Your state's high school football playoff system

For purposes of comparison and contrast, I invite you to share the particulars of your state's high school football playoff system.

MICHIGAN
Any team in Michigan that goes 6-3 (or 5-3) qualifies for the playoffs. Enough 4-loss teams necessary are then added to fill out a 256-team field. Those 256 teams are then split into eight divisions by enrollment (so one does not know what Division one is in until the pairings are announced). Those eight divisions are then divided into four regional brackets of 8 by geography, and each region is broken into two districts, also by geography. Teams in each district are seeded 1-4 by "playoff point average" (basically, strength of victory). Playoff point average continues to determine home-field advantage until the state semifinals (which are held at predetermined neutral sites).

The five-round tournament concludes in eight championship games held on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving at Ford Field in Detroit.

There are also two 16-team divisions of 9-man tournaments, conducted on similar principles, which conclude at the Superior Dome in Marquette the weekend before Thanksgiving.

PROS: The 6-win qualification does set a reasonable bar for qualification without excluding anyone who could make a reasonable case at making a run. The regionalized system keeps travel costs fairly low until the later rounds (unless you're north of the middle of the Lower Peninsula). All seeding is done by a mathematical system, removing any biases or "eye tests" from the equation.

CONS: Because the MHSAA does not involve itself in regular season scheduling and the benefit of playing a good team and losing is basically nil, teams are incentivized to hand-pick their schedules as much as possible to get to six wins, making scheduling difficult for schools without similarly-sized peers nearby. Regionalizing the tournament to this degree can create lopsided draws, such as second-round playoff games between undefeated teams.

 

California is divided into 10 sections that each have their own systems for playoffs. All have divisions based on the number of teams in each section. Each section has its own criteria for making the playoffs that all have some system of league finish and strength of schedule. But this opens the door for a 2-8 team making the playoffs. I think I've also seen a 1-9 team make it. From there the division winners* advance to regional championships in one of 13 competitive divisions (teams are grouped based on equitable competitiveness rather than school size. I think this is meant to give public schools a chance to avoid private schools). Winners of the NorCal and SoCal regions advance to state championships.

* If a section has an open division, a runner up in the open can replace a non-open division winner. So in the section I used to cover, there were five divisions with the top 3 being labeled as open divisions. The top 3 divisions are populated by 24 teams from the most competitive leagues (called A leagues in a 3-tier system). The remaining 16 slots are from B and C leagues. The 3 open winners advance and the next two non-winners advance to the NorCals.

The upside is we get our state champions decided within 6 weeks and more teams have an opportunity to make the playoffs.

Downside the hodgepodge of systems means there is an inconsistency of which teams make it.

 

MISSISSIPPI
Note: There are separate associations for the public and private schools, and each has their own system

Public schools
Classes 1A, 5A and 6A (6A is the largest) are divided into four regions, and the top four from each region qualify for a 16-team bracket.
Classes 2A, 3A and 4A have eight regions where the top four qualify in a 32-team bracket.
The state is divided along north-south lines, with half of the regions in the north and half in the south, and the North and South champion meet at a neutral site for the state championship game. This year it's at Southern Miss, but it rotates between there, Mississippi State and Ole Miss.

Pros: Teams can earn their way in without non-region games being a factor at all. The North-South split helps some with travel, although the state is big enough that two- and three-hour road trips are normal. That even happens in region play.

Cons: The higher classifications have good teams, but the middle ones get some dreadful ones because some of the regions only have five or six teams thanks to the weird way they split up the classes. There's a 1-10 team in the playoffs this season.
The North-South split for Class 1A is also bizarre because there are only about a half-dozen Class 1A teams south of Jackson. There are some teams that play in the South bracket that are located near Starkville or in the Delta. That's a bigger issue than the playoff bracket, though.

Private schools
There are six classifications, including one for 8-Man football, although starting next year there will be two classes for 8-Man.
Some of the classifications are bigger than others, so the brackets range from six to 16 teams. The higher seed gets home field advantage all the way through to the championship game, which is played at a neutral site in or near Jackson.
For all of the brackets, the district champions get automatic bids and the rest of the teams are selected through a power points system. Teams get points for wins and strength of schedule (bonuses for playing teams in higher classifications, as well as for games their opponents have won), which is divided by the number of games played to come up with an average that they're ranked by.

Pros: You can earn your way into the playoffs by winning the district, but good teams aren't left out. Also, because you get points for your opponents' wins, you wind up with late-season scenarios where random games on the other side of the state mean something to someone. A Class AA team your competitor played in Week 2, playing a Class 4A team in Week 10, can affect the Class AAA playoff race. It's some fun chaos to try and figure out.

Cons: The brackets are too big for the number of teams in some of the classes. There were 23 teams in Class 3A this year and 16 of them made the playoffs. One year, one of our locals lost its last eight games and still made the playoffs -- a situation even one of the assistant coaches cursed about, because he had planned to go to a college game the weekend of the first round.

 

What always bugged me was that San Francisco's AAA and the Oakland Athletic League were their own sections, while my school was one of 100-plus in the North Coast Section, which basically included schools all the way from the East Bay to Eureka. I think there were two groups: Clayton Valley beat Pinole Valley in the large school championship that year. Obviously, before De La Salle's domination of everything.

