No More 7A: Alabama's New Classification and What It Means for Flag Football

In January, the AHSAA's Central Board of Control voted 13–2 to tear up the classification system Alabama high school sports had used since 2014 and build a new one. Class 7A is gone. Public and private schools will no longer meet in the postseason. And because girls flag football is a fall sport, it's among the first in the state to actually play a season under the new structure: the season that kicked off this week.

Here's what changed, how flag football's divisions map onto it, and what our ratings data suggests about how it will play out.

What the AHSAA Changed

The old system had seven classes, 1A through 7A, with public and private schools mixed together. Private schools carried a 1.35 enrollment multiplier, and later a "competitive balance factor," both meant to push successful private programs up into tougher classes. The arguing over whether that was fair never really stopped.

The new system, in effect for the 2026–27 and 2027–28 school years, resolves the argument by separation:

• Public schools now fill six classes, 1A through 6A, assigned by enrollment. The 7A tier, home of the state's biggest schools since 2014, is simply gone; those schools are now the top of 6A.
• Private schools get their own two classes, called Single A and Double A, assigned by straight enrollment. The 1.35 multiplier and the competitive balance factor are both repealed, since the mechanism they served no longer exists.
• The split applies to championship play. Public and private schools can still schedule each other all regular season long.

How Flag Football Maps Onto It

Flag football doesn't field enough teams in every class to run six separate public championships, so the AHSAA groups the classes into three public divisions and adds one private division. Here's the full 2026 structure, from the official alignments:

Flag Division	Who's In It	Teams	Regions
6A	Class 6A public schools	31	4
5A	Class 5A public schools	46	8
1A–4A	Classes 1A through 4A combined	58	8
Private	Single A and Double A private schools	15	4

A few things jump out of that table. The 1A–4A division is the biggest tent in the sport: 58 teams spanning four enrollment classes, though in practice it leans heavily toward the top of that range (29 of the 58 are 4A schools). The private division is the smallest at 15 teams, which is why Single A and Double A compete together in flag even though they're separate classes in most other sports. And 6A, despite absorbing the former 7A giants, is the second-smallest division: the state's biggest schools, one bracket, no place to hide.

If you followed flag football last season, note that the old "6A/7A" championship framing is dead. Our 2025 playoff simulation covered a 7A bracket that no longer exists.

What the Ratings Say About the New Divisions

Classification sorts schools by enrollment. It does not sort teams by strength, and our preseason ratings show the difference clearly.

On average, the enrollment ladder holds: the typical 6A team rates about 4 points better than an average Alabama team, the typical 5A team sits right at average, and the typical 1A–4A team runs a couple of points below. Bigger schools, deeper rosters, better average teams. No surprise.

The averages hide the interesting part. The spread inside each division is far wider than the gaps between divisions. The best team in 1A–4A enters the season rated around +20, better than every 5A team and good enough to contend in 6A. The private division, fifteen teams deep, spans more than 40 rating points from top to bottom. Enrollment predicts the middle of a division; it says very little about the top.

That's worth keeping in mind when cross-division games happen, and they'll happen constantly: last season, 55% of all games in the state crossed division lines. A small-school program beating a 6A opponent isn't an upset of the classification order. It's what the rating spread says should happen regularly. This is also why our rankings put every team on one statewide scale and treat the divisions as playoff groupings rather than separate universes.

What It Means on the Ground

For the former 7A programs, the practical change is bracket size. They now share one 31-team division with the rest of 6A, four regions, straight shot to a title game. For private schools, the change is bigger: they're no longer chasing public-school brackets under a multiplier that inflated their classification, and their path to a championship runs entirely through other private programs. Whether that produces better or worse competitive matches in the private bracket is an empirical question, and with only 15 teams in the division, we'll have a season's worth of evidence quickly.

One honest caveat: this is year one. Region assignments, division groupings, and even which schools field teams will shift as the sport grows and as the AHSAA reviews the system for the next two-year cycle. The structure described here is the 2026–28 alignment, not a permanent map.