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Source: Jimmie Kaska | Civic Media

WIAA approves high school football playoff changes beginning with 2025 season

3 major changes were approved by the WIAA Board of Control on Wednesday.

Jimmie Kaska

Feb 5, 2025, 10:42 AM CST

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STEVENS POINT, Wis. (Civic Media) – The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association Board of Control voted on three major changes to the high school football posteason.

A proposal by the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association to change playoff qualification to a transparent wins-based metric was approved by a 10-1 vote Wednesday morning.

The approved proposal means that high school football playoff qualification will change from winning over 50% of conference games to a win-based formula against all opponents.

It also means that seeding and regional grouping in the postseason will be done by the metric, as opposed to the current computer algorithm that is unknown to coaches. The lack of transparency frustrated coaches after some questionable seeding in recent playoff fields.

The measure to change how regional groupings are done passed with an 8-3 vote.

A third major decision expanded the field for 8-player football playoffs to 32 teams. The change also moves the season start date to line up with 11-player football. 8-player football will still play eight regular-season games, with five weeks of playoffs culminating in a championship game played in Wisconsin Rapids. The change was approved unanimously.

The WFCA made its case for change

WFCA President Brian Kaminski, who is also the head coach at Sun Prairie East, said that the plan received strong interest from coaches across Wisconsin.

“We’ve got about 425 head coaches in the state, and 400 of them took time to do [the survey],” Kaminski said.

Of those, 350 indicated they supported the WFCA’s proposal, with public social media posts largely in favor of adopting the plan.

“A system that makes sense and brings much needed transparency,” John Tackmann, St. Croix Central head football coach, wrote on X.

WFCA president Brian Kaminski talked about the feedback from coaches and the survey results, showing great support for the WFCA’s plan to change postseason qualification.

The strong support is encouraging news, Kaminski said, because if the vote had been closer to 50-50, it might not have been put up for consideration this year.

“There has been a lot of work put into this, all to make our football playoffs as good as they can be. It’s transparent and balances all the brackets,” Kaminski said.

Why is this only about football?

In Wisconsin, only 256 teams make the playoffs – 224 in traditional 11-player and 32 in 8-player. With over 450 programs, that means that fewer than two-thirds of all teams advance to the postseason.

Other sports that are sponsored by the WIAA are “all play,” meaning that every team makes the playoffs regardless of their record.

Football specifically is limited in the number of games that can be played each week due to the physical nature of the sport. NFHS and WIAA guidelines only allow for one varsity contest to be played each week, unless there’s an exception due to a weather delay or other extenuating circumstance.

Because of that, the football postseason is limited to eight divisions of 32 teams and covers five weeks, wrapping up the week before Thanksgiving at Camp Randall Stadium, except for the 8-player division which plays its championship in Wisconsin Rapids during the week of the 11-player semifinals.

The WFCA offered an explainer on the proposal to Wisconsin high school football coaches before a survey went out in December.

Qualifying for the playoff field now is simple math: The teams with the most wins get in, with the previous qualification to clinch a spot being a winning conference record in 11-player football.

Where things got confusing for fans, players, coaches, administrators, and officials is when multiple teams tie for remaining playoff spots to fill out the field when there aren’t enough teams that have winning conference records, a common issue as the number of programs at the 11-player level has dropped to around 360 for 2026-27.

Adding to the headache before Wednesday’s change: football divisions weren’t set until the 224-team qualifying field was set. Within that, there are even more tiebreakers to determine divisional placement if two teams have the same enrollment. Now, divisional cutlines are set up before the season.

The new setup will incorporate the Tournament Performance Factor implications, which moves teams up divisions if they’ve advanced to certain points in the postseason in the past three seasons. This also results in other teams moving down a division if they’ve accumulated no points in the previous three years.

Mistakes in the 2024 playoff field spurred momentum for change

At the outset of the 2024 WIAA football playoffs, a mistake was caught in the brackets released for reduced-player football.

The initial brackets included Gilman in the 16-team field for 8-player football, but a few hours after the brackets were published, a correction was issued, placing Clayton in the field and removing Gilman based on an incorrectly-applied tiebreaker.

However, the incorrect tiebreaker applications didn’t end there. Numerous media outlets, coaches, and other observers lobbied the WIAA to also take a look at its football qualifying field, pointing out a mistake that led to two teams that thought they should have been in – Madison West and Greenfield – out of the playoffs.

