IHSA playoff football expansion is here, ready or not

There are a million ways to write a column about IHSA playoff football expansion.

The easiest ways are to either bash the expansion or praise it. But what’s coming in the 2026 season bleeds too many shades of gray to take the easy way out.

The enormous shift, announced this week, expands the eight-class field by 128 schools. In a ballot conducted the last few weeks, IHSA member schools voted overwhelming in favor of the amendment proposal (377-252 with 96 abstentions).

By increasing the number of qualifiers from 256 to 384, each class grows to 48 teams with the top 16 seeds getting a first-round bye. The playoffs stretch an additional week, forcing the regular season to start a week early.

Expansion means teams with 4-5, 3-6 and even some with 2-7 records will now qualify for the playoffs. So if you thought postseason blowouts were an issue before, just wait.

This season, at least seven of the 16 first-round games in every class had a margin of at least four touchdowns. Seventy of the 128 games in total.

While the top seeds likely won’t play the 2-7 teams because of the bye, there will be plenty of great teams bashing the new blood in the opening round. And for teams that do survive the first round, they’ll have to turn around and play a top seed coming off a bye week.

It’ll take six playoff wins, not five, for a team without a bye to win a state title. That creates a brutal 15-game schedule.

The bye builds in a massive advantage for teams already owning an advantage in talent. I believe the top teams have earned an edge (like home playoff games in team sports), but the bye might be a little too much.

That said, I also see the positives of expansion.

There are always strong 4-5 and 3-6 teams that don’t qualify, although many folks won’t be happy to hear most of them are private schools. Two years ago, Nazareth sneaked into the field as a 4-5 team and wound up winning the Class 5A state title.

Another point: Theoretically, it should now be easier for schools to schedule nonconference games because there’s no longer a worry about reaching five wins.

You can draw a straight line between the obsession with getting to five wins and the enormous amount of conference shuffling over the last several years as schools abandoned decades of tradition for a better shot at the football playoffs.

One final point: More teams will have more to play for late in the regular season. Far fewer teams will simply play out the string in a campaign with no playoff hopes.

Long story short, I can relate to both sides of the expansion debate.

There are still kinks to work out with the plan. For example, every football team in the state now has to adjust their schedule because the season starts a week earlier.

There are teams currently looking for games because of cancellations caused by sudden schedule conflicts, but hopefully it’s a minor inconvenience.

So now that we’re in this brave new world, I do have one question.

At what point do we just let every school into the football playoffs?