The FHSAA will reveal the eight-team Florida Open Division football playoff field and seeds on Friday at 5 p.m. ET, setting up the first run of the state’s new postseason format. Once the bracket is announced, those teams will be split into two pools and sent into three weeks of pool play before the tournament turns to single elimination.
The timing matters because this is not a standard win-or-go-home bracket. The eight qualifiers will be selected from the MaxPreps rankings at the end of the regular season, regardless of classification, and each will carry a seed into the Open Division. Pool A will include the No. 1, No. 4, No. 5 and No. 8 seeds, while Pool B will include the No. 2, No. 3, No. 6 and No. 7 seeds. Every team will play the other three members of its pool once, and every qualifier is guaranteed at least one home game during that stage.
That setup changes the meaning of an early loss. A defeat in the opening round will not automatically end a team’s season, because advancement depends on where each program finishes after pool play, not on one bad night. The top two teams from each pool move on to the state semifinals, but tied records can still force the FHSAA’s tiebreaking procedure to decide who advances. In other words, the opening rounds give teams more room to recover, but they also leave open the possibility that a head-to-head edge or another tie-breaker could be what separates a semifinal berth from an exit.
The Open Division is Florida’s first such football playoff format, and it runs alongside the traditional Class 1A–6A playoffs, which continue separately toward their own state championship paths. Friday’s reveal will not tell the whole story, but it will define the first map of a format that gives eight programs a different road to the title and no one the comfort of assuming one loss ends the season.
