A proposal to expand the IHSA football playoffs by 128 teams was passed by a school-wide membership vote, 377-252 (with 96 abstentions).

The proposal, submitted by Monticello High School, will change the landscape of the IHSA football season in a number of ways.

First and foremost, the playoff field will expand by 128 teams, increasing the field of qualifiers from 256 teams to 384. The field has been at 256 teams since the 2001 season.

The eight classifications will remain, but instead of 32 teams in each field, it will become 48-team fields. The highest 16 seeds in each bracket (1 through 16 in Class 7A-8A and the top eight seeds in the north and south brackets in Class 1A through 6A) will receive byes into the second round.

The playoff season will now encompass six weeks of the season and still will conclude on Thanksgiving weekend.

The regular season will still include nine games, but the beginning of the season will start one week earlier to accommodate the extra week of playoffs that needs to be scheduled.

This adjustment will eliminate the Week 0 scrimmage week and will allow for just 10 dates to get nine practices in the preseason to meet the previously established state acclimatization practices.

All other IHSA standards for setting the field will be retained, including multipliers, waivers and teams electing to voluntarily “play up”. Teams will be placed in the field and seeded the same way they have been, and seeded first by total of wins and second by number of playoff points (total wins of one’s opponents).

By utilizing previous season’s data, all nine-, eight-, seven-, six-, five-, four- and three-win teams will now make the playoffs. Several two-win teams also will make the playoffs, and that will vary from season to season.

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

A portion, in most seasons, that includes about half of the teams that finish with a 2-7 record would 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.

The playoff fields that would have been built had the field been constructed using a 384-team qualifying method can be found here.

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 these brackets. Since the IHSA is now using a year-to-year enrollment indicator, some schools’ enrollment numbers could change enough that they might be in another classification next season.

Also, there are four conferences in the Chicago Public League that use different qualifying standards than all other conferences were also used in this process. There is no information available on whether those conferences will still use different qualifying protocols. If they remove those restrictions, several more CPL teams will qualify, and possibly as many as 10 fewer 2-7 teams would reach the fields.

IHSA Executive Director Craig Anderson commented via press release on the new policy.

“Too often throughout the years, football decisions have negatively impacted other sports at IHSA schools,” Anderson said. “We are hopeful that this football playoff expansion will provide intended relief to our schools by stabilizing conference movement and eliminating the difficulty of scheduling football games that many of our schools face each year. It may create some short-term complications for some schools, conferences, and coaches, but we remain optimistic it will create long-term stability in football and beyond.”