The merger of the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League and the Peninsula Athletic League for football has been agreed upon and will take place in the fall of 2022.

Many of the details are still to be worked out as athletic directors have been inundated by postponements and cancellations of winter season games due to the onset of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

There will be two A divisions, two B divisions and one C division. The SCVAL and PAL names will remain, but there will be some shifting of teams.

The SCVAL De Anza Division will have six of the seven teams from last season with Santa Clara moving down.

The PAL Bay Division will have four of the six from last season -- Menlo-Atherton, Sacred Heart Prep, Half Moon Bay and Burlingame -- along with Menlo School and Aragon.

The SCVAL El Camino Division will be comprised of Gunn, Cupertino, Los Altos, Santa Clara and former PAL members The King's Academy and Sequoia.

The PAL Ocean Division will have Hillsdale, Capuchino, Jefferson, Carlmont, Terra Nova and San Mateo as its six teams.

The PAL Lake Division will bring together SCVAL schools Fremont, Monta Vista, Lynbrook and Saratoga to join with Woodside, Mills, El Camino and South San Francisco from the PAL.

Teams in the A and B divisions will have five league games and two equity-based crossover games. For example, M-A, which has won the PAL Bay title the last four years, has crossover games with Los Gatos and Wilcox, the two top teams in the De Anza Division last season.

At the end of the season the plan is to rank the teams from 1 to 32 and do it all over again.

"It might have made more sense if we went 8-8-8-8 (and had four divisions for 32 teams),'' SCVAL commissioner Brad Metheany said. "But if we'd done that our A division would have been unbelievable, better than the WCAL.''