The road to the Illinois high school football championships is getting a major upgrade.

The IHSA is rolling out a brand-new, expanded 384-team playoff system that completely changes how teams punch their ticket to the postseason.
If you’ve been trying to figure out if your favorite local team is going to make the cut, here is a breakdown of how the new system works.
Getting In: The Magic Number is Four
In past years, teams practically needed five wins to feel safe about making the playoffs. Under the new 384-team format, the pressure eases up a little bit.
    • The Sure Things: If a team wins its conference or hits 4 regular-season wins, they are officially in.
    • The Bubble Teams: Teams finishing with 3 wins or fewer aren’t necessarily out, but they have to play the waiting game. The IHSA will fill the remaining spots using Playoff Points—which is just the total number of combined wins achieved by all nine opponents on a team’s schedule. The tougher the schedule, the better the chance of sneaking in.

How the Brackets Will Shake Out
Once the IHSA has its 384 teams, they line them up by school size and split them equally into eight groups, from the smallest schools in Class 1A to the largest in Class 8A (48 teams per class). From there, the setup depends on the school’s size:
    • Classes 1A to 6A: To keep travel manageable for smaller schools, the IHSA splits each class into North and South halves (24 teams each) and seeds them 1 through 24. Because a 24-team bracket leaves some open slots, the top 8 teams in each half get a first-round bye to rest up.
    • Classes 7A and 8A: The big schools don’t care about geography. They are seeded 1 through 48 on a massive statewide bracket. In these classes, the top 16 teams earn a first-round bye.

Game Day Rules and Home-Field Advantage
When it comes to kickoff, the IHSA keeps things standardized. Playoff games are set for Saturdays between 1:00 PM and 7:00 PM. The only way a game happens on a Friday night is if both schools shake hands and agree to it.
As for who gets to play in front of their home crowd? In the opening rounds, the higher-seeded team gets the home game. After that, the IHSA looks at who has hosted fewer playoff games so far. If it’s a tie, the advantage goes right back to the higher seed.
The playoff pairings and brackets are being announced Saturday, October 17, 2026, starting at 5:15 PM CT for qualifiers and 9:00 PM CT for the official class-by-class bracket reveal