-win group in order of points through eight weeks of play:

Obviously any of these teams can remove themselves from the list by winning their fifth game, but the list can’t be limited to just teams with 4-4 records at this point because 3-5 teams have the opportunity to join the other teams in the 4-5 group with a Week 9 win.

You get the leading candidates to take the open spots from whoever ends up in the 4-5 pool after the conclusion of this week’s games. With additional points factored in from Week 9 it appears it will take at minimum of 49 points to have a chance to earn one of those bids.

Conversely, if more than 256 teams qualify for the field with five victories or more, those five win teams that do not have an automatic bid for winning their conference are sorted out by playoff points. The teams with the fewest playoff points in this scenario would be removed from the potential field until the list holds only 256 teams.

Here are the teams that could find themselves at 5-4 with the fewest number of playoff points:

If there is a tie for the last spot or spots in the playoff field the tie is broken by the following steps:

• Head-to-head result if teams have played

• Number of teams played that qualified for the playoffs

• Number of wins accumulated by opponents that qualified for the playoffs

• Number of points allowed against playoff qualifiers

• Coin flip

Once the field is set with 256 teams the schools are sorted by their pre-established football enrollments.

Four schools are using the optional “playing up” option in the IHSA by-laws. East St. Louis, Antioch, Glenbard South voluntarily moves up from Class 5A to Class 6A, while St. Rita moves from Class 6A to Class 7A.

One school, Sacred Heart Griffin, is subjected to the IHSA’s Success Formula. Since the Cyclones earned a state tournament trophy in both the 2021 and 2022 postseason, the Cyclones will play one-class above the class where the state championship trophies were attained. Since Sacred Heart Griffin won the trophies in Class 4A it is mandated that they participate in at least the Class 5A playoffs for last season and this season.

The eight classifications are then broken into groups of 32 teams each. In Class 1A through Class 6A the 32-team groups are broken into groups of 16 and 16 by a north/south geographic split. Class 7A and Class 8A are 32-team brackets with no geographic split.

Seeding then occurs with nine win teams placed in the bracket first, followed by eight, seven, six and five wins teams. If needed, four win teams that qualified are placed at the bottom of the bracket.

Seeding ties are broken inside of the win groups by playoff points. If teams are in the same win group with the same number of playoff points, ties are broken by a tiebreaker of the number of playoff points accumulated by defeated opponents. The only exception being for undefeated teams, as both of those tiebreakers are the same number and can’t break the tie. A random number generator is used to split the tie in that case.

So now that we’ve gone to into the great detail of what could come in Week 9. Here’s a quick review and primer on the steps it will take to fill the field of 256:

• There are currently 223 teams that have already achieved five wins.
• That leaves 33 spots left to fill.
• There are 29 teams that are currently 4-4 that are playing sub .500 teams in Week 9.
• Assuming all win, that leaves four spots left to fill.
• There are 28 teams that are currently 4-4 that are playing teams with above .500 teams in Week 9.
• If all lose, that would leave four spots available for 4-5 teams
• Every team that wins from the group of 28 teams playing teams with record above .500 reduces that number, counting down from 4.
• If any of the teams from the group of 29 teams loses that number increases, counting up from 4.
• If that number finishes at zero at the end of all games, all five win teams make the field and no four win teams do.
• If that number finishes as a positive number, the number that is how many four win teams are needed to fill the field.
• If that number finishes as a negative number, that’s the number of teams with five wins that will need to be eliminated from the field to set it. Teams with the smallest amount of playoff points in the five-win group are eliminated first.