IHSA Playoff Projections 2026: Why Three Wins Should Now Be Enough

Three wins should be enough to reach the IHSA football playoffs this year. Not five, which has been the standard for four decades. Three. If that projection holds, it rewrites the last two Fridays of the regular season for half the teams in west-central Illinois — including five local sides that, under any previous set of rules, would already be finished.

What actually changed

The IHSA expanded its football state series for 2026 from 32 qualifiers per class to 48. Across the eight classes that is a field of 384 teams, up from 256. It is the first expansion since 1985, and it is the reason the season started a week early: the extra round needed an extra Friday.

The mechanical consequence is simple arithmetic. Adding 128 places to the bracket without adding any teams to the state means the cut line has to fall a long way down the win column. Those places have to be filled by somebody, and the only teams left to fill them with are the ones that previously missed out.

How far down is the question everyone is now asking. Shaw Media’s projections, reported by the Chicago Sun-Times on 6 October, have every three-win team in the state reaching the field, with a handful of two-win teams sneaking in as low seeds — a No. 46 seed here, a 6A filler there.

That is a projection, not a rule. The IHSA has published no guarantee that three wins qualifies, and the real cut line depends on how the rest of the state finishes over the next fortnight. Treat it as the best available estimate from people who do this for a living, and nothing firmer than that.

Why it matters more here than in the suburbs

Expansion is a mild curiosity in a conference where most programmes win seven or eight games. It is transformative in a region where programmes live in the three-to-five win band. That band is exactly what the extra sixteen places per class absorbed.

Of the ten eleven-man teams this site covers, five are sitting on two wins with two games to play. In 2025 all five would be playing out a dead season. In 2026 all five are one win from the projected cut line.

Already through

Three local sides have the five wins that have always qualified outright, and are now playing for seeding rather than survival.

• Annawan-Wethersfield, 6-1. Five straight wins and unbeaten so far in the Lincoln Land Conference North Division. The only team to beat them all year is Farmington. Bureau Valley at home on 9 October, then ROWVA/Williamsfield.
• Abingdon-Avon, 5-2. Got there in Week 6 with a second consecutive shutout, before the run ended 35-20 at Havana. Rushville-Industry away, then Astoria/VIT.
• Stark County, 5-2. The fifth win came 28-13 at Bureau Valley. Two of the Rebels’ wins have come by a combined five points; their one failure to score was a 41-0 defeat to Macomb.

Comfortable, not certain

• Monmouth-Roseville, 4-3. Three straight wins, finishing with a 59-0 shutout of Little Village, and a defence that has conceded 21 points in three weeks. Four wins is comfortable under the projections. Kewanee away, then Orion at home.
• Galesburg, 3-4. Already at the three-win mark the projections point to, after beating Quincy 56-42. The Streaks have scored 50 or more three times and lost one of those games 63-56. Rock Island away, then Moline at home.

The five teams on two wins — and here is the part nobody has noticed

Knoxville, United, ROWVA/Williamsfield, Bureau Valley and Princeville are all 2-5. None can reach five wins. All five need one more victory to hit three.

And the schedule has arranged it so that they largely have to take that win off each other.

• Friday 9 October: ROWVA/Williamsfield host Princeville. Both 2-5. One of them walks away on three wins and inside the projected field; the other is left needing a result in Week 9. This is an elimination game that is not being described as one anywhere.
• Friday 16 October: Bureau Valley travel to Knoxville. Both 2-5. Same structure, one week later, and for both sides it is the final fixture of the regular season. If neither has won by then, this single game decides which of them plays in November.
• United are the exception, and arguably the best placed. They have Astoria/VIT at home on 9 October and Havana to follow — and they are the form side of the five, having won their last two by 20-16 and 49-6 after losing the first five.

The other fixtures are harder. Knoxville go to 5-2 Stark County on 9 October. Bureau Valley visit 6-1 Annawan-Wethersfield the same night. ROWVA/Williamsfield finish at Annawan-Wethersfield, Princeville finish against Stark County. Which is precisely why the two head-to-heads matter so much: for four of these five programmes, the realistic route to a third win runs through another team on this list.

2026 results, Weeks 4 to 7

For completeness, here is what the last four Fridays produced across the eleven-man sides, every score verified against both teams’ records.

