Just like the football teams that are contained inside this playoff projection, the most change occurs to it between the first two weeks of the season.

A doubling of the available data on teams is extremely valuable at this point although there are more than a few teams out there that we still know very, very little about in regards to how they might stack up against the rest of the field.

Even so, there’s a trend that’s already emerging that might be a theme all year long. The break lines in the middle classification are going to be swinging back and forth for most of the year.

Part of the reason for that is is the somewhat volatile nature of the first few projections. 23 new teams entered the projection between the first projection and the current one and obviously with that comes some movement up and down the draw.

23 teams is actually a relatively low number of new teams to enter the projection between the first and second weeks, but the thing that actually has more emphasis on moving the classification lines around is not actually the number of new teams, but the identity of those teams and where they are coming from.

Many of the changes that are made in the early season projections are simply what I call straight swaps. One team beats another and changes my perception of which teams from one conference will get in and which will not. This happens a lot in the early season and less so once we get deeper in the year.

And when those straight swaps happen they don’t often have much of an effect on the field’s break lines. That’s because most conferences don’t have a wide variation between classifications amongst the members. More often than not there’s no more than a two classification variance from the smallest school in a conference to the largest.

There are obviously exceptions to this rule. But there’s one rather large block of schools where this doesn’t apply: the Chicago Public League.

There are conferences in the CPL where there are 3A schools in the same conference with 8A schools. One conference in the CPL has a range of 422 to 2897.

So if the projection indicated that the 2,897 enrollment school should be swapped for the 422 that has a sweeping shift affect on all classifications.

Adding another wrinkle in the equation was that the IHSA multiplier process was changed this year and required schools ask for a multiplier waiver. Many of the CPL schools are non-boundaried and are subjected to the IHSA 1.65 multiplier if they aren’t granted a waiver and in the past most of them were given one. But it appears not many CPL schools requested those waivers, because even though three of them met the required standard to be multiplied anyway, only a small fraction of those potential eligible seemed to attempt to exercise the option.

Under previous playoff projections with the former enrollments, CPL schools would tend to collect in the Class 4A and 5A draws. The new enrollments are pushing those schools that do make the projection into higher classifications. For example, this week’s Class 4A projection has just three CPL teams.

With those teams moving up, coupled with some new teams crashing the party this week, the cutoff number between Class 4A and Class 5A continues to rise. This week, for the first time since I’ve been doing the eight-class projection, I have a school with a football enrollment of over 1,000 in the Class 4A field.

And while it is always prudent to keep in mind that it is very early in the projection cycle, what this ultimately probably means is that teams in the 900 enrollment range such as Montini, Boylan, Cahokia and Sterling are very much in play to be 4A postseason teams. Teams in the 800 range like Morris, Rochelle and Highland are starting to look like locks for 4A.

That surge is showing itself in 5A as well where schools like Glenwood, Crete-Monee, Washington and Dunlap, all of whom typically land in the 6A field are trending toward 5A. Cary-Grove, a long-time 6A combatant, now finds itself almost over 10 teams deep in the Class 5A projection.

Here is the Week 2 playoff projection for all eight classes:

Class 1A

Class 2A

Class 3A

Class 4A

Class 5A

Class 6A

Class 7A

Class 8A