The state may be ready for playoff football expansion, but not district scheduling

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

It’s the one about a section of the IHSA membership eager to turn prep football on its head with a proposal to alter the regular season and playoffs. Expansion, geographic districts … you know the drill.

A couple weeks ago, Steve Soucie at Shaw Local News Network wrote a story about a proposal submitted to the IHSA by Roxana High School officials that would expand the football playoffs from 36 to 48 teams in each of the eight classes. It’d also create a “Flexed Regional Model” of scheduling for the regular season that’d end the traditional conference system for football.

Schools would be free to schedule their own opponents for a few weeks a season, but the bulk of the games would be based on geography and enrollment.

IHSA officials first must decide whether or not to place the proposal on the annual ballot. If it goes to a member vote, the results would be revealed in December. According to the proposal, the changes would be in place for the 2026 season.

I feel like I just cut and pasted those sentences from the multiple stories I’ve written through the years on this subject. We’ve seen so many similar proposals come and go in the past.

Just two years ago the membership rejected a districting proposal. In 2018 the state approved a districting proposal but reversed it the very next year before it had a chance to be implemented.

We could go back further into the archives, but what’s the point? As we all know, nothing’s shaken the conference landscape that’s dominated for decades.

But here we are again, trying to undo those decades of tradition. According to the proposal, “The system provides flexibility at enrollment boundaries, expands the playoffs, and standardizes scheduling across the state while respecting traditional rivalries.”

Roxana officials say they’ve attracted support for the proposal, and I can’t imagine too many folks — the IHSA included — opposing playoff expansion. But I question the level of support for eliminating conference play in the regular season in favor of districts.

Did they check with members of the Mid-Suburban or Central Suburban, two balanced conferences adept at preserving key rivalries? How about the West Suburban Conference, which, while competitively imbalanced in many sports, has boasted a stable membership since the 1980s?

The DuKane and this version of the Upstate Eight are new to the scene compared to those more established conferences, but I doubt there’s an urge for this amount of change.

Bottom line, it seems like a mistake for the Roxana proposal to combine playoff expansion with district scheduling. It’s a lot to ask in one giant gulp.

Could it pass as is? Sure, anything’s possible based on the 2018 vote in favor of district scheduling. But my gut tells me the state is much more amenable to playoff expansion than it is for upending the regular season.

Combining the two ideas may be a reach too far.