Schedules Are ... Almost Here

Hidee-ho, everyone!

High school football fans across the state have been waiting with bated breath for the IHSAA to release the schedules for the next two years. The 2018-19 cycle is full of changes: new districts with new sizes, new numbers of teams in each class, and new playoff qualifying rules (including non-district games, for the first time). Naturally, with all that, things must have taken a bit longer for the boys in Boone to pull together a workable schedule for all 331 schools that intend to play football in 2018 and 2019.

(Yes, that's an odd number. There are 65 schools signed up for 8-player football this fall; apparently there's going to be somebody on a bye every week of the 8-player season?)

Typically Iowa high school football schedules have been released in late February. This year, the process took a little longer ... tomorrow morning, March 21 at 10 am, the state will release the schedules. As I mentioned, things got a little more complicated than in the past, but the state has said the majority of schools got paired up with most of their requests for non-district opponents. Each 11-player school submitted a list of opponents they would like to play in non-district contests; out of those 266, 249 (93.7%) got at least three of their requested opponents out of their four non-district games. Just 15 schools got only two of their requested opponents, and only 2 were given three non-district games with opponents they hadn't asked for. So that's pretty good, all in all.

One of those two unlucky schools was in 3A, by the way. In that class, 37 out of 54 (68.5%) got all four of their requested opponents; 11 (20.4%) got three, and 5 (9.3%) got just two. And no, the state didn't say which teams were which; if your coach or AD is willing to tell you, I guess you can find out.

Anyway, as fans were impatiently waiting for the expected release in late February, some tentative schedules were leaked out from the IHSAA website. They weren't final by any means - some weeks didn't have all the schools listed, most the districts were completely wrong, and the home/away didn't make sense either - but it did open the possibility of what the state was starting to work with. For Xavier, these leaks seemed to indicate non-district games with Iowa City Regina, West Delaware, Davenport Assumption, and Decorah - going along with the already-known district games against Center Point-Urbana, Marion, Dubuque Wahlert, Western Dubuque and Maquoketa.

Again, those leaks were not official, and could have little relationship to the actual posted schedules. Then again, they appear to make sense, by and large. We'll know for sure in less than 19 hours.