Officially past the halfway point of the regular season gives us a chance to take stock of how things could shake down in a month when the playoff pairings are announced.

One thing is becoming abundantly clear.

The cream of the crop is starting to break away from the field, but that group remains smaller than most.

Just 56 schools have emerged through the first five weeks of the season unscathed and the concentration of where those 56 come from is also particularly interesting to note.

Over one third of the remaining undefeated teams will likely find themselves in either the Class 1A or Class 2A draws, while there are very few candidates to get through the season with a clean sheet in the larger classifications. Just four teams that are guaranteed to be 8A teams (Mount Carmel, Lincoln-Way East,eight-win Sandburg and Fremd) are currently without a loss and two of them, Lincoln-Way East and Sandburg, square off in Week 9.

Why does that matter? With so few undefeated teams, eight-win (and even seven-win teams with good playoff points) are looking to get single-digit seeds and the cluster of teams with six and five wins (and maybe four) is going to be of larger quantities in the larger classifications.

The exact reverse might happen in the smaller classifications, where potentially a 10-0 team that wins its opening round game could find itself traveling to another 10-0 team if the seeds hold because of the sheer volume of undefeated teams inside that classification.

Week 5 is also an excellent gauge of how things are looking statewide.

Along with the 56 undefeated teams, there’s still a relatively large group of teams (88) with just one loss. And the 3-2 group is also fairly large at 115 teams. That leaves 259 teams above .500 through five weeks, which doesn’t necessarily cotton with the thought that we’ll need 4-5 teams to fill the 256 field, but there’s certainly no guarantee at all that all 115 3-2 teams will go 2-2 the rest of the way and there are a few CPL variables that will also trim that number of teams some.

Scoring explosion

If you have gotten the feeling that more scoring has been happening this season that feeling is most distinctly correct.

A whopping 142 teams won games this weekend by scoring at least 40 points, four more teams lost despite scoring at least 40 points.

41 teams were in the 50-point club, while 11 managed to go past 60.

Two teams were in the 70-point club with Wauconda posting 77 in its victory.

Even stranger, everyone seems to be getting into the act. Even though 50 point outbursts have become relatively common just five schools in the state of Illinois are currently averaging 50 points per game: Bishop McNamara, Maroa-Forsyth, Westville, Richland County and Aurora Christian.

Pivotal weekend

This season there’s been a distinct trend that many of the conferences have had several games that have championship implications early in the year.

In the past, many conferences seemed to push the games that almost always factor heavily into league titles later in the season, but across the board it seemed like those games have already been contested in many places.

That trend has left just 12 conferences: CCL/ESCC Blue, Chicagoland Christian, Kishwaukee, Lincolnland/Prairie Large, Lincolnland Prairie Small, Little Illini, Mid-Suburban West, Northwest Upstate Illini, Sangamo, Southwest Valley Blue, Vermilion Valley and Western Illinois Valley North with more than one undefeated team.

But in holding with the trend that premier matchups are largely not being held back to the last few weeks of the year, at least six more of those conferences will have just one undefeated team as big league showdowns headlined by Brother Rice vs. Mount Carmel are all slated for this week.

In addition, there’s a non-conference game that pairs undefeated teams as Byron and Durand-Pecatonica clash.