Chauncey Carrick said he wasn’t sure if Proposal 19 is going to fix all of the issues with IHSA football scheduling.

But he said he knew for sure things weren’t going to get better under the old system, which is why the Sycamore athletic director encouraged the district to vote yes on the proposal that expanded the football playoffs.

“I’m not 100% sure that scheduling issues will be corrected. I’m not 100% conference jumping will be corrected,” Carrick said. “But I was 100% sure if nothing changed all that stuff would continue. Sycamore was willing to vote yes to see if that would help solve those other issues.”

The IHSA announced the passage of the proposal on Tuesday by a statewide vote of 377-252, with 96 abstentions.

The proposal will keep the eight classes but create 48-team fields, with the highest 16 seeds in each bracket – 1 through 16 in Class 7A and Class 8A and the top eight seeds in the north and south brackets in Class 1A through Class 6A – receiving byes into the second round.

The playoffs and regular season will each start one week earlier. The scrimmage week will be eliminated and there will be only 20 dates to allow nine preseason practices.

This change, according to Genoa-Kingston athletic director Phil Jerbi, was a big part of his district’s no vote.

Jerbi said there are a lot of school events based around the current schedule that are going to have to change, such as fundraisers, photo days and scrimmages for more than just football. He also said the dead week moving into July may cause some problems this year as well.

“We did not feel this is going to rectify that a lot of people believe it’s going to,” Jerbi said. “On a personal level I’m not a big fan of having three- and four-win teams making the playoffs. There’s already a large discrepancy of skill level with teams in the playoffs already.”

The theory of the expanded playoffs is to make scheduling easier and, hopefully, cut down on the dramatic shift in conference reshuffling. Instead of chasing five wins, all three-win and most two-win teams should make the postseason on a yearly basis.

Both DeKalb and Sycamore have gone through dramatic scheduling and conference shifts since the Northern Illinois Big 12 broke up.

DeKalb joined the DuPage Valley Conference, in which the closest school is 35 miles away and the other schools have enrollments around 1,000 students larger than DeKalb. For the past two years, the DVC and the Southwest Suburban have tried a couple different alignments of a football-only arrangement.

Before that, the DVC teams would have to play each other twice in the year and make trips to the Belleville area to schedule enough games.

“The worst thing ever is keeping the things the way they are because ‘we’ve always done it this way,’ ” Goff said. “We put through a proposal where scheduling stays with the schools. Now you don’t have to do that chase for five. We play a very tough schedule, one of the toughest in football, and we would have been one of the last teams in.”

Sycamore joined a new-look Interstate 8 with Plano and Sandwich, but after a brief football-only arrangement with the Kishwaukee River Conference, Plano and Sandwich left the I-8 for the KRC, leaving six teams, all refugees from the NIB 12, in the I-8.

For the Spartans, that necessitated trips to Mahomet-Seymour and Cahokia in the last two years alone, while the other I-8 teams have had to go even farther, including out of state, to fill out their schedules.

The Barbs, at 2-7 last year, likely would have qualified for the postseason. Goff pointed to the success of Nazareth, a 4-5 team that won a state championship in the past, of what a battle-tested team can do in the postseason.

“They played a tough schedule and in the long run it worked out,” Goff said. “They got in, they had enough playoff points and they were competitive and won. This should loosen up that drive for five and get everyone playing those tougher teams.”

DeKalb has only qualified for two postseasons since the NIB 12 broke up after making the last five in the old league.

Genoa-Kingston missed the postseason last year with a 4-5 record, with three of those losses by a touchdown or less.

Jerbi said while more games is great for players, the chance for lopsided games puts a damper on that and in the end, it’s just a trade-off between upsides and downsides.

“I think if there was a perfect format, someone in the state probably would have found it already,” Jerbi said. “I don’t know if there is a perfect format. But as always we will adjust accordingly and make the necessary changes internally to adapt to the new process.”