When the IHSAA said it would no longer pre-set a full bracket for the football postseason, instead setting up an “as-you-go” for each round, I wondered if there would be final brackets made after the finals. That did not happen.
So I made my own. I started with the championships, worked backward round by round, and then finally, determined seedings based on the order given in the online district standings. Here are the brackets: Class 8, Class A, Class 1A, Class 2A, Class 3A, Class 4A. The seeding is the district number plus the letter of finish, i.e. “5B” means the second-place team in District 5. Please note that they are not necessarily home team on top, as I did not have that information. Regular-season records are included for every team in the first round.
After looking at these retroactive or reverse-engineered brackets, here are some statistics of note. Remember: There are 192 teams overall and 96 first-round games overall.
- Two 2-7 teams made it, both in 4A: Cedar Rapids Kennedy, which was technically third place in District 5 based on district record and point differential, and Clinton.
ThreeFour 3-6 teams were included: Des Moines Lincoln, Dubuque Wahlert, Underwood, and Lake Mills.- 21 teams had four wins (4-5), including 4-4 Des Moines East.
- Nine teams with 7-2 records, as well as 8-1 Graettinger-Terril/Ruthven-Ayrshire, would have been left out in the previous 16-team-per-class postseason structure. There was a three-way logjam in 8-man District 2 with three teams posting 6-1 district records. This scenario is one of the justifications for the expanded postseason.
- District champions played fourth-place teams with five exceptions: AHSTW and Panorama in 1A; Clear Lake in 2A; and Waverly-Shell Rock and Washington in Class 3A. They all played third-place teams.
- There were only three games where the fourth-place team won: 8-man, Harris-Lake Park over district champion Boyer Valley; 3A, Webster City over district champion Ballard; 3A, Newton over Clear Creek Amana.
- By the quarterfinals, there were only two third-place teams still alive, both in Class A: Denver and Earlham.
- Four of the six classes, all except 1A and 4A, made their western Iowa District 1 teams play each other again in the first round. That was unavoidable given the geographic limitations. (However, 3A District 1 champ Sioux City Heelan ended up playing District 2 fourth-place Webster City in the next round anyway after the aforementioned upset.)
- Overall, 16 first-round games were district rematches.
- Class 4A had a clean east-west split in the two halves of the bracket. Class A would have had the same thing, generally south+west vs. north+east, if BGM and Van Buren had been swapped.
EDIT 6/16/15: Corrected number of 3-6 teams.