How big is your league?

Ours is 6 teams

5 league games

5 "non league" games

Many of the leagues here are 6-8 teams

They're roughly divided geographically, with some effort to group schools by size

For example our league is all D1 (highest level, although we have much less students than the others in our league, long story)

There's another mostly D1 league in our section

There are a few leagues of mostly D2-3 (all fairly close)

A couple small school leagues (D4 and 5)

And there is 1 or 2 leagues that are kind of a huge range... But generally they're pretty bad overall leagues

We are in a 6 team league in the same section as PIGSKIN11. We suffer because our league is classified as a "C" league because every body but us is pretty lousy. As a result, we get low playoff seeds because we lack power point from half our games being against our league.

To give you an idea of where we stand vs our league, we've had a running clock for the last 3 years of league play.

So, we load up our preseason with anyone looking for a fight and hope that does enough to prep us for playoffs.

We are broken into districts in PA. We have two regions/leagues in our district for our class. Both have 8 teams so we end up with 3 Indy games now.

Our league has three divisions based on enrollment and (loosely) geography.

Divisions have eight teams each, so have to schedule two non-leaguers.

Often but not always they are crossovers with schools from another division in the league.

9 teams

Our state has 332 teams in the association, IIRC, divided into 6 classes for public and private schools, with 2 classes for privates-only.

The 32 largest public schools make up the top class, get automatic playoff berths, and are divided into 4 districts with 8 teams each.

The next 5 classes are subdivided into 8 districts apiece, which vary in size  The top 4 schools in each district make the playoffs and the playoff bracket format is set in stone before the season begins.  It's just a matter of penciling in who finishes #1 in each district, then who finishes #2, etc.

Our district has 7 teams now after our state just redistricted.

Some teams get to play in 5 team districts so all you have to do is beat the worst team, which means 1-9 gets you into the playoffs there or beating 4 bad teams guarantees you home field for the first 2-3 rounds, but scheduling that many non-conference games can be a pain for those schools.

Other districts in the same class will have 9 teams, so a 6-4 record might still have you missing the playoffs there and they have the scheduling problems you mentioned.

This is actually a major improvement over the complex BCS-style points system we used to determine playoff seeding for a few years.  That thing was a nightmare.

Wait, WTF? How does this not cause a massive sh!tstorm every year?

It used to in some places. Most just accepted that as a fact of life.

They tried fixing it a few years ago and the result was a horrible 3 class system that split into 6 for the playoffs and relied on a very complex points system for everything. The state didn't even handle that correctly twice.

This is their attempt at fixing it.

i guess that i need to add to mine, we have class 1-6 plus 8 man in our state, class six is largest with 32 teams, then there are 64 teams in class 1,2,4,5 but what is left over goes in class 3, so after the top 32 largest schools, so then they go with the 64 lowest populated schools in class 1, 64 most populated after cl 6, then class 2, then class 4, then whoever is leftover goes to class three, we also have a 1.35 multiplier for private schools, schools can coop but total population counts for both schools, 8man is only class allowed to three schools coop, to play 8 man must have less than 200 in school, although we have a lot of schools with less than 200 play 11 man

I'm just excited to escape any heat possible.

We play in a 12 team conference. The conference is split into League A and League B competitively. Every two years, the worst team from A and the best team from B switch places.

I'll say one thing for our section: while they have continuously failed to come up with an equitable play off system, they've continually tried to find one that doesn't screw anyone over.

mariner42 & tothehouse - Thanks for the invite....

We are in a "region" with 11 teams, which is divided into two "leagues", one with 6 teams and one with 5. We are in the 6 team league so we play 5 league games, then get to choose whether we will play 4 or 5 non-league games. We usually schedule 2-3 of those games against teams from the other league and then try to find 1 or 2 good teams from Northern California to schedule. Only the league games count towards playoffs, so in the 5 team league you can have teams play a 10 game regular season where only 4 of those games actually count towards determining playoff qualification. But we also let 4 teams from EACH league into our playoffs. That's right, 8 out of 11 qualify.