NCHSAA 1A Playoff Projections

1A Playoffs – The NCHSAA Playoff seeding system is hard to understand. The Athletic Association uses a system called “RPI” or “Rating Percentage Index”. RPI is is a statistical system used to comparatively rank teams. The system uses a teams winning percentage, opponents winning percentage, and opponents opponents winning percentage to calculate the RPI. The top 32 teams from the east and 32 teams from the west will make up a 64 team bracket, with the final team standing crowned State Champs.

RPI isn’t the only thing you have to take into account when seeding teams for the playoffs, as there are a number of “automatic bids” given to teams depending on their conference standing. Conferences with six or more teams participating in a sport will get two automatic bids, one going to the conference champion and one to the conference runner-up.

In conferences with both 1A and 2A teams, the highest-finishing team from a particular classification will make the playoffs automatically, regardless of where it finishes in the overall conference standings

The remaining spots are determined by your position in the RPI rankings.

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Here is our best guess at what the 2023-2024 1A State Football Playoffs will look like:

Obviously these will change after Friday’s games. Most importantly, Swain and Robbinsville will play for the #1 overall seed in the West (meaning homef