Is football the next sport to add a Super 8 tournament? MIAA vote suggests yes

Massachusetts high school football might be hopping on the Super 8 train.

The possibility of adding a Division 1A "elite" tournament to the sport's playoff structure took a big step forward on Thursday, May 14 when the MIAA Football Committee voted 13-4 in favor of the proposal during a virtual meeting.

This news comes on the heels of the MIAA Board of Directors' decision on May 13 to approve Super 8 tournaments for baseball (starting with the 2027 spring season) and boys and girls ice hockey (beginning with the 2027-28 winter season). Boys hockey staged Super 8 tournaments from 1991-2020, and baseball ran them from 2014-19. This will be the first time for a girls hockey Super 8.

The football version of the Super 8, which would only draw teams from Division 1 and Division 2, still must be approved by the MIAA Tournament Management Committee. If they sign off on it, it would go to the Board of Directors for a vote.

The plan, if approved, would start with the 2027 season.

"They have already approved Super 8s (for other sports), so I don't know why they wouldn't approve this one," Milton High coach Steve Dembowski said.

MIAA spokesperson Jim Clark said he did not know when the TMC would consider the proposal, noting only that it was not on the agenda for the committee's next meeting on May 20.

Dembowski, a former president of the state coaches association, voted in favor of the proposal even though he has mixed feelings about it. "I think it's a Band-Aid to where we need to get to," said Dembowski, the coaches' representative to the Football Committee, "but it's probably the next step to improve it and try to give all teams that play football a quality regular season."

The proposed football Super 8 would be part of a larger plan that reimagines the calendar and cuts the divisional playoff fields in half -- from 16 teams per division to eight. That would reduce the overall playoff field from 128 teams (16 teams from each of the eight divisions in the current setup) to 72 (eight teams from each of the nine divisions, including the new 1A bracket).

Teams that don't qualify for the playoffs would have just one week of consolation games instead of two. Also, the current rule that teams must win at least three games to qualify for the playoffs would be scrapped.

Teams would play a nine-week regular season, at which time the top eight teams from Div. 1/Div. 2, using the MIAA's power-rating system, would be grouped into the Div. 1A tournament. Teams from Div. 3-8 would not be eligible.

The rest of the football schedule would look like this:

Week 10 -- First-round playoff games, plus consolation games