CHSAA Board of Directors approves change to postseason capture criteria starting in 2022

AURORA – The Colorado High School Activities Association’s method of selecting the postseason field for team sports is getting an overhaul following the 2021-22 cycle.
 
At the CHSAA Board of Directors meeting on Wednesday, the Board voted unanimously to move away from the current system of using solely CHSAA RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) to select the postseason field. Beginning next school year, the postseason field for team sports – baseball, basketball, field hockey, football, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball and volleyball – will be selected by an even combination of CHSAA RPI and MaxPreps Rankings to capture postseason qualifiers. This change will not replace automatic qualifiers for league champions or district tournaments for sports that have them.
 
Postseason tournament capture is a Board policy, and the new policy is as follows:
 
“In all team sports that do not use district tournaments to determine the playoff field, the CHSAA Final Season Index (FSI) shall be used to determine which teams qualify for postseason play. The CHSAA FSI will be determined, by classification, for all teams by averaging the final finishing position of each team in the end-of-season CHSAA RPI and MaxPreps Rankings. In the case of a tie in the FSI, precedence will be given to the team with the better head-to-head record, followed by the team with the better end of season MaxPreps Rating. In the case that an automatic qualifier should finish outside the playoff field as determined by the CHSAA FSI, the lowest-ranked qualifier by FSI will be replaced by an automatic qualifier until all automatic qualifiers are accounted for.”
 
In the case of a tie for the final postseason qualifying spot, and only in that specific instance, best head-to-head record will be used as the first tiebreaking criteria before comparing the teams’ MaxPreps Ratings.
 
The proposal to change the Board policy on postseason capture was brought before the Board by a committee that was formed to evaluate the current system. The committee conducted a survey of member schools. In the results from that survey, 83.3 percent of respondents said they would be in favor of a universal tournament capture system to select the postseason field for all CHSAA sports. Of that group, 65.9 percent also said they preferred a combination of RPI and MaxPreps Rankings to serve as the selection criteria.
 
“The genesis of this process began last year when we heard from sport committees and members of the association, who identified the need to look at alternative methods to capture state tournaments,” CHSAA Board President Luke DeWolfe said. “Because this is a Board policy, the Board identified that the best avenue to do that would be to have a committee formed to look at some alternatives. The committee met a multitude of times and spent countless hours in addition to communicating with their leagues, their constituents, and other members of the Association.
 
“There was a presentation at the All-School Summit, as well as a survey sent out to the membership. Information and data was gathered, and this fifty-fifty approach was identified as something that should be taken to the Board for its consideration.”
 
All sports will proceed through the end of the 2021-22 school year using the postseason capture and seeding methods that are currently in place for this cycle. The Board did not address postseason seeding, only qualifying. The seeding process will be addressed at a later date by sport committees and the CHSAA legislative council process.
 
The following is an example of a scenario to determine FSI position for five teams in the same classification. 
 

In this scenario, the relative standing of the five teams would be (in order):
        Team C (by virtue of the lowest FSI score)
        Team A (by virtue of the next lowest FSI score)
        Team E (though tied with B & D in FSI, they are ranked best by MaxPreps of the three)
        Team D (tied with B in FSI, but ranked better by MaxPreps)
        Team B (ranked lowest by MaxPreps of the three teams tied in FSI)
 
“I think there was a desire throughout the state that we needed to look at how we captured those teams that qualified for the postseason,” CHSAA Board Member Ernie Derrera said. “There needed to be a way that we could find a process that most people thought was fair. Once our committee got together, we started with the survey and we examined that data. I think the group we had together was an experienced group that all came in with open minds and looked at the survey for what it was.
 
“I think people who came in thinking it was going to be a certain way were flexible enough to realize that it was pretty clear what the state wanted, and that was a mixture of RPI and MaxPreps.”