• Week 4, 11 September: Galesburg beat Normal University 57-36; Princeton beat Monmouth-Roseville 29-14; Knoxville won 42-10 at Lewistown/Cuba/Spoon River Valley; Elmwood/Brimfield beat United 54-14; Abingdon-Avon beat Farmington 33-26; Havana beat ROWVA/Williamsfield 37-14; Annawan-Wethersfield won 47-6 at Rushville-Industry; Macomb beat Stark County 41-0; Hamilton/Warsaw beat Bureau Valley 38-28; St. Bede beat Princeville 53-14.
• Week 5, 18 September: Sterling beat Galesburg 63-56; Monmouth-Roseville won 30-14 at Hall/Putnam County; Annawan-Wethersfield beat Knoxville 42-13; Abingdon-Avon won 40-0 at United; Stark County won 22-20 at ROWVA/Williamsfield; Princeville beat Bureau Valley 35-20.
• Week 6, 25 September: Geneseo beat Galesburg 58-23; Monmouth-Roseville won 32-7 at Mendota; Princeville won 33-20 at Knoxville; United won 20-16 at Rushville-Industry; Abingdon-Avon beat Lewistown/Cuba/Spoon River Valley 56-0; Annawan-Wethersfield won 20-6 at Stark County; Bureau Valley beat ROWVA/Williamsfield 43-20.
• Week 7, 2 October: Galesburg beat Quincy 56-42; Monmouth-Roseville beat Little Village 59-0; ROWVA/Williamsfield beat Knoxville 30-8; United won 49-6 at Lewistown/Cuba/Spoon River Valley; Havana beat Abingdon-Avon 35-20; Annawan-Wethersfield won 44-23 at Princeville; Stark County won 28-13 at Bureau Valley.

None of this applies to eight-man football

West Central, Galva and Ridgewood/Alwood/Cambridge play in the Illinois 8-Man Football Association, which is not an IHSA sport and runs its postseason entirely separately. The expansion to 48 qualifiers per class has no bearing on any of them, a distinction a good deal of coverage blurs. Their season also runs a Friday longer, to 23 October, with a mid-season open date built in.

For the record: West Central are 6-0 with 326 points scored, Ridgewood are 5-1 and 4-0 in the Central West Eight-Man, and the two meet at Ridgewood on 9 October in what looks like the conference decider. Galva are 2-4 after a 50-12 win at West Prairie/Southeastern, and travel to Peoria Heights next.

What happens next

Two Fridays remain: 9 October and 16 October. Pairings are announced on Saturday 17 October, on a live telecast at 9pm — nobody knows which class their school is in until then, because the IHSA waits for all qualifiers before splitting them into eight equal groups by enrollment. The opening round follows on 23-24 October, and the state finals are at Hancock Stadium, Illinois State University, Normal, on 27 and 28 November.

One wrinkle worth knowing: the top 16 seeds in each class skip the new opening round. Seeds 17 to 48 play an extra game to reach the point where the old 32-team bracket used to begin. Qualifying is easier this year; winning it from a low seed is harder, because a low seed now needs five wins to reach a final rather than four.

We will update every team page here the morning after each round. For the underlying mechanics — class assignment, how seeding works and what the extra round changes — see our guide to how the IHSA football playoffs work in 2026 and the longer piece on what the expansion means for the Galesburg area.

A note on the numbers

Every score above was taken from both teams’ own schedule records and cross-checked against the opposing team’s, so that each result appears identically from both sides. Two area schools — Knoxville and United — have schedule pages on national aggregators that are still missing games played in late September, which is why some outlets currently show Knoxville at 2-3 and United at 0-4. Both are 2-5. If you spot a figure here you believe is wrong, tell us and we will check it.

Eligibility for the postseason still depends on the ordinary rules — grades, age, semesters and the rest. See our guide to IHSA eligibility rules for 2026-27.

Confused by the conference names? Our Lincoln Trail Conference guide explains the fourteen member schools and why football is played in the Lincoln Land Conference under three divisions.

Send us results

Scores, corrections and photographs from any of the fourteen schools we cover are welcome. If you coach, keep stats or simply watch from the fence, we would rather hear from you than guess.