Soucie: What could the 6-game spring football season look like?

The IHSA announced the schedule for the remainder of the 2020-21 calendar Wednesday, including spring football, unveiling a six-week season with games set to begin March 19.

And that was about the only thing that was perfectly clear about the announcement.

What do we know?

On the initial announcement, not much.

Other than the original indication that contests would start March 19, and players would begin to get in the required 12 days of acclimation beginning March 3, not much was made clear.

There is overlap between these shortened seasons. Athletes who are moving from sports contested in the first segment of the calendar (basketball and swimming for example) will need 10 practices before being allowed to compete in football games.

We also know that there will be no IHSA state series in football this spring, and no state champions will be crowned.

Additionally, teams will be required to compete within their conferences or health regions.

What do we still need to figure out?

There are several things we don’t know that are pivotal to how things might ultimately shake down.

Team participation is the first unknown. There are overlaps with other seasons on the both the front end with basketball and others, and on the back end with baseball, wrestling and others. Smaller schools and even some larger schools might be in the situation where they might not have enough athletes available to successfully maintain their football programs.

There were 501 schools in the state slated to play 11-man football in the fall. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number fall significantly under the current situation. For example, 48 Chicago Public League schools were scheduled to be among that 501, but sources in the CPS indicated it was unlikely that all 48 programs would be a full-go.

I think a realistic number of participating schools probably will end up in the 350 to 400 school range provided everyone reaches the requirements for being eligible to play.

Next up is scheduling.

IHSA Executive Director Craig Anderson confirmed that teams would be limited to either their health region or conference play.

Here’s a breakdown of IHSA football 11-man programs by COVID Region.

In preparation of a potential spring season, schools had been working toward filling their schedules for a seven-game schedule.

Six weeks isn’t as clean for eight-team conferences, as one matchup won’t get played inside of those conferences in a simple round-robin arrangement. Twelve-team conferences with six teams in each division have an interesting option of getting creative with their scheduling by playing a round robin in division and then a one-off matchup between the corresponding records in each division.

Things get stickier for conferences that might have a program or two opt out of participating in the season. Allegiances likely are going to have to be formed with neighboring conferences that reside in the same health region, and if you look closely at the map, that’s sometimes a slippery slope. Conferences obviously were not designed to abide to the bracketing of health regions.

Things could get really tricky for schools that have small conferences in regions that aren’t well populated with football-playing schools – the Northeastern Athletic and Prairie State, for example. Creativity is going to be critical for those schools that always have had scheduling problems in the past.

The biggest hurdle some programs are going to have to get over is not having a postseason – although some schools are just happy to play, others were holding out hope for some type of state series or a special way to close out the season.

Back in the fall, I formulated a plan for schools to be placed in six-team districts based on geography and classification with the idea that it could provide a five-game regular season followed by an abbreviated postseason. That wouldn’t work in the confines of a six-week season, but it would have provided a framework for a potential Week 6 “Bowl Game” situation that might have provided a form of closure and provide some fun matchups.

At the end of the day, this six-game slate is better than what the alternative could have been.