 

And the southern section is even worse with schools from Pismo down to San Diego and from the coast to the Nevada border and Palm Springs up to near Tahoe.

 

MISSOURI'S SHITTY SYSTEM

The 9-game regular season doesn't eliminate anyone, just serves to seed the distrct tournaments.

An 0-9 team could catch fire and win a state title.

3 weeks of district play, then sectionals, quarterfinals, semifinals, and finally championship games played on Thanksgiving weekend, formerly at the Dome in St. Louis, now at Mizzou.

 

Some schools in the San Luis Obispo area transferred from the Southern to the Central this fall. So instead of losing to LA schools, they're losing to Fresno and Bakersfield.
Not to forget schools in the Lake Tahoe area that play in the NIAA instead of the CIF. Nevada state champions are just 15 minutes away.

 

Beginning this season, Kansas has what amounts to three playoff systems.

Classes 6A, 5A, and 4A (each with 32 teams) are somewhat like Missouri. It's an eight-game regular season and everyone makes the playoffs (so, like Missouri there's this possibility an 0-9 team could catch fire but bad Kansas teams are usually horrible).

Kansas splits the teams into two halves (Missouri splits them into multiple districts). The halves are seeded 1 through 16. The higher seed hosts all the way to the semifinal (Sub-State as it's called here).

The scheduling is open, meaning anyone can play anyone during the regular season. It's meant to keep leagues relevant but it also leads to oddities. Bishop Miege is a Class 4A school but is a long-time member of a league with 6A and 5A schools (and it used to be a 5A school itself). That means its first game against a Class 4A school this season was its first-round playoff game.

These three classes also have a tie-breaker system: 1. winning percentage, 2. head-to-head, 3. points. Points are given to a team for each point in their margin of victory (or subtracted if they lost) up to 13 points — unless it was an overtime game, in which case the max is 1 point.

In 4A East, there was only one undefeated team. None of the three 8-1 teams played each other. There were three 7-2 teams, one of which was Miege. And none of them played each other. Head-to-head didn't come into play at all in seeding the bracket.

The east-west split is a bit lopsided in these classes. In Class 6A, you were east if you were in Johnson County and west if you were anywhere else. Lawrence and Topeka were west teams. Teams from the Southeast Kansas League could have played each other for the 4A title because two of its teams were put on the west side. And one thing an area coach was concerned about was rematches of games played a week or two ago in the first round of the playoffs. That happened to Ulysses (the only 4A school west of Hutchinson), which had to go to Abilene for its final regular-season game and back there again for its first playoff game (lost the first, won the second).

Ulysses played its last home game on September 29. They had a bye the following week because they couldn't find anyone and then closed out with two road games to end the regular season and two road playoff games. And its seed was low enough that it wouldn't have had a chance at another home game even if they had managed to upset McPherson (the only undefeated team in the west) Friday night.

Classes 3A and 2A have playoff systems based on the old district system. Each class had 48 teams, drawn into eight districts of six teams each. The top four made the playoffs. The bottom two played week nine games — I guess you could call it a consolation round — against the bottom two games from their neighboring district. The first three games of the regular season were open scheduling but the last five you had to play against teams from your district. The tie-breaker was the same except that the points went up to 21.

Parsons was assigned to Class 3A but it plays in a 4A league. It decided to withdraw from its league in football because what was the point of playing teams that were bigger than it and being ineligible for the championship because it could only play three league games?

Class 1A was pretty much the old system. It was originally going to be the 32 (or more) smallest 11-man football schools. I think they were expecting somewhere between 36 and 40 teams but they ended up with only 31. So they ended up with eight 4-team districts (except District 8, which had only three teams) and everyone made the playoffs. The champion of District 7 had a first-round bye only because there wasn't a fourth team in District 8.

The two eight-man divisions (there are about 90 eight-man teams) had the same format as 3A and 2A.

The old system used to have non-sensical ways to determine home-field advantage. For instance, under the old system, Ulysses (4-4) would have been the home team against unbeaten McPherson Friday night.

 

I give you ... New Jersey.

NJSIAA's new football playoff system is a disaster | Politi

 

I remember as a kid I could never even figure out the premise of the New Jersey system. All of the schools around Trenton played each other in a league that included a small Catholic school, the big city high school with 2,000 students, and a dozen others in between. At the end of the season, though, they somehow got placed into their respective classifications based on results ... or something.

 

Good Tebow. That's even crazier than the Central Section letting anyone who wants to be on the playoffs in.

 

MASSACHUSETTS
8 divisions predetermined divided into 4 sections. Most have 12ish teams, top 8 by power ranking make it, play weeks 8, 9, 10 for sectional titles then whittle it down from there.

Pros: true state champions. Eight seems like a shit ton for state Mass size but before this they were crowning as many as 20. Also gives good teams a mulligan for one bad game. Under the old 20 Champs system only league champions went so really good one loss teams got no playoffs. Incentivized leagues to divide into a zillion 4 team divisions to create more berths.

Cons: too many divisions. Every now and then a really shitty team gets in (an 0-7 made it), because there's Thanksgiving day games teams that are out play other teams that are out for 1-2 weeks and more often than not those games are dog food.