The official 2025 Nebraska High School football playoffs brackets were released Saturday.
If you didn’t see playoff projections throughout the season and don’t know how the seeding system works, you might think Millard South being the No. 4 overall seed was a misprint. How could a team that is ranked in the top-25 nationally be the fourth overall seed in the playoffs in their state?
In reality, nothing was wrong, and the wild card point system, which has been in place since 1976 with tweaks and adjustments along the way, isn’t really broken. Think of it as a strength of schedule or strength of the opponent system.
Wild card points started in basketball after the 1975 district basketball playoffs saw a number of ranked teams prior to making it to state.
It’s been the system to determine state football playoff pairings in Nebraska since the 1980s.
It isn’t broken. Could adjustments be made? Sure. But that is for another day.
In the case of Millard South being a No. 4 seed, there were multiple factors at play.
No Division I Wins
The 2025 Millard South Patriots would have loved to create their own schedule for all nine games. That isn’t how the system works, so they were given their schedule by the NSAA based off of the now defunct serpentine model. Yes, that is a deeper dive for another day,
How the wild card system works is you get 50 points for a Division I win, 47 for Division II, 44 for Division III and 41 for a Division IV win.
Millard South had one Division I win with Arbor View, Nevada, but due to their forfeit for using an ineligible player at the time that Division I win turned into a forfeit loss.
The scheduling cycle, which is two years at a time, gave the Patriots teams that are traditionally Division I teams or right on the cusp in 2023.
Millard North, Millard West, Kearney and some years even Papillion-La Vista or Lincoln Southeast are in the top five or what can be classified as a Division I win. That was not the case due to either coaching changes or roster turnover for some of the teams on their schedule this year.
Breaking Down The Seeds
Omaha Westside (8-1) is the top overall seed because they had two Division I, four Division II, two Division III and zero Division IV wins.
Creighton Prep (8-1), the No. 2 seed, had five Division I wins and three Division III wins, with their lone loss coming to Westside, a Division I opponent.
The third seed, Papillion-La Vista South (8-1) had one Division I win, three Division II, three Division III and one Division IV.
Millard South, with its 8-1 record’s strength of schedule, just wasn’t there. The Patriots had no Division I wins, four Division II, two Division III and two Division IV wins on their resume.
Even if they would have kept the Arbor View win and finished 9-0, the Patriots would have been the two seed behind Omaha Westside.
The cool thing about the playoffs is you eventually will have to play good teams, and Millard South will have the opportunity to play the No. 1 seed just a week earlier than the state championship, should they both make it that far.
