Well, knock me over with a feather. The IHSAA is going back to 16 teams per class in the football postseason starting in 2016. There won’t be 2-7 teams in the playoffs anymore, and now the points start to matter again for 7-2 teams. There does not appear to be any plan to change the “as-you-go” bracketing, however.
It’s being framed as a player issue, to prevent playing four games in 15 days (F-W-M-F), but I believe the new hard start date for school was also a factor. I wholeheartedly support this reversal from a situation where more than half of teams qualified for the postseason.
If you want to see how things shook out last year, when 9-0 South Winneshiek squashing 3-6 Lake Mills was one of the matchups involving a team with a losing record, the all-classes-all-brackets PDF is linked in the sidebar and individual images are on this December blog post that also analyzed the brackets. If I do that again, I will try to make sure I capture the home/away splits.