{"id":5614,"date":"2014-12-17T10:17:56","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T16:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=5614"},"modified":"2015-06-16T01:23:43","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T06:23:43","slug":"creation-analysis-of-retroactive-football-brackets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2014\/12\/creation-analysis-of-retroactive-football-brackets\/","title":{"rendered":"Creation, analysis of retroactive football brackets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When the IHSAA said it would no longer pre-set a full bracket for the football postseason, instead setting up an &#8220;as-you-go&#8221; for each round, I wondered if there would be final brackets made after the finals. That did not happen.<\/p>\n<p>So I made my own. I started with the championships, worked backward round by round, and then finally, determined seedings based on the order <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iahsaa.org\/football\/2014-football-standings\/\">given in the online district standings<\/a>. Here are the brackets: <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket8_14.png\">Class 8<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket0A_14.png\">Class A<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket1A_14.png\">Class 1A<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket2A_14.png\">Class 2A<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket3A_14.png\">Class 3A<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/pdfs\/Bracket4A_14.png\">Class 4A<\/a>. The seeding is the district number plus the letter of finish, i.e. &#8220;5B&#8221; means the second-place team in District 5. Please note that they are <em>not necessarily<\/em> home team on top, as I did not have that information. Regular-season records are included for every team in the first round.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li><del>Three<\/del> Four 3-6 teams were included: Des Moines Lincoln, Dubuque Wahlert, Underwood, and Lake Mills.<\/li>\n<li>21 teams had four wins (4-5), including 4-4 Des Moines East.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>District champions played fourth-place teams\u00a0<em>with five exceptions<\/em>: AHSTW and Panorama in 1A; Clear Lake in 2A; and Waverly-Shell Rock and Washington in Class 3A. They all played third-place teams.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>By the quarterfinals, there were only\u00a0two\u00a0third-place teams still alive, both in Class A: Denver and Earlham.<\/li>\n<li>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.)<\/li>\n<li>Overall, 16 first-round games were district rematches.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>EDIT 6\/16\/15: Corrected number of 3-6 teams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the IHSAA said it would no longer pre-set a full bracket for the football postseason, instead setting up an &#8220;as-you-go&#8221; for each round, I wondered if there would be final brackets made after the finals. That did not happen. &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2014\/12\/creation-analysis-of-retroactive-football-brackets\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schools","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5614"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6239,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614\/revisions\/6239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}