JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Florida High School Athletic Association is poised to debate and vote on another new playoff system, one that would end the two-year cycle of Suburban-Metro and create an Open classification for the top teams in the state.
The board of directors is scheduled to take up the new system on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Up for discussion is another new postseason system, which would reclassify schools from Rural to Class 1A to 7A and usher in an in-season district tournament in baseball, basketball, football, soccer, softball and volleyball.
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It is the latest shakeup to the high school playoff system, one that has been shifting since the installment of a points system in 2017-18, followed by an RPI-type format and then MaxPreps rankings points the last two seasons.
Schools would be placed in districts as they have in the past, again based on school enrollment figures, but district games would not be required during the season. In such instances in the past, schools like Bolles and Trinity Christian elected to play in a higher classification so that it could lock in district opponents because teams were hesitant to play them. Under the current proposal, districts would be forbidden from requiring district games.
The top four teams in each district would then be assigned a seed (Nos. 1-4) and use Week 10 as the semifinal round and Week 11 as the final round to determine a district champ. The losers of the semifinal round would meet in Week 11.
Districts larger than four teams who had teams not qualify for the in-season tournament could schedule other opponents in those weeks.
After those tournaments, the playoff bracket would be finalized. A massive shift is the proposal for an Open division, which would take the top eight teams in the state from MaxPreps rankings points and place them in a separate bracket.
The FHSAA proposal has numerous gaps in it that it doesn’t yet address. It doesn’t specify how teams who win or finish as runner-up in district tournaments advance to the regional round, how many districts per class there will be or how many rounds of regional play would exist.
The proposal is set to end the two-year experiment of the Metro-Suburban system. Schools in Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas and Seminole were grouped into the Metro division, while schools in the state’s other 59 counties were in the Suburban and the Rural.