Steve Soucie’s Week 1 playoff projection: Could Glenbard West, Maine South end up in Class 7A?

Batavia’s Drew Gerke runs the ball during a game against Phillips at Gately Stadium in Chicago on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022.

The numbers game will be fully in play once again for the IHSA football postseason as a dwindling number of 11-man football team that are eligible for the postseason should have an effect on who and how teams get into the postseason fray.

The number of eligible teams dipped to an all-time low 491 teams for the 2022 season, with the top 256 teams getting tickets to the postseason.

And after the initial wave of early-season nonconference games, which includes games against out-of-state opponents, there’s only going to be around 250 wins awarded per week to teams across the state of Illinois.

So what does that really mean? It seems more and more likely that four-win teams are going to get into the field as at-large teams. The regular process simply won’t produce enough teams with five or more wins to fill all 256 slots.

A deep dive into the first projection of the season reveals a few possible trends to watch. A whopping 12 4-5 projected squads were needed to fill the 256-team projection. That number should almost certainly go down, as the Week 1 projection is clearly the one with the most variability.

But the fact remains that the variable could swing either way. The projection is based on a clean stacking of conference races in order of how the data points indicate things will most likely play out. But upsets and toss-up games mean additional teams getting to the five-win threshold, but it could also mean that teams that were tracking to reach five wins fail to get there.

One of the things that actually helped the number of teams that are likely to reach the minimum of five victories was a realignment of the Chicago Public League’s conferences. Two new divisions were formed with six teams each from a smaller group of programs that tend to at least be competitive in matchups outside the CPL. This group typically accounts for the grand majority of the teams that the CPL qualifies for the postseason.

This new alignment will likely hurt the fortunes of a few teams in these divisions. Due to the increased level of competition, not all of them will be able to reach the five-win threshold. But the other CPL schools have been placed in other new divisions made up largely of teams that haven’t had much of an opportunity to even think of playoff berths. They will now be in line to snag berths.

The first projection has 22 CPL teams reaching the field, a higher number than usual, and the list includes several schools that would be making either their first playoff appearance or ending a significant drought.

And, of course, the most interesting thing about almost any playoff projection is studying where the classification lines break. For this projection, easily the most interesting thing is studying the line between Class 7A and Class 8A. Both Glenbard West and Maine South, two very highly regarded teams, currently find themselves among the larger schools in Class 7A field. In recent years, both have found themselves as members of the Class 8A field, and Maine South was an 8A finalist just last year. Obviously, if they both happened to stay where currently projected, it would dramatically change the landscape of both classes.

A few other interesting bubble scenarios currently finds Rochester in the 5A field as the smallest school and the defending Class 2A state champion, Wilmington, is walking the tightrope between 2A and 3A, and is currently in the final projected spot in the Class 2A draw.