Which Gaylord area football teams made the MHSAA playoffs?
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GAYLORD — The high school football playoff stage is set.
The MHSAA Football Championship Selection Sunday Show was held on Sunday, Oct. 25, with teams across Michigan learning the fates of their seasons. While one Gaylord area team will be hosting a first-round playoff game, the other two fell just short of the 32-team brackets.
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Who will Gaylord St. Mary play in its first-round game, and where will it be played? How close were Gaylord and JoBurg to keeping their seasons alive?
Gaylord St. Mary
Final Playoff Points/Overall seed: 35.833, No. 4 (8-player, Division 2)
Matchup: St. Mary (9-0, 5-0 Bridge Alliance-Valley) vs. St. Ignace (8-1, 3-1 Bridge Alliance-Straits) (Gaylord St. Mary Family Field)
During the first seven weeks of the season, some people doubted the Snowbirds based on their résumé. In the final two weeks of the season, they put any of those doubts to bed with a 42-0 win over Pickford and a 54-6 win over Inland Lakes.
Now, they look to be one of the favorites in the 8-player Division 2 playoffs.
St. Ignace is no pushover opponent in the first round. The Saints have only lost once all season, a 44-14 loss to Pickford in Week 4. A win in the first round would likely match GSM up with Lake Linden-Hubbell, another top state-title contender, in the regional finals.
Gaylord
Final Playoff Points/Overall seed: 39.444, No. 39
Injuries piled up for a relatively young Gaylord roster this season, resulting in a detrimental three-game losing streak in Weeks 6-8 and a 4-5 overall record.
It's a step back for coach Matt Silsbury after a 9-0 record in his first season as Gaylord's head coach, but it was also one that helped identify some of the top talent for the program to build around.
Junior quarterback Calvin Cosby was the focal point of the offense through the first seven weeks before an injury knocked him out of the lineup. Cosby, alongside fellow juniors Jimmy Jorgensen and Pierce Barraw, should be the leaders of the 2027 Blue Devils program as they try to get back into the Division 3 playoffs and the Big North Conference title race.
Johannesburg-Lewiston
Final Playoff Points/Overall seed: 23.222, No. 34
JoBurg's final game of the regular season felt like the end of the road.
With JL sitting at No. 32 in the Division 8 playoff points rankings heading into its Week 9 game with a tough Manton team, the Cardinals likely needed an upset victory over the Rangers to feel safe about making the final field. When that game started to slip away, the season felt like it was also slipping away.
And even though those feelings may have been right, the Cardinals only missed the playoffs by two spots and just over a single playoff point.
The 20-8 loss to Oscoda in Week 3 was the game that could've swung things if the Cardinals could've changed the outcome. Now, the future seems uncertain for a team losing its captains and top offensive players, Joey Smokevitch and Peyton Basinski.
Contact GHT Sports Editor Dylan Jespersen at [email protected]. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @dylanjespersen, and Instagram, @dylanjespersen.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Which Gaylord area football teams made the MHSAA playoffs?