GREEN BAY — The high school football regular season ends this week, and fans will notice a different playoff qualifying and seeding format.
Past years have been marred by controversy, so the WFCA and the WIAA have instituted what’s called a playoff matrix.
NBC 26 caught up with coaches and the WIAA to find out how it works.
Starting this year, teams were assigned divisions before the season started — a change from previous years when divisions were assigned after the full playoff field was determined.
The top 32 teams in each division make the playoffs.
From there, they’re divided into four geographical regions and are seeded 1 through 8.
“The basic outlook on this is you want to win your games. That is priority number one and then you want your defeated opponents to win the remainder of their games,” said Jake Beschta, the WIAA assistant director.
According to Beschta, teams are awarded points from two main tiers.
The first is based on who you beat. Teams earn different point values based on the division their opponent is in.
Beating a Division 1 team is worth 6.5 points.
That value lessens by a half point per division — 6 for D-2, 5.5 for D-3, all the way down to 3.5 for D-7.
“For each win, I get the divisional value points of that team I defeated and then at the end of the season, that total is divided by the number of games my team played and that gives me my Division 1 score,” Beschta said.
Then there’s tier two, which gives teams the points of their defeated opponents.
“That number is divided by the number of games your opponents play and then it’s multiplied by strength of schedule multiplier, which is nine, and that’s simply because there’s nine games in a season — a full schedule — so you’re getting credit for each one of those games,” Beschta said.
The points from the two tiers are combined to establish a team’s score.
For example, from projected scores from D-2 according to the WFCA, West De Pere and Notre Dame are both 8-0, but the Phantoms (30.08) have nearly six more overall points than the Tritons (24.83) mainly because of their strength of schedule. They have beaten four Division 1 schools and Notre Dame has only beaten three.
But the coaches NBC 26 spoke to are on board with the change.
“There was a pretty overwhelming agreement from the WFCA that this was a better system than what we had and this will be the first year that we put that to the test,” said Notre Dame head coach Mike Rader.
“Hey, there’s still some things that will probably get better in future years and I’m looking forward to this system starting like this and then improving as we go along,” said Neenah head coach Steve Jung.
The final seedings will be put out on Saturday morning by the WIAA.
