Private schools won seven of Illinois' eight state football championships last fall. Six times they went head-to-head vs. public schools. They won all six by the 40-point mercy rule.
The smallest four champions — Belleville Althoff in 1A, Chicago Christian in 2A, Lombard Montini in 3A and Chicago DePaul in 4A — all played in a smaller class after getting an automatic waiver from the IHSA's 1.65 attendance multiplier for non-boundary schools.
"When I first started, we could line up and compete evenly with teams that are multiplied," said Stillman Valley coach Mike Lalor, who has not gotten past the second round of the playoffs since winning his fifth state title 11 years ago. "Now public schools are fighting just not to be 40-pointed. The gap has grown exponentially."
The IHSA is trying to close that gap. The state has tinkered often with its multiplier rule, usually making it more lenient. Its latest change brings it back to more like it was when Rockford Lutheran — a Class 1A girls basketball team the last two years — played in Class 3A for eight years.
The IHSA made minor changes in two other classification rules for the 2025-26 school year.
The success factor has been tweaked to a rolling three-year period, with private schools moving up a class regardless of their enrollment if they have won two state trophies in that span. And classes now have a predetermined cutoff: 300 for Class 1A, 700 for 2A and 1,600 for 3A in basketball, baseball, softball and girls volleyball.
“Everyone just wants to see an equitable situation here and see competitive games in the state playoffs,” Byron football coach Jeff Boyer said. “They realized the balance is out of whack and are trying to get that back in order."
IHSA restoring the intent of multiplier rules?
But the big change is putting more teeth into the multiplier. That rule had been weakened, almost from its start. Illinois first voted to adopt the multiplier in 2005, but 37 private schools sued and were granted a court injunction.
When the rule later passed, the state's 130 private schools and open-enrollment public schools had every 100 of their students count as 165. But they could apply for a waiver for any sport that had not won three regional titles in the previous six years. That soon changed to an automatic waiver. And you basically had to be a top-10 team in the state to get hit with the multiplier.
The time period to get moved up due to pass success then dropped from six years to four years. Then two years.
The latest standard for an automatic waiver had been not winning a state trophy in the previous two years, or a sectional title (final eight in state) in one of those years and a regional in the other. In football, you needed to win three playoff games in two years, but not not until the end of that two-year period. That's how ...
