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Teams are arranged in classes (by 9-12 enrollment) and sections (geographically 7 or 8 teams) so your sectional games are somewhat close to each other. There are some sections that get spread out and a team has to travel an hour or two for a game and that's a big issue. But it's entirely possible for 2 highly ranked teams to be in the same sectional and play each other in the first round rather than the sectional final.
Regular season is 9 weeks; playoffs 6 weeks. Once your team loses in the playoffs they are done. I don't know of any schools that play a JV game after the playoffs start.
The source of Indiana's all-in system was the introduction of a "cluster" playoff system created back in the early 80s. I don't know exactly how it worked but they somehow clustered teams together and points were associated with who you beat. It sounds like a screwy system and it resulted in some 10-0 and 9-1 teams not making the playoffs. I believe the percentage of teams that made the playoffs was pretty small. Some of these schools decides to sue the IHSAA and rather than deal with it, they came up with this all-in system to avoid any future issues. It has gone unchanged since then.
Indiana does have conferences and they are formed independently like NCAA. They are not assigned to a conference by the IHSAA. Many of the conferences have teams from multiple classes. Because of that some teams play very few teams in their class. A few years ago a team went 3-6 during the regular season but they won the state championship in their class. Their conference apparently had teams in higher classes so they lost to bigger schools. A couple conferences have 10 teams so they only teams they play are in their conference.
One idea floated around is to have 7-8 team conferences similar to today's sectionals. That would give each team 6-7 conference games that would be used as the primary determination in playoff qualification and use the other 3-4 games for traditional rivalries with teams from any class. That is usually shot down because people don't want to break up conferences. They exist for all sports and not every sport would be broken up the same way.
One of the common arguments for keeping it is it gives teams that struggle early a reason to stick with it the rest of the season. There's always another opportunity. Since a bad team could draw another bad team, they could get an extra game or two or three in the playoffs. And how could you possibly take away the playoff atmosphere away from the kids? Isn't that what this is all about? What kind of atmosphere did the kids get when they got beat 60-0?
Keep in mind this is the same state that still assigns officials to all playoff games based 100% on a coach's vote.
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