With only two weeks remaining in the regular season, Colorado Preps can start providing a serious look at potential 2A playoff brackets.  League champions earn automatic bids but this year they’re not guaranteed a first round playoff game at home.  The remaining nine spots are determined by RPI standings but once the 16 playoff teams are selected, the committee can use other sources to place teams in the bracket.
Those sources include a formula based on combined rankings from MaxPreps, CHSAA (Coaches), RPI and Packard.  We posted those rankings for this week on Wednesday and you can see them here.
Conference finish also factors into the bracketing as teams cannot be seeded higher than a team that finished ahead of them in their respective league standings.  The system in place calls for all league champions to be placed on the seeding board.  Then one team is given the top overall seed and the second place team from that conference is then placed on the seeding board with the remaining league champs.  Then a number two seed is selected and the process continues until all 16 teams are placed in the bracket.
Teams can also be moved based on head-to-head results, geographic purposes and to avoid conference matchups in the opening round.
With all the criteria in mind, we start the process of laying out our bracket.  The first process is determining which teams earn automatic bids as league champions.  We used current standings to decide conference champs and that works well except for the Intermountain and Flatirons where two teams remain in the top spot.  We flipped a coin to determine Bayfield captured the IML and Faith Christian for the Flatirons.  Other league champions are Englewood, Resurrection Christian, Sterling, Classical Academy and Rifle for our projections.
That leaves the wildcards as Lamar, Delta, Basalt, Eaton, Platte Valley, Elizabeth, Moffat County, La Junta and D’Evelyn based on RPI.  Academy is 16th in this week’s standings but would be bumped by Bayfield as the Wolverines are only 22nd in the rankings at this time.
So with those clubs in play, here is our projected bracket.

  • #1 Sterling vs #16 D’Evelyn
  • #8 Basalt vs #9 Platte Valley
  • #4 Classical Academy vs #13 Moffat County
  • #5 Lamar vs #12 Englewood
  • #3 Resurrection Christian vs #14 La Junta
  • #6 Delta vs #11 Elizabeth
  • #7 Faith Christian vs #10 Eaton
  • #2 Rifle vs #15 Bayfield

We moved Faith Christian ahead of Basalt since the Eagles are a league champion and Basalt could end up third in the Western Slope if they fall to Delta this week.  If Basalt wins that game, then they could easily exchange spots with the Panthers in our bracket.  The move of Faith Christian also prevents three teams from the Western Slope on the same side of the bracket.  With the change, those squads are evenly split with two in the upper half and two in the bottom.  The Tri Peaks also has four teams in the bracket but they’re already evenly divided between the two sides.
Discussion could also center between Sterling and Rifle as the top overall seed.  With a neutral site for the championship game again this year, that separation is minimal.  In fact, we flip-flopped D’Evelyn and Bayfield in the final two spots for travel purposes.  That keeps Bayfield from making the trek to Sterling for a playoff opener.
Resurrection Christian is the number one team in RPI this week but we drop the Cougars to third based on a head to head loss to Sterling and the unbeaten record of Rifle.   Eaton is also one spot behind Platte Valley in RPI but we moved the Broncos up since they beat the Reds during the regular season.