CHAPEL HILL — The road of the 2021 North Carolina High School Athletic Association 4A East football state playoffs will run through Raider Stadium.
Less than 24 hours after the Richmond Senior High School football team clinched its fourth consecutive Sandhills Athletic Conference championship, the Raiders were named the No. 1 seed in the 4A East playoff bracket.
It’s the second time in three seasons Richmond has been slotted as the top seed, having also been named the No. 1 team in the 2019 4AA West playoffs.
Unlike the 2019 run, which ended in the 4AA Western Regional Championship for Richmond, there are no subdivisions this fall. The field of 64 4A schools has been split in half with 32 teams in the East and 32 teams in the West.
Schools have been predetermined East or West by the NCHSAA based on their geographic location.
“Once we saw that Wake Forest lost (on Friday), we expected to get the No. 1 seed based on knowing how the formula works,” Richmond head coach Bryan Till said.
A new aspect to the playoffs this year is that the NCHSAA is using an RPI formula (Ratings Percentage Index) to determine seedings for all sports. According to the NCHSAA’s website, the formula is RPI = (0.3 x WP) + (0.4 x OWP) + (0.3 x OOWP).
WP stands for a team’s “winning percentage” (divide the number of wins by the number of total games played), OWP is the “opponents’ winning percentage” (average the winning percentages of a team’s opponents) and OOWP is the “opponents’ opponents winning percentage” (the same process but for the opponents of a team’s opponents).
Richmond received an automatic playoff bid for winning the SAC championship, and the NCHSAA then seeded the all the 4A conference winners by each team’s RPI.
With the No. 1 seed comes home-field advantage for the Raiders, which is something Till and the team hopes to use to their benefit.
“The biggest thing is being at home and not traveling during the playoffs,” Till said. “But we’re not at home unless we win. So if we can find a way to win, we can continue to have home playoff games. This is something we don’t want to take for granted and is good for our fans.”
Home-field advantage for Richmond could last through the first four rounds and then the Eastern Regional Championship, before the state title game would be played at a neutral site.
There are also no first-round byes in this year’s playoffs, which means the Raiders will start getting prepared for their first-round opponent, No. 32 Jack Britt High School, on Monday.
Till said the Richmond coaching staff has been working on getting film on the Buccaneers, a former SAC opponent the past four years, most of the day Saturday.
He added that considering the Raiders have had to deal with playing three games in 11 days earlier this season, getting film and prepping for Jack Britt “has been minor in comparison.”
“It’s good in the first round to play a team we know,” Till said. “We like the familiarity because at some point you may play someone you haven’t played before.
“We appreciate that, we want to have a decent crowd in the first round, and Jack Britt is close,” he closed. “It’s a good first round matchup. I’m extremely happy with our conference championship, but our ultimate goal is a state title.”
The Richmond Observer will publish a full playoff preview for the first-round game against Jack Britt later this week, which will be played at home on Friday, Nov. 5.
Below is a full graphic of the NCHSAA 4A football state playoff bracket, complete with first-round East and West matchups.
