One of multiple proposals by membership schools to make changes to Illinois High School Association protocols is Proposal 19.

Submitted by Monticello High School, the proposal is primarily centered around expanding the current playoff field from 256 teams to 384 teams, adding 16 schools to each classification’s playoff fields.

This proposal is now under consideration by all IHSA member schools. Schools will have the ability to vote on each of the ballot initiatives and a majority vote of schools voting will allow this proposition to be put into play for the 2026 football season. Voting will commence through December 15 and the results will be released shortly thereafter.

The top 16 teams in each classification will receive byes, while the remaining 32 teams will play opening round games feeding into the teams that received byes.

In order to make this system work, six weeks of the postseason will be required. The Monticello proposal is requesting that the football season moved up by one week to accommodate for the 9-week regular season followed by the extended playoff.

All other IHSA standards for setting the field will be retained including multipliers, waivers and teams electing to voluntarily “play up”. The difference will be extending the number of teams that qualify for the playoffs.

The proposers believe that by expanding the playoff field team’s difficulties in scheduling games will be very much decreased as teams will no longer feel as significant a strain in getting enough wins for playoff qualification.

Detractors believe that the proposition will water down the playoffs. While five wins has become the standard for basic playoff qualification currently, under this proposed system all teams with three wins would make the playoffs and some teams with two wins and a high number of playoff points would make the field in nearly every season.

By using the records and playoff points of the last three seasons here is the breakdown of how many teams at each record level would make the postseason using the 384-team model:

In the 384-team model all teams with at least three wins would make the playoff field. A portion, in most seasons, nearly half of teams that finish with a 2-7 record would also qualify. In the case of the 2025 data, 32 2-7 teams would make the field with a minimum of 42 playoff points required to make the field as a 2-win team.

Below are the playoff fields that would have been built had the field been constructed with using a 384 team qualifying method.

There are several things to keep in mind when looking at this process.

All current enrollments, multiplier status, playing up status and success formulas that were used in the 2025 season were used to build this bracket.

The four conferences in the Chicago Public League that use different qualifying standards than all other conferences were also used in this process.

Class 8A

Class 7A

Class 6A

Class 5A

Class 4A

Class 3A

Class 2A

Class 1A