Steve Soucie’s Week 7 playoff projection: Field starts to stabilize, seeds do not

There’s always a point in the attempt to project the IHSA playoffs where the picture becomes a bit clearer.

That happened in one way after the Week 6 results. And it got a lot more blurred in another.

The field of teams is starting to come into focus. That’s a perfectly reasonable expectation to have considering 120 teams have already reached the five win plateau.

And taking in the other consideration that it appears extremely likely that all five win teams will qualify, that means that almost half the field at least in terms of qualification have already secured their places in the field.

But what happened this week that caused significant changes all over every classification were some big victories recorded by either slight underdogs or huge underdogs where the winner and loser of the contest were already projected into the field.

Examples of that would be Geneva’s win over Batavia; Brother Rice’s win over Mount Carmel or Rochelle’s victory over Morris.

Other games re-established a team’s ability to pick up a win over a quality opponent causing a reassessment of where those teams fall in their respective conference pecking order such as Richmond-Burton’s comfortable win over Sandwich or Fenwick’s relatively comfortable win over St. Laurence.

Week 6 also wasn’t devoid of notable upset victories either. Although just 11 new or returning teams were added to the projection this week, which is easily a season-low in terms of teams being swapped in or out, Carrollton’s win over Hardin Calhoun puts them on a path to a berth that wasn’t clearly there before and Galena made a big stride toward its slot with a win over Fulton despite an ominous back end of its schedule.

And of course what would this process be without a little wrinkle courtesy of the Chicago Public League, where it was revealed that the four CPL divisions that were originally only going to give playoff qualifying bids to division championships will now give two more bids to runner-up teams in those divisions that will play against one another in Week 9 to decide who will get playoff eligibility. Although it may seem like a small thing, those two bids could potentially mean a lot for the four-win teams hoping to get in the field with a large cache of playoff playoffs.

With that revision made to the process, nine four win teams will be needed to complete the playoff field of 256 teams. Not surprisingly four of those nine teams are currently projected to come from the CCL/ESCC and it took a tiebreaker at 47 points to decide what team would make the field (East Moline United) and the first team out (Hinsdale South).

Here is the Week 7 playoff projection for all eight classes. (below each bracket is more context on what happened in Week 6 that changed the make-up of the brackets):

Class 1A

Class 1A Enrollment Range: Up to 303 (Arthur)

New teams in field:

Class 1A North/South Map

Class 2A

Class 2A Enrollment Range: 304.5 (Bloomington Central Catholic) to 412 (Carlinville)

New teams in the field:

Class 2A North/South Map

Class 3A

Class 3A Enrollment Range: 415.5 (Paxton) to 561.5 (South Shore)

New teams in field:

Class 3A North/South Map

Class 4A

Class 4A Enrollment Range: 563.5 (Peoria Notre Dame) to 851.5 (Centralia)

New teams in field:

Class 4A North/South Map

Class 5A

Class 5A Enrollment Range: 868.5 (Rochelle) to 1326.5 (Kaneland)

New teams in field:

Class 5A North/South Map

Class 6A

Class 6A Enrollment Range: 1340.5 (Dunlap) to 1833 (Wheaton Warrenville South)

New teams in field:

Class 6A North/South Map

Class 7A

Class 7A Enrollment Range: 1868 (Willowbrook) to 2255 (Glenbard East)

New teams in field:

Class 8A

Class 8A Enrollment Range: 2307 (Edwardsville) and up

New teams in field: