The state’s high-school playoff pairing system is going to look a little different going forward.

The Colorado High School Activities Association’s board of directors approved a slight change in the use of MaxPreps and the Ratings Performance Index rankings to form the association’s seeding index.

The switch involves each teams’ rankings in MaxPreps and in the performance index rankings. The Ratings Performance Index takes into account a team’s winning percentage, those of that teams’ opponents and those of that teams’ opponents’ opponents.

According to CHSAANow.com, team rankings through MaxPreps and the ratings index “will be normalized” before going through a process to combine them and then come up with an average.

“This normalization will put the values on a common scale so they can be combined in a meaningful way,” CHSAANow.com said in a release.

The old system combined and averaged the rankings, which created a lot of ties in the final seeding index polls.

CHSAANow.com said more than a third of the teams in each classification wound up in ties across team sports. Sports such as swimming, cross country, tennis, track and field and wrestling do not use this seeding index for their state tournaments.

CHSAA officials hope this new setup will eliminate the number of ties.

To get into the final seeding index, teams have to play a certain number of games. MaxPreps makes the determination, and the threshold of minimum games played depends on the sport and the of the given season.

The means to determine state playoff participants won’t change, according to CHSAANow.com. Both the ratings index and MaxPreps rankings will account for 50% of a team’s final seeding index rating.

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For more from Steve Smith on the landscape of CHSAA and Colorado sports, keep with all sports at Colorado Community Media at this link.