OHSAA expands football playoff field

From Staff and Wire Reports

The Ohio High School Athletic Association Board of Directors announced Thursday that the high school football playoffs will expand beginning this fall.

The playoffs, which were originally planned to expand from eight to 12 teams per region, will now expand to 16 teams per region starting in the 2021 season, per a press release from the OHSAA on Thursday.

The first two rounds of the playoffs will have the higher seeds host at their venue with neutral sites coming into play starting in the regional semifinals.

The playoffs will begin the weekend of Oct. 29 and 30 with the state championship games taking place Dec. 2-5 at a site to be determined. One game will be played Dec. 2 with two games being played each day from Dec. 3 to 5.

This season, Divisions I, II, III and IV playoff games through the state semifinals will be played on Fridays with Divisions V, VI and VII games being played on Saturdays.

The last planned expansion to the number of teams in each region came in 1999 when the field was expanded from four to eight teams in each region. More teams were included when the OHSAA added a seventh division in 2013. Due to the pandemic, all football-playing schools played in the playoffs unless they withdrew.

The field will now include 448 teams among all seven divisions. In 2020 there were 709 schools playing 11-man football in Ohio, per the OHSAA.

The OHSAA also noted that they may explore adding a strength of schedule component to the Harbin computer ratings used to fill the playoff field. If approved that would be added for the 2022 playoffs.