The 6A Southern Idaho Conference, a high school football league in southern Idaho, has announced a sweeping change to its postseason structure, doing away with the traditional conference championship game that had been a staple of the league for decades.
Instead of a single title match, the league will now rely on MaxPreps.com rankings to determine which teams qualify for the playoffs and how they are seeded. The new format awards five playoff berths: two division winners receive first‑round byes, and the top three ranked teams are seeded based on their MaxPreps position.
Three additional spots are reserved for the highest‑ranked non‑division‑winner teams, guaranteeing that placement is judged solely on ranking rather than head‑to‑head results or division standing. This approach was introduced to prevent stronger divisions from completely excluding weaker programs and to avoid playoff spots that could be secured with a single victory.
The decision to eliminate the championship game was driven by concerns that the previous system sometimes left promising teams without a postseason opportunity and produced matchups that reinforced existing power hierarchies. The league’s last championship game was played in 2020, after which the board voted to pursue a ranking‑based model.
Playoff Reform
Divisions have been reshuffled using a snake draft based on the previous season’s MaxPreps rankings, a process that saw schools such as Centennial move down to the 5A classification this fall. The 5A classification, unlike the 6A system, does not guarantee first‑round byes for league champions, reducing its playoff field from 16 to 12 teams and allocating the remaining eight spots to the top eight ranked teams.
MaxPreps rankings incorporate win‑loss records, margin of victory — capped at 21 points by the Idaho High School Activities Association — and strength of schedule, while deliberately excluding class, school size or coach votes from the calculation. This methodology aims to produce a more objective measure of team strength across the state.
Historical data shows that 83 percent of the top four MaxPreps seeds have reached the Idaho state semifinals in recent years, and 65 percent of the top two seeds have advanced to the championship games, underscoring the predictive power of the ranking system. The league also notes that no 6A SIC football team has captured a state title since Rocky Mountain’s victory in 2020, a gap the new format hopes to address by giving more programs a realistic path to deep playoff runs.