INDIANAPOLIS — Five. Six. Two. Four. Seven. Three. One. Eight.
“All good.”
Just like that, eight Indiana high school football teams have their postseason fates secured.
For more than 100 years, this is how the IHSAA has determined its playoff brackets in one shape or form. From pulling popsicle sticks, to index cards, to now ping pong balls — a completely random blind draw has been used to create sectional brackets in all the team-based sports.
It’s a system that’s become a lightning rod for discussion. Despite the calls from several outside voices to seed the tournament, the IHSAA has held firm in its belief that the blind draw is right for them.
Here is how it looks from the inside.
Behind the scenes of an IHSAA blind draw
After a month of confirming which schools will be in the tournament, organizing officials and getting the sectional alignments verified, it’s time to do the draw.
All the 8-team sectional fields are listed on the spreadsheet first. Then the 7-team, 6-team, 5-team and 4-team ones. This is the order they will be drawn in — a relatively new wrinkle to the process.
When the IHSAA moved to ping pong balls decades ago, each team had its own ball. That meant accounting for 380-plus balls at any point (the IHSAA now has 408 official members). They were separated into boxes for each sectional and drawn that way.
IHSAA football sectional draw: Check out the 2026 Indiana high school tournament pairings
A few years ago, though, commissioner Paul Neidig shifted to its new system. Each sectional is listed in alphabetical order. The first team is the No. 1 ping pong ball, the second team No. 2, and so on.
That means there’s 400 fewer ping pong balls to keep track of.
“I saw our staff sorting ping pong balls with a name on them for every school and I thought there had to be a better way to do that,” Neidig said.
Neidig usually is the one sitting at the machine conducting the draw, but he was out of the office on this day. IHSAA assistant commissioner Robert Faulkens took control instead, with administrative assistant Kayley Howell and assistant commissioner Kerrie Rosati in the room as well.
At 10:47 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, the official draw for the 2026 IHSAA football tournament began.
Faulkens places the eight ping pong balls on the flat part of the machine. He pulls out the metal sheet holding them up, dropping the balls into the chamber of the lottery-style machine. He flips a switch, and the balls start swirling around.
Quickly, Faulkens grabs one ball after another out of the chute. As he grabs each one, he shouts them out for Rosati and Howell to hear. Faulkens is also placing the balls on the platform to keep them in the order they were pulled.
The real stars are Rosati and Howell. As Faulkens shouts numbers, their goal is to remember which order that ball was pulled out, not what number Faulkens said.
For example, the first number pulled was 7. Instead of writing 7 on the sheet of paper, Rosati and Howell find the 7th-listed team in the sectional and write “1” next to it. The next number pulled gets a “2” until all teams in each sectional are drawn.
Once every number is pulled from the machine, Rosati and Howell double-check their papers. If they match, everyone moves on to the next sectional.
“It’s very precise — that’s why there’s three of us,” Faulkens said. “We’ve got to double and triple check the sequence and that everyone goes into the right blanks.”
In an eight-team football sectional, the team drawn first visits the team drawn second in the first round. Same goes for third at fourth, fifth at sixth and seventh at eighth.
In a seven-team and five-team field, the last number drawn gets the bye into the semifinals. In the six-team fields, the last two teams drawn get the byes. There are no byes in the eight-team and four-team configurations.
It takes Faulkens, Rosati and Howell 38 minutes to finish the football draw, ending with the final four-team field of Class 5A, Sectional 16.
There was only one notable snafu, which came during Sectional 40. Rosati and Howell were confused on the ordering of the numbers, so Faulkens read them back to confirm the order they were pulled in.
All in all, not a bad performance when having to draw 48 sectionals.
“I think a misconception is it’s not a blind draw sometimes — it certainly is,” Neidig said. “The way we do it now, when I’m drawing out the ping pong balls — I personally don’t pay attention to who’s playing who until the thing is over. I just want to keep the order of the ping pong balls in place so we can get those written down and tell who’s playing who. It truly is a blind draw.”
Putting on a show
The draw is now done but it will not be unveiled to the public for another four days. That’s because, much like the blind draw itself, a special show to unveil the results of the draw has been an IHSAA tradition for decades.
IHSAA sports information director Jason Wille is the next person to see the draw. He’s in charge of typing up the press release that will be sent out after the show.
Once the press release is finished, it goes off to IHSAA director of broadcasting Heath Shanahan, who’s in charge of producing the two-hour show the organization will do Sunday night. The main task is the on-screen graphics with the brackets, meaning all 311 football teams and where they’re aligned in the sectional are on Shanahan to format correctly.
It takes about the same time to make the graphics as it does to do the blind draw itself.
By the end of the day Wednesday, everything related to the football blind draw is done … except the unveiling itself.
That comes Sunday night. They’re aired on this day on purpose, as there are no organized games or practices that day. Doing it in the evening also allows teams to gather for watch parties, which everyone in the IHSAA raves about.
