Week 9 almost always seems to bring a distinct level of chaos.

And we should have been on a red alert after a relatively calm Week 9 Friday night.

But as IHSA schools wrapped up the regular season on Saturday afternoon and all the final scores were in and ready to be assembled into the 256-team bracket there was a power outage in Bloomington/Normal, home of the Illinois High School Association.

And the computer that does all the tabulating and checking of how the brackets were put together wasn’t operable for a substantial chunk of Saturday afternoon.

Pairings are usually available to those putting together the IHSA Pairings Show no later than 6 p.m. I’ve been a part of several of those broadcasts, including Saturday night’s, and there have been delays to that process before because of both weather and injury delays in Saturday contests.

But there wasn’t anything quite like Saturday night where the first pairings were not made available until just under an hour before broadcast time.

It led to an afternoon full of speculation that didn’t get resolved until almost the last minute.

The race to 256

The biggest question that seems to always swirl around the final day of the regular season over the past few years is whether or not we are going to need 4-5 teams to round out the field.

Early on Friday, it looked like we were going to not have much to talk about on that front.

When looking at what happens to construct the back end of the field you have to look at two things: 4-4 teams that pick up win number five on Week 9 and those same 4-4 teams that don’t.

And there’s varying degrees to who those teams play. Some of those teams are playing teams with above .500 teams, while others are not. And there’s usually a blend of teams from each of those groups which usually leads to a fairly clear indication what the field will need to be filled.

Then there was shift on that as 4-4’s that played teams with better records such as St. Rita, Knoxville and Sycamore locked up bids by claiming their fifth wins and with those moves the list of expected 4-win teams started to dwindle.

But other upset bids flickered out and a counter move quickly started to develop. Teams seeking that fifth win struggled with feisty teams with lesser records looking to play spoiler. Stillman Valley, Romeoville and Triad all bowed out and that suddenly shifted the scales back in favor to 4-win teams hoping for a bid.

There were two more results that very quietly caused a shift. Blue Island Eisenhower came up short against Shepard which bounced Eisenhower from the potential playoff record. But more importantly for field construction it lifted Shepard to a 4-5 record. The Astros started the season 1-5 and fell off the radar, but they finished with a three-game winning streak. They also played six playoff teams during the campaign giving them a treasure trove of playoff points and put them near the top of teams hoping to get in via that route.

Another score that quietly got little notice was 3-5 Urban-Prep Bronzeville’s win over 6-2 Prosser on Friday night, lifting UPB to a 4-5 record (and we will get to that a little later).

3-5 teams actually seemed to do more pivotal work than 4-4’s, the biggest might have came when Joliet Catholic, also with a cache of playoff points, fended off 6-2 Providence to get themselves back into the conversation.

Quite possibly the strangest journey to playoff qualification came courtesy of Edwardsville. The Tigers entered Friday night seemingly needing to defeat Desmet Jesuit out of St. Louis to get to the five-win mark.

Edwardsville plays several out-of-state opponents and sometimes those opponents records aren’t always updated quickly by the IHSA’s partner, MaxPreps. As late as Wednesday, DeSmet was listed as having three wins on the season. But somewhere between then and pairings night, DeSmet was given credit for an unrecorded game in the system and entered Friday night’s game with a 4-4 record, rather than what had previously been listed as 3-4.

Why does that matter? Edwardsville lost that game to DeSmet, which gave them another playoff point. That, coupled with the extra point added from the unreported game, left Edwardsville with 48 points, one point above the cut-off line for 4-5 teams that qualified.

In the end, five 4-5 schools qualified, one fewer than the most ever in playoff history as six 4-5 teams qualified in 2023. The schools that ultimately made the field at 4-5 were Shepard, Joliet Catholic, Edwardsville, Loyola and Urban Prep-Bronzeville.

The final countdown

It became apparent midway through Saturday afternoon the battle for the final spot was going to come down to two teams: Urban Prep-Bronzeville and Marist.

Marist entered Saturday with 47 points and a 4-5 record, Bronzeville entered Saturday with a 4-5 record and 45 points with a guarantee of two Saturday points to be added and the possibility of a third.

Bronzeville’s could have locked down a 48th point and the final spot with a win by non-conference opponent Noble-Rauner, but Noble fell to Crane so the exhaustive tie break circumstance needed to come into play.

Both schools were tied with 47 points (Step 1), and both teams four victories were won against opponents that amassed 15 victories combined (Step 2).

Step 3 didn’t apply as they did not face each other in a head-to-head matchup.

Step 4 was how many playoff-bound teams each faced. Both had six.

Step 5 was how many wins those playoff-bound teams amassed. Both had 38.

Step 6 was how many points were allowed in games against playoff-bound opponents, Urban Prep-Bronzeville held the edge 135 to 170 and finally broke the tie for spot 256.

Next up on the list would have been LeRoy, Westinghouse and Reed-Custer, who all finished 4-5 with 45 points.

Rinse and Repeat

One of the underlying themes of the pairings release was the fact that there were numerous pairings that are repeat pairings of regular-season contests.

Obviously, the one that drew the most attention was a repeat of the CCL/ESCC showdown between Mount Carmel and Loyola that was played in Week 9, but another Week 9 battle between York/Lyons is also being repeated in 8A.

Just in Class 8A, four of the 16 first-round matchups (Lockport/Sandburg and Bolingbrook/Oswego East are the others) are repeat games.

There are 11 more games in the other seven classifications that are repeat games from the regular season.