I said I wasn’t going to do this. Furthermore, I said I wasn’t going to go all out on it. Perfectionist me begs to differ.
That’s right, the reverse football playoff brackets are back, in a manner of speaking. Once again, trying to wade through the absolute mess that is the IHSAA website put me in my workshop tinkering with a better mousetrap, or at least a competent one.
This year, every team was in the “postseason”, creating a round-of-64 level with a varying number of first-week byes by class. Pods were numbered, then lettered, reshuffled after the second round and the quarterfinals. My main goal with these is to show “path to the championship” lines, and I was doing 1-line scores, so I didn’t set them up by the pod order. If you want those, you’ll have to dig into either a newspaper’s website or the IHSAA’s, and you’ll have to look in multiple places. Home teams are bolded.
I started with each class’s final and worked backwards. The only guiding principle was to structure it such that it looks mostly obvious where the bracket lines would be if I stretched it out more. By the end, or should I say the beginning (first round), I docked a point size to make them all fit. The only time I indicated a seeding was the quarterfinals, which I got from the Register, and I believe are RPI rankings because they didn’t quite match the polls.
The brackets: Class 8, Class A, Class 1A, Class 2A, Class 3A, Class 4A.
