I shouldn’t have to do this. I don’t really have to do this. And yet, I do.
This is, once again, my way of expressing extreme brow-furrowing at the IHSAA for being strange in how it goes about publishing finalized state football playoff brackets.
Now, to the IHSAA’s credit, there is a compilation of brackets from the 2018 playoffs now available. It has an RPI list and regular-season records. It doesn’t unify the pods with the finals, though. But something needed to be done because guess what, the website redesign launched the first week of the playoffs 404’d all their links from my 2018 bracket announcement! Ironically, the football archive links for 2013-17 are broken, but the 2007-12 pages in good ol’ HTML are still accessible. Before that, there was an incomplete archiving.
I am looking for, and thus I made, something with the following:
- All matchups from first round to championship in one frame
- All RPI rankings, including the marking of at-large bids
- Records of all the teams involved
- The home team marked in some manner. This was actually the trickiest, because it brought to the forefront the clash between “high seed goes on top” of a typical bracket and “home team goes on bottom” of a typical scoresheet. I went with the former.
- Scores that have the numbers next to each other
Individual PDFs: Class 8, Class A, Class 1A, Class 2A, Class 3A, Class 4A. The combined PDF has some layout adjustments because a margin appeared to leave out the edges. I’ve put it in bracket format, but maybe next time, I will go down to a straight-up list like the old archive links.
Because of the pod system and re-seeding, a complete bracket before the playoffs begin is not possible. But why does that stop you from 1) not merging them in the week before the semifinals and 2) not removing RPI numbers in the existing pod brackets after those games are played? From the IHSAA, here are the first two rounds of this year’s playoffs; here are the Dome brackets.
I’m being excessively nitpicky about this. I just feel it could be done better. The IGHSAU shifted the web engine it uses for postseason stuff, but this year’s volleyball brackets exist if you hit the right combination of search terms through Google.