“It’s an event,” Shanahan said. “Now they can go and watch it together as a team. The camaraderie aspects there, the team-building aspects there ... it’s a tradition now.”
This year’s show was hosted by Greg Rakestraw and IndyStar high school editor Kyle Neddenriep. The former steers the ship, having spent decades hosting these types of shows. His prep began Monday, putting together seven pages of notes on each team.
“When I write this out for this show, it’s almost like a paragraph for each sectional because I know that I’ve got 13 segments to get in across two hours — but that also means 12 breaks,” Rakestraw said.
Neddenriep has covered Indiana high school sports for The Indianapolis Star since 2008, adding high school sports editor responsibilities at the newspaper in the last year as well. He’s been on his fair share of these shows, too, working alongside Rakestraw for most of them.
“My whole goal is to stay out of the way as much as possible and interject some meaningful names and a stat here or there; just something to keep the show rolling,” Neddenriep said.
Sunday was a particularly busy day for Rakestraw, as he hosts Indianapolis Colts pre- and post-game shows on the radio as well. He broadcasted his postgame show from the IHSAA offices, wrapping up at 6:57:20 before the blind draw show began at 7 p.m.
What being in two places at one time looks like. Here after the game until 7p, down the hall with a shirt and tie after that. Thanks @IHSAA1 and @1075thefan for allowing me to knockout a five hour radiothon today. pic.twitter.com/g1TlbfTczX
— Greg Rakestraw (@gregrakestraw) October 11, 2026
After 15 minutes of preamble — including an interview with Neidig — it was time to reveal the brackets. Each of the first four Classes were separated into two segments due to there being 60-plus teams in each. All eight sectionals in 5A and 6A were compressed into their own respective segments, as each one has just 33 teams involved.
Each of the first eight segments had about six minutes of sectional breakdown; roughly 90 seconds a sectional. Class 5A had nine minutes and 6A had approximately 11 minutes, about the same average per sectional as 1A-4A had as well.
At 8:59:23, Rakestraw signed off, and the blind draw process was officially over.
“Everybody is going to get their time on screen,” Rakestraw said. “That’s why I make sure that if you are playing in the tournament, I am going to say your name during the show. Every team hears me say their name between 7 o’clock and 9 o'clock Eastern on Sunday night.”
Why has the blind draw persevered over the years?
The “how” of the IHSAA blind draw is a straightforward process.
The “why” is a more complicated answer for some.
Neddenriep, like many others in the state, has been a critic of the blind draw — especially in football. With travel contained to one day a week for the sport, he feels like it shouldn’t be an issue to seed teams in some capacity.
“(The IHSAA) is like, ‘What about Knightstown going 0-9?’ And my thought is, ‘What about Ben Davis who’s 9-0 having to play Brownsburg who is also 9-0?’” Neddenriep said. “Who are we catering to?”
Seeding for any tournament would have to go through the sport’s coaches association first. The Indiana Football Coaches Association proposed seeding the tournament in 2024, but did not gain much traction beyond that.
From 2024: Proposal from IFCA to seed Class 6A football will not make it to IHSAA board
There are many arguments the IHSAA deploys in defending the blind draw. One of them is what metrics you would use to seed it. They believe there are too many factors to consider and that it’s almost impossible to seed everyone correctly.
Faulkens also believes teams may try to avoid playing marquee games in the regular season to get potentially easier wins, helping their overall record and thus chance at a higher seed.
“Football is better in Indiana because we have a blind draw,” Faulkens said. “There’s no punishment for playing somebody in the regular season.”
The fact every team makes the postseason is also a reason the IHSAA states as doing a blind draw. If teams had to qualify for the playoffs, then a point system would be needed. This would then help create a seeded bracket.
Only one other state in America has an all-in football tournament: Missouri. They use a playoff points system to seed their districts.
Another argument is “you’re going to have to beat someone good eventually.” If a team is good enough to win a state title, it shouldn’t matter which round you play a good team in. Neidig believes the cream rises to the top more times than not, regardless of the draw.
“I think we get the state champion right,” Neidig said. “Do we have a high-level matchup in the first round of the tournament sometimes? We do. But I still think we get the sectional champions right, too.”
Then, there’s the “tradition” of the blind draw. No other state does this but Indiana. It’s been a part of the IHSAA since its inception. A wall with hundreds of ping pong balls in the shape of the state outline hangs on one of the walls of its Indianapolis office.
For better or worse, the IHSAA has stayed loyal to the blind draw. That isn’t changing anytime soon.
“I understand the debate,” Neidig said. “I think I would probably agree with the debate if you had to qualify to play in the tournament. Because you don’t have to, I think that brings a different set of circumstances to the table that you have to consider.”
Austin Hough is a sports editor within the Center for Community Journalism at USA Today Co., overseeing high school sports and Notre Dame athletics coverage for five Indiana newspapers. Follow him on X @AustinRHough. Hough can be emailed at ahough@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Behind the scenes of the 2026 IHSAA football blind draw | Exclusive