Week 9 surprises loomed large as WPIAL football committee paired brackets

By: Chris Harlan
Sunday, October 30, 2022 | 2:00 AM

Some folks count sheep.

As co-chairs of the WPIAL football committee, Norwin athletic director Mike Burrell and Brentwood principal Jason Olexa spent the final night of the regular season endlessly counting tiebreaker points before they could fall asleep.

This year, there was more counting to do than usual after the season ended Friday night. The final week of the regular season brought more surprises than usual.

“We know we’re going to be up late,” Burrell said. “After some of the upsets from (Friday) night, it was after 2 a.m. by the time we got done.”

The WPIAL football committee met for around three hours Saturday morning to seed the playoff brackets, and those Week 9 surprises loomed large in the pairings they released in the afternoon.

Among the biggest surprises, Penn Hills seemed destined for a No. 2 seed in Class 5A before the Indians lost Friday to Woodland Hills, 7-3. As a result, Penn Hills fell out of the playoffs entirely, and Woodland Hills got in.

“At the beginning of the day, nobody thought that Penn Hills wasn’t going to make it,” Burrell said. “Most likely they were going to be conference champs. At the end, they’re collecting equipment on Monday, which is unfortunate.”

The next biggest surprise involved McKeesport.

The Tigers were penciled in as No. 2 seeds in Class 4A before they lost to Thomas Jefferson, 20-10. That win earned Thomas Jefferson the No. 3 seed and a first-round bye.

“Every person on our committee goes in with brackets written down,” Burrell said. “For the most part, people had the winner of Central Valley/Aliquippa as No. 1. Everyone probably felt McKeesport was going to win, so they’ll go to two. The loser of CV/Aliquippa can go to three or four. Everyone thought that was going to happen, and it didn’t.”

There was discussion about jumping Armstrong to No. 3, Burrell said, but the committee preferred Thomas Jefferson there. Armstrong is No. 4. McKeesport fell to No. 5.

There were no surprises with the No. 1 seeds. Defending champions Aliquippa and Bishop Canevin were among the six teams seeded first when the brackets were revealed online via TribLive HSSN.

Aliquippa is the defending Class 4A champion, and Bishop Canevin is trying to repeat in Class A. The other top seeds went to North Allegheny in Class 6A, Bethel Park in 5A, Belle Vernon in 3A and Steel Valley in 2A.

The championship games for Class 6A and 5A are Saturday, Nov. 19, at Norwin. The four smaller classifications will be played at Acrisure Stadium on Friday, Nov. 25.

All six championship games will be streamed live on TribLive HSSN.

The playoffs start Friday, but Class 6A teams must wait a week to join the action. All four 6A qualifiers have a bye week.

Burrell said the most challenging bracket to finish was Class A.

The small-school bracket had the largest field with 16 teams, but the committee also added more fingerprints there by awarding home games to all four Black Hills Conference qualifiers: No. 1 Bishop Canevin, No. 6 Fort Cherry, No. 7 Burgettstown and No. 8 Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.

OLSH earned its playoff spot with a Week 9 win over Cornell.

In many ways, the rough drafts the football committee might have drawn Friday morning looked much different than the final versions released Saturday.

• Seneca Valley lost by one point to North Allegheny on Friday night, leaving the Raiders on the outside looking in at the Class 6A playoffs. Canon-McMillan’s loss to Mt. Lebanon sealed Seneca Valley’s fate.

• Defending champion Penn-Trafford squeaked into the playoffs as a Class 5A wild card by defeating Big East leader Franklin Regional, 28-21, handing the Panthers their first conference loss.

• North Hills suffered a 47-0 loss to Pine-Richland on Friday, yet the Indians claimed the other Class 5A wild card over Peters Township and Penn Hills.

• The Greater Allegheny finished with a three-way tie that sent Mars and Hampton to the 4A playoffs and sent North Catholic home.

• Montour celebrated a 21-20 overtime win against West Allegheny that saw those two teams switch spots in the Parkway standings. Montour is seeded eighth in Class 4A. West A is No. 10.

Those outcomes and a handful of others made this Week 9 the most surprising in recent years.

“Absolutely,” Burrell said. “We kept communication throughout the night, texting back and forth on score updates. It was a little shocking.”

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.

Tags: McKeesport, Penn Hills, Thomas Jefferson, Woodland Hills