The only thing I've heard is that they were going to go back to more of a seed based bracket than geographical bracket. Geography will still play a part though, since they don't want any 5-4 teams traveling 500 miles to get their behinds handed to them. Espically with gas at $2.50 plus.
If I had to bet, I'd say look for a somewhat southern bracket of 32 and a and a all northern bracket of 32 in 7A. I wouldn't see them setting it up with Alton, and East St, Louis in one bracket & Edwardsville & O'Fallon in another.
Look for geography to play a part more in 5A and lower. Don't hold me to that though, these are just my thought and nothing official from the IHSA.
__________________
Vincent Johnson/Editor-in-Chief
www.IHSFW.com
Somebody has to cover the entire state.
It kind of answers the questions. Bascially everybody will just have to sit tight and wait till the end of week 9.
As far as 7A goes, I would suspect that teams from the Rockford are will be on one side & teams from the St. Louis area will be on the other. After that, unless Pekin, Qunicy or Bradley-Bour. turn things around everybody but the teams from eeh Southwestern will be on or north of I-80.
Grouping and Seeding the Brackets
Once the 32 teams in a particular class are determined, they are grouped manually by the IHSA Office. Each class is grouped into two halves of 16 teams based on the general location of the schools within that class.
Then, within each half, the seeds are determined by sorting the teams by two of the factors used to determine playoff berths:
* Total wins * Combined wins of all opponents (known as "playoff points")
If two or more teams are tied for a particular seed, the following tiebreakers are applied:
* Head-to-head record (if exactly two teams are tied) * Conference standing (if none of the tied teams is an independent). Ties in conference standing are not broken, except that a single champion is determined according to conference rules, as mentioned in the first section. * Random selection by computer
If, in any half, the natural first-round pairings (1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc.) result in two or more trips exceeding 150 miles, an attempt will be made to re-pair the 16 teams into quadrants of eight teams each. If, in these quadrants, the natural first-round pairings (1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, etc.) do not eliminate more than half of the 150-mile trips, the attempt will be abandoned and the original pairings using all 16 teams will be used.
__________________
Vincent Johnson/Editor-in-Chief
www.IHSFW.com
Somebody has to cover the entire state.
So I am guessing in 7A we will have two brackets of 16. If this is true, then IHSA can determine who plays whom, by any means they want.
They can put any team where they want in the two brackets, deaming it impossible to "predict" who each team will play in the first round. In years past the quadrant system made it pretty easy for the Southwestern Coaches to predict who was going to play whom. This year is a crap shoot.