“Following a review of the 2024 WIAA 11-Player Football Playoffs qualification process, we acknowledge challenges occurred with the computer program, which was unable to process the full field of 224 teams,” the WIAA said in a statement. “Based on the information that is now available to our staff, it has been determined Madison West and Greenfield should have been included in the playoff field of 224 teams.”

The specific tiebreaker dealt with teams that do not have a winning conference record. That tiebreaker calculates opponent conference winning percentages of teams defeated, with the highest percentages getting in. However, as applied by the WIAA this past year, it also incorrectly factored in non-conference games, elevating Edgewood and Pewaukee to the playoff field.

No legal action was taken, so the playoffs went on as scheduled. Any court decisions could have delayed the start of the playoffs in at least four divisions, as the schools affected ranged from Division 1 to Division 4.

Travis Wilson of WisSports.net reported that WIAA Executive Director Stephanie Hauser met in person with staff at both Madison West and Greenfield to apologize and offer an explanation.

Kaminski said that the process to change postseason qualification began before the WIAA’s mistake, but because of the wrong teams getting into the 2024 playoffs, the WFCA’s proposal got a lot more attention.

Coaches sought transparency in the process

A common refrain from coaches was frustration in how computer rankings ended up sorting out each 32-team field. For the fourth season, the WIAA left it to technology to sort out, eschewing the coaches’ seeding meetings of past years.

Some of the more notable seeding decisions included putting 8-1 conference champion Oconomowoc on the road as a 6 seed. In Division 7, the top two teams in the Six Rivers were pitted against one another in a Level 1 game, with undefeated Potosi/Cassville eking out a 7-6 win over Black Hawk/Warren.

Potosi/Cassville, which received a 3-seed despite going 9-0, wouldn’t lose until the state finals against Edgar. Black Hawk Warren, who lost to Edgar last year in the D7 title game, got a 6-seed after finishing 7-2 in the regular season.

West Salem finished 8-1, falling by two points to the defending champion in their division, but got a 3-seed. Beaver Dam was a co-conference champion at 8-1 and was put on the road as a 5-seed.

Coaches have been loud about the current process. The unknown algorithm the WIAA uses had been a source of contention for coaches, who don’t have access to the actual formula used to calculate seedings.

Now, the new playoff qualification setup offers full transparency.

How qualification will happen now

The WFCA announced its proposal to solve two main issues with the current system.

First, it would divide the state’s 364 11-player football teams into seven 52-team divisions. In each of those, the top 32 teams would qualify. This would mean each team would know their divisions before the season began.

Second, the system would reward wins rather than winning percentages, weighting victories against other winning teams or larger-division squads more than beating small-school teams.

The proposed formula is available on the WFCA website, a mark of transparency that coaches say is missing in the current setup.

Edgewood head football coach Jesse Norris talks about the details of the WFCA’s proposal, which he helped put together.

The new system was proposed by Edgewood head football coach Jesse Norris and assistant Andy LaVoy.

According to the WFCA release, it is based on Ohio’s playoff-qualifying procedures.

In addition to addressing pre-season divisional placements and value of wins, it also tackles how teams are seeded in the postseason, publishes a simple formula based on wins that eliminates the unknowns of the current setup, and attempts to eliminate some of the travel disparities that teams experienced in the computer ranking era.

An explainer video is available here that details the process and offers examples.

What happens now?

With new qualifications in place, it means that programs around the state will now get to see where they stand each week as it relates to playoff qualification.

The WFCA is careful to note that the proposal doesn’t change the two-year realignment cycle for conferences. However, none of the playoff-qualifying metrics include conference games, treating all nine games on a team’s schedule the same.

That’s a change from the work the WFCA and WIAA have done in structuring conferences statewide to have an even number of members in an attempt to solve a disparity from previous years where some leagues had 10 teams and others had as few as 5, meaning playoff-clinching metrics for teams varied between 3 and 5 wins.

Realignment work is already beginning for the 2026-2027 seasons. It is unknown if the WFCA proposal would eventually affect the current structure of conferences in Wisconsin.


READ MORE: Proposal to overhaul prep football playoff system receives overwhelming support from coaches

READ MORE: Wisconsin coaches, officials address challenges in playoff qualifying system for high school football

WATCH/LISTEN: Jesse Norris explains the details of the WFCA’s proposal on The Dom Salvia Show

WATCH/LISTEN: Brian Kaminski reveals that the WFCA’s survey shows overwhelming support from coaches and explains what is next for the proposal on The Maggie Daun Show

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