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Before this season, no one was quite sure this would ever happen.
But the OHSAA did it: They reduced the Ohio high school football playoff field.
It had been at eight qualifying teams per region before the COVID-19 season of 2020 when everyone qualified.
After that, it went to 16 teams per region.
But this season, it's down to 12 qualifiers per region. And with that comes a new feature: byes.
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Why are there byes in OHSAA high school football playoffs?
There are byes this year because 12 isn't a workable bracket number in a single-elimination tournament.
With eight or 16 teams in a region, each round splits evenly, from 16 to 8 to 4 to 2.
With 12, it doesn't work like that. You need to have four teams on a bye so that in the second round, you have four first-round winners plus four bye teams to have a splittable 8.
So in each of Ohio's 28 regions, the top-four seeds have byes. They will all host a home game in the second week of the playoffs (Week 12) after not playing this Friday night (Week 11).
There have never been byes in the Ohio high school football playoffs, so there's no telling how it will impact team performances coming off the bye week.
The past four years, the No. 1 seed has played a No. 16 seed. There's only been one upset in that seeding through four years, when Milan Edison beat Bellevue in northwest Ohio in the very first year of the 16-team system.
There will be no 16-1 matchups anymore, and the new bye layer is something different to track this time around.
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