Steve Soucie’s Week 6 playoff projection: Countermove provided by small schools

There’s often a strange set of balances that come into play when projecting the IHSA playoff field.

If you see a wild swing in one direction (larger classification teams moving into lower classifications, for example), it usually doesn’t happen over a multiple week stretch.

If anything, a counterbalance move is usually going to happen in the near future.

Last week in this space we talked about smaller schools struggling in some games that would have afforded them a much easier path to a potential playoff berth. The cause and effect of that phenomena was that larger enrollment schools started sliding into the field, including some projected four-win teams with high playoff points.

So, of course, the balance maneuver came.

Fifteen new (or returning) teams joined the field. A large majority of those additions came from the smallest four classifications.

Big wins from schools like Belleville Althoff, Monmouth and Beardstown began to push back teams back toward their traditional classifications.

But not all the way back.

The first five weeks of this season had a much larger effect on how this field will ultimately be constructed. As such, the projection has returned a school like Richmond-Burton to its expected classification of Class 4A, white others are still holding firm in the anticipation that they might end up in a different class than previously expected.

Let’s take a look at the bubble spots for the most recently projected playoff field:

Those ranges are wider than they usually are, particularly in Class 3A and Class 4A. That’s primarily because even with the new teams that entered the field from small classifications, there’s still a group of traditional playoff teams from these classes that aren’t likely to reach the qualifying standards.

On top of that, the new upstart teams pushed some of the potential four-win qualifiers out of the projected field. The number dropped to seven schools this week and all but one of them comes from a large school classification (Class 5A-8A).

Let’s talk about another issue that is starting to effect the construction of the field: locked conferences. A locked conference is a 10-team league where your nine-game schedule is entirely made up of conference opponents.

There are eight locked conferences in Illinois. Typically these conferences play out to form which would have one team at each of the 10 win levels (9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0). The large majority of locked conferences play out with each one of those leagues sending five teams to the postseason.

Ties do happen sometimes in these leagues. For example, instead of having a nine-, eight- and seven-win team, the top three teams might split their games against one another and would instead have three eight-win teams. All would still advance to the playoffs and a tiebreaker would be used to decide which team would be the designated conference champion.

For playoff qualification, it wouldn’t matter either if this happened between the potential eight-, seven- or six-win teams splitting their three games and instead having three seven-win teams and no six- or eight-win teams.

But here is where a problem develops: if a conference has a trio of four-win teams that tie and split the wins, that would have ordinarily led to a five-, four- and three-win stack of teams, the bid that would have gone to the five-win team disappears.

This might happen once a year and goes relatively unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. But in a year with such parity developing statewide, the scenario could end up playing out in as many as six of those conferences.

On top of that, those lost bids that would go to five-win teams might end up going to four-win teams with high playoff points. Closed conference teams with four wins can’t possibly accumulate more or less than 41 points (5 points per week in weeks where a loss in incurred for 25 and 4 points per week in weeks when said team wins for 16).

That won’t be anywhere near enough points to qualify for an at-large berth as a four-win team, if those teams are needed to fill out the 256-team field.