Steve Soucie’s Week 8 playoff projection: Field looks to be stabilizing, but much room for variability

The picture of the IHSA playoffs gets clearer every week as more results pour in and more teams secure their spots.

102 spots are already officially secured by teams with six wins or more and another 67 already pretty close to locked in with five wins, there’s still a lot to be settled for the other spots.

But perhaps what is making this year different in regards to figuring out how the rest of the field fills out is this: the pack of teams that currently sit at three and four victories stands at over 150 teams. There’s even a couple of two wins teams that could enter the conversation by sweeping their final two games.

And nearly all of those teams are facing several other of the teams in the same situation as them over the last two weeks.

The paths to playoff spots involve more teams with a path to get there and there are just as many options for teams to fall short in that quest.

And then there are things that just won’t sort themselves out.

The Big Northern Conference has three teams in Byron, Dixon and Rockford Lutheran that have broke free from the pack. But four more teams (Oregon, Stillman Valley, Genoa-Kingston and North Boone) that sit at either three or four victories. There’s a route, albeit unlikely, where all four of those teams could make the playoff field, there’s also a route where none of them make it.

In the end, it will probably be two teams. But it could be three, it might be one too. And where those teams fit on the enrollment list affect all the teams that sit around the bubbles in Class 2A, 3A and 4A.

The Big Northern Conference is far from alone in this scenario. There are jumbles in the Heart of Central Illinois, Illini Prairie, Kishwaukee River and a particularly tricky log jam in the Northern Illinois 10.

All of them effectively will sort out and could have a huge effect on how many four win teams are needed to make the field. Upsets will happen in Week 8 and particularly in Week 9, but the key is what kind of upsets are they.

Are the upsets by teams that still won’t make the field with a win but potentially knock out another team that could? Or are they upsets that has a team forcing themselves into the field where that opportunity didn’t appear to be there before?

The projection currently has five teams with four wins needed to fill the field of 256. It seems more likely that that number will go up than down and it would require extreme chaos in the final two weeks to create scenario that none would be needed.

Here is the Week 7 playoff projection for all eight classes. (Included in Class 1A through 6A are north/south divisional maps and below each bracket is more context on what happened in Week 7 that changed the make-up of the brackets):

Class 1A

Class 1A Enrollment Range: Up to 304.5 (Bloomington Central Catholic)

New teams in field:

Class 1A North/South Map

Class 2A

Class 2A Enrollment Range: 307 (Momence) 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: None

Class 4A North/South Map

Class 5A

Class 5A Enrollment Range: 868.5 (Rochelle) to 1340.5 (Dunlap)

New teams in field:

Class 5A North/South Map

Class 6A

Class 6A Enrollment Range: 1374.5 (Simeon) to 1868 (Willowbrook)

New teams in field:

Class 6A North/South Map

Class 7A

Class 7A Enrollment Range: 1876 (Quincy) to 2322 (Glenbard West)

New teams in field:

Class 8A

Class 8A Enrollment Range: 2351.5 (Plainfield North) and up

New teams in field: