After the Iowa high school football playoffs ended, I took the finals and started working backwards to create a post-hoc bracket for the season. I had two tools I didn’t last year: The IHSAA published a list of qualifiers in order, and I had the foresight to copy the list of games before each round so I knew where the games were being played.
Link to combined football brackets for all six classes, 2015 (PDF)
It takes a lot of time to make these, so if you find them useful, please drop an e-mail to let me know. Next year’s playoff field is being cut in half, which is a blessing for this work. After creating all the brackets and looking at the results along with the standings, here’s my analysis based on records and geography. Team regular-season records (overall, district) are included when they have a bearing on the factoid.
- All top-two teams in every district had home games the first round, so this makes me think I had some errors in the order of finishers in 2014.
- Gladbrook-Reinbeck was the only non-district champion to win a state title.
- Four fourth-place teams won their first-round games, including Creston toppling Harlan and Estherville-Lincoln Central over Southeast Valley.
- Speaking of Southeast Valley, Class 2A District 8 was a good example of why the brackets were expanded. SEV (7-2, 5-1) was the district champion over East Sac (5-4, 5-1) because of a one-point victory during the regular season, but East Sac in turn had the higher seeding over Shenandoah (7-2, 4-2). Then the latter two ended up playing each other in the first round anyway.
- Iowa City West (3-6, 3-1) was the second-place finisher in Class 4A District 7 by beating Dubuque Hempstead (6-3, 2-2) — with Davenport North (1-8, 1-3) finishing fourth because, well, someone had to.
- Some teams had one fewer game in the regular season because of heavy thunderstorms across Iowa the Friday before Labor Day, giving us two 4-4 teams (Harris-Lake Park and West Bend-Mallard). Springville (5-5, 4-3) got in a 10th game before losing to Don Bosco, which only played seven before the playoffs. Three 8-player district champions — and then Xavier and Dowling, who were supposed to play each other in Week 1 — had undefeated eight-game seasons.
- There were eight 3-6 teams and 21 4-5 teams.
- Four of six North Tama opponents in the postseason advanced to the second round, and that was only because East Buchanan played at GR.
- South Tama and Albia outscored their opponents by a combined 177-0 before playing each other (Albia won 17-6).
- Only Class 4A had a pure east/west split. Class 3A almost did, except for the node containing Pella, which eventually resulted in an all-District 7 faceoff in the final. But Class 3A overall is heavily tilted to the east; there were District 1 and 2 rematches in the first round and Sergeant Bluff-Luton was the only team west of US 169 to make the quarterfinals.
- Second-round matchups with notable distance between teams: Panorama at Dike-New Hartford (2A), HLV at Elkader (8), West Bend-Mallard at Janesville (8), Akron-Westfield at Logan-Magnolia (A), Boyden-Hull/Rock Valley at Webster City (3A). Council Bluffs Lewis Central had to make three trips to the Des Moines metro.
Creating the bracket knowing the home teams brought up an interesting design quirk. In a convention so widespread I wasn’t conscious of it until about a year ago, when sports websites give scores the home team is always on the bottom. However, in brackets (e.g. the NCAA tournament), the higher seed starts on the top or outside. So I had to pick which convention to use, and since I have the district placement coded beside the name, I went with putting the home team on the bottom. This is one of those things that you only consciously think about when the two styles pop up beside each other. (Another would be the 10 days before and after Thanksgiving when you see home football teams playing in colored jerseys while the away team is in white, but the home basketball team plays in white while the away team plays in color.)