Football committee chair Mike Krueger. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com)
AURORA — Football league schedules are going to look vastly different in 2016 than they did last season.
During Thursday’s Legislative Council session, the proposed football league realignments (deemed the “waterfall alignment”) passed through a council vote, with 99 percent approving the football committee report.
Class 5A leagues are now officially divided based on a two-year average of teams’ total RPI. Other classes were divided with a combination of a waterfall and their geographical location.
The move for all sports to move to an RPI-based postseason selection process also passed Thursday.
“I’m excited for it, I think it’s going to more indicative of the final result than the Wild Card points,” CHSAA assistant commissioner Harry Waterman said. “Wild card served its purpose at the time, but it’s outdated now and I believe we have a better system.”
The general idea for the waterfall proposal was divide teams evenly throughout the state, using the RPI formula to determine league placing. The top seven teams in that ranking will each be placed into seven separate leagues. From there, teams will be snaked into leagues. So, No. 8 will be placed into the same league as No. 7; No. 9 will be with No. 6; No. 10 with No. 5, and so on — until all teams are placed into a league.
Also in 2016, all classes will move to a 16-team playoff field.
“With 5A, it was really important; it was the only one we could truly waterfall,” Waterman said. “In order to align with a 16-team bracket from 32, I think it was necessary to waterfall 5A, as the competitive balance wasn’t where we would’ve like it to be.”
In past years, 6-man has had an eight-team bracket while 5A has had a 32-team bracket. Every other class has held firm with 16 teams that qualify for the postseason.
The proposal was first introduced at the football committee meeting in August and the vote became official during Thursday’s meeting.
“The cool thing about standing up there was that I was trying get across that the document that was put before this body, came from this body,” football committee president Mike Krueger said. “Everybody had input, there was representation all over the state from all classifications.
This isn’t something that came before everybody today and had them thinking that some committee put together. The committee was an extension of the entire state.”
This will be the start of a new era for Colorado high school football. The RPI replaces the current wild card system. After the adoption of RPI by football, all sports began looking into using the system starting in the 2016-17 school year. Baseball will be the first sport to use RPI as they move to the format this spring.
“We’re a part of something bigger than football,” Krueger said. “We want to see kids that play baseball, softball and soccer compete and have fun. If it’s good for kids, it’s good for kids, period. It doesn’t matter what sport they play.”
The passing of RPI and the league alignments now brings a single, uniform process for football postseason selection. The playoff field will be determined by league champions and RPI, then a selection committee will build and seed the playoff bracket. A member of each conference will sit on the selection committee, but that member cannot be a coach.
“That’s the part that we’re going to have to wait and see,” Krueger said. “We’re excited because we anticipate that it’s going to go well and we think what we put together is good based on what was great about each classification and adopting aspects of all of them.”