Bracket Week in Florida: The FHSAA Releases the Football Playoff Pairings Friday at 5 P.M. — With a Brand-New Open Division on Top

Florida high school football's loudest week is the quiet one between the last regular-season whistle and the bracket reveal. That reveal now has a time: the Florida High School Athletic Association announces the final playoff brackets this Friday, November 6, at 5 p.m. Eastern on its YouTube channel. A handful of South Florida makeup games in the next three days can still nudge the ratings at the margins, but the field, as the bracket analysts who track it read this run put it, is essentially set.

This year's bracket comes with a structural twist at the top. For the first time, the state's eight highest-rated teams in the final MaxPreps power ratings are pulled out of their classifications and seeded into an Open Division: two pools of four, each team playing its three pool opponents, the top two from each pool advancing to a final four at The Villages on December 3-5, and the title decided alongside the class championships at Pitbull Stadium at FIU on December 9-12. There is no committee, no override and no opt-out — the ratings decide. Every qualifier removed reshuffles the No. 1 seeds in its own class beneath it, which is why Friday's reveal moves dozens of brackets at once.

Orlando has a direct stake in the experiment. The First Academy projects inside the Open Division field — a No. 6 seed in the most recent published projections — in its first postseason of eligibility after a two-season FHSAA ban that covered 2024 and 2025. Projections are not pairings, and the desk will file the real brackets when the FHSAA publishes them Friday. But the shape of the month is already clear: regional quarterfinals behind it, pool play and class semifinals through November, and state finals in December — and for Central Florida's programs, it all starts with Friday's five o'clock reveal.