High School

No guarantees for conference champions in new NCHSAA playoff format

The NCHSAA Board of Directors recently voted on several changes

Mike Duprez

NCHSAA
NCHSAA / File

Flash forward to November and your high school football team just won a conference championship. 

That means you’re playoff-bound, right?

Not necessarily.

Things are a lot different now in the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. The NCHSAA Board of Directors recently voted on several changes that were necessary because of the organization’s expansion from four to eight classifications.

State playoff berths now will be decided on a 40-40-20 RPI formula, which is to be run through MaxPreps. The formula will include a 40 percent weight on a team’s winning percentage, a 40 percent weight on an opponent’s winning percentage and a 20 percent weight on the winning percentage of their opponents’ opponents. Margin of victory was not included over fears teams would run up the score.

Conference champions and conference tournament champions will not be guaranteed playoff berths, a radical departure from the previous system. Almost all the new conferences are split, some among three classifications, making it impossible to guarantee each conference champion a playoff berth.

Under the new system, classifications 1-A through 7-A will have 48 teams in the playoffs. There will be 24 playoff teams from 8-A. 

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Mike Duprez
MIKE DUPREZ

Mike Duprez became a freelance sports journalist for Scorebooklive.com several months after retiring from the newspaper business. A native of Oakland, California, Duprez moved around as a child due to his father’s service in the United States Marine Corps. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981. Duprez, who lives in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, had 30 years of experience in newspapers as well as other endeavors before retiring at the end of 2021. He covers stories in both North Carolina and South Carolina for Scorebooklive.com.

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