How the Open Division Reshaped Arizona High School Football in 2024
Arizona — 2024 Season
By the end of the 2024 season, it was clear the Open Division had become the true center of gravity in Arizona high school football. Created to bring the state's elite programs together regardless of enrollment classification, the bracket produced a 2024 championship between Liberty and Basha that felt like the culmination of a season-long chase among the state's best teams.
Liberty's 35-17 win over Basha made the Lions the first repeat Open Division champion, but the division's depth went well beyond the two finalists. Programs like Centennial, which fell to Liberty in the 2023 Open final before capturing a Cinderella 6A title of its own in 2024, and Brophy, which entered the 6A playoffs as the top seed only to be upset by Mountain View, all found themselves either fighting for a spot in the Open bracket or dealing with the fallout of a stacked field.
The result was a 2024 season in which nearly every major storyline in Arizona high school football ran through, or around, the Open Division in some way — whether it was Liberty's title defense, Basha's run to the final, or the ripple effects felt by 6A programs still adjusting to a world where their toughest opponents might not even be playing in their own bracket anymore.
For a division introduced just a few years earlier, 2024 marked the moment the Open Division stopped being an experiment and became the standard by which the state's best programs measured themselves.