It's that time of year again. Now that league play has begun for every team, we can being our annual exercise in premature playoff prognosticating. Welcome to The Bee's first football playoff projection of the 2011 season, based on games played to date.

In our first outing, the only Sacramento region team to snag a No. 1 seed is Foresthill, in Division VI. Local heavyweights Pleasant Grove and Elk Grove start as No. 2 seeds in Divisions I and II. Del Oro, highly ranked by The Bee, is the fifth seed in Division III. And perhaps the biggest surprise: Grant could make a return to the D-I playoffs if current trends hold.

With four games left to play, seeding will change significantly over the next few weeks. This projection is meant to give a broad sense of how the divisions are shaping up and which teams have the inside track for home field advantage. A more thorough discussion of how our projection is done appears below the chart.

On the divisional edge: The smallest enrollment school in D-I this week is Beyer. The largest school in D-II is Lodi, and Antelope is the smallest enrollment team in the division and the most likely to drop to D-III. Cosumnes Oaks is the largest school in D-III; Lindhurst is the smallest. In D-IV, Livingston is the largest. These are the schools most likely to switch divisions, if the mix of qualifying teams changes.

Outside looking in: Grant is the only three-win team to receive an at-large bid. After the Pacers, Riverbank and Rocklin have the next-highest OW tallies out of the three-win teams.

How our projection is done: We have attempted to apply the section's playoff rules for this year as much as possible, with some slight adjustments to compensate for the four weeks yet to be played. The section's playoff plan for 2011 is attached to this story, along with some sample brackets.

We change the rules in two ways to make our projection. First, we ignore the requirement that a team have two league wins, since many teams have just started league play. Second, we add CalPreps rankings as a second tiebreaker for determining each league's two automatic qualifiers. The official tiebreaker is head-to-head competition, but in many cases the teams have yet to play each other. Head-to-head results are used whenever the teams have played.

These charts show preliminary seeding. The section has broad authority to adjust the seeds to compose the final brackets. For example, the seeding in D-I would generally be adjusted to prevent teams from the same league (Granite Bay and Woodcreek in this case) from meeting in the first round. Travel distance is another potential reason for a seeding adjustment. For these charts, we haven't tried to make those final tweaks.

Graphic by Nathaniel Levine nlevine@sacbee.com