The WIAA Board of Control approved expanding the 8-player football playoff to 32 teams, along with the Football Playoff Matrix that will be used for playoff qualification, seeding, and groupings.
The board of control in an 11-0 vote approved expanding the 8-player playoff to 32 teams from its current 16. In order to accommodate the additional teams and keep the state championship game on the Saturday before the 11-player state championships, the start of the 8-player season will be moved up a week and Level 1 of the 8-player tournament will be played on the same Friday of Week 9 of the 11-Player season.
In two other votes, the board of control approved the new Football Playoff Matrix 10-1 for qualification and seeding and 8-3 for making regional groupings.
Under the new system all 11-player teams will be divided evenly into the 7 divisions and the best 32 teams in FPM score in each division make the playoffs.
Each team’s Football Playoff Matrix score is determined in two tiers, tier one is by taking the average of the division score for each defeated opponent, 6.5 points for a Division 1 team, 6 for a Division 2 … down to 3.5 points for Division 7. 8 player has 3 points for an 8 player team 3.3 points for an 8 player team with an enrollment over 200.
Tier two is each of your defeated team’s tier 1 scores divided by your opponent’s games played multiplied by 9.
So for example Medford would have had a Tier 1 score of 4.89, a Tier 2 score of 21.72. That would have ranked them as the 4th best team in Division 3.
The next step is to create the 4 groupings in each division. Under the new system, the top four teams in each division are given the 4 one seeds. In D3 last year that would have been GB Notre Dame, Mount Horeb/Barneveld, Grafton, and Medford. Then seeds 5-8 are assigned to each group based on geography. Then the rest of the teams are added through the same process.
Division 3 Group B under this system would have been
1 Medford
2 La Crosse Logan
3 Onalaska
4 Plymouth
5 Whitefish Bay
6 Fox Valley Lutheran
7 Lakeland
8 Antigo
You can read the full plan including full rankings from last season and playoff brackets here.
