How far has New Jersey come in HS football? The evolution from declared champs to Group Finals in 104 years

In the early 1970s the NJSIAA was still using a version of a ranking formula designed by a Trenton High School math teacher to determine state champions in the eight public school sections in the state, as well as the parochial sections.

After studying 130 teams over a four-year period, J. Whitney Colliton devised a system that paid little regard to group size, but how each team had performed over a four-year basis. They would be put in one of nine groups, in descending order, based solely on their records. Wins over higher-tiered teams would garner more points, with fewer points being awarded for losses.

This system took effect in 1937.

By 2018, the NJSIAA had added another mathematician’s formula – the Born Power Index – to the Colliton System’s eventual replacement, the long-standing “power point “power ranking” system.

Now, the state uses a variant of the BPI – in reverse fashion, so as to not reward teams for winning by greater margins – and for the first time ever, will crown Group Champions in 2022, as nearly every other state in America does.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. But how did we get to this point?

Here’s a look at how the last more than 100 years of crowning football champions have gone in New Jersey

• 1918: The NJSIAA is formed, initially to regulate football, but eventually all high school sports.
• 1919: The first football champions are declared by the NJSIAA. The public school championship was given to Barringer out of Newark, while Peddie Institute – as it was called then – of Hightstown was awarded the prep school trophy. Around this time – and no one is really sure how or why – a clause was written into the NJSIAA Constitution stating that no state champion should be declared in football, and for more than a century These words would later dog efforts to determine public school champions.
• 1937: There’s no documentation as to when the NJSIAA began using the Dickinson method of rating teams, which took into account wins and group size, but by now, there is a plan to replace it with the Colliton System, developed by J. Whitney Colliton, a math teacher from Trenton. NJSIAA Secretary Walter E. Short is “completely sold” on the system, saying, “I don’t know of anything quite like it anywhere in the country. It’s really a scientific solution to our problem.” But over the years, there are more than a few instances where one team would rank ahead of another, despite the lower-ranked team having won a head-to-head matchup. And so, fairly frequently, controversy would ensue, especially when co-champions were declared, when teams were within a certain threshold of points from each other.
• 1974: Tired of ties and controversies – which were plenty under the Colliton system – the state adopts a playoff, at the behest of a a special Football Playoffs Committee headed by legendary Brick Township coach Warren Wolf. Teams must opt-in after Week Four of the season. Not all do, and some sectional champions are still declared when there are no eligible teams according to the state’s point system. The playoffs aren’t really playoffs with a bracket as we think of them now. They would only include two teams in each section, if necessary; they must be separated by a certain number of points. Too wide a gap between No. 1 and No. 2 means a champion would instead be declared. Out of 16 potential public school playoffs, only eight are held. And there was controversy right off the bat, when in North 2, Group 4, there were four undefeated teams heading into Thanksgiving that many thought deserving of a shot at a state title: Westfield, Morris Knolls, Morristown and Barringer.
• 1975: Just a year in, calls from the Skyline Conference in North Jersey echo down to Robbinsville to reform the ranking formula, and there’s even talk of the league’s schools seceding from the NJSIAA. The pressure results in changes that are adopted in time for the 1975 season, expanding the playoff field in each section to four teams, with the schools chosen according to a new “power ranking” formula – a precursor to the power points system we now know and love. It deals only in wins and losses, and awards “quality points” based on group size. Almost immediately, Vineland – a Group 4 school – has a gripe in that there aren’t enough “big” schools for it to play in South Jersey compared with schools like Brick Township, and wants credit for beating Philadelphia schools, which it plays on a somewhat regular basis. Sound familiar?
• 1998: The playoffs are expanded again, this time to eight teams in each section. The minimum for playoff qualification is that a team must be .500 or better at the end of the regular season through its first eight games. Byes are given when there aren’t enough teams to fill a bracket.
• 2000: Then-Wallkill Valley assistant football coach and co-Athletic Director Mike VanZile proposes a major overhaul to the way the state divides up schools into groups and how they qualify for the playoffs. His idea is to eliminate conferences, creating ten-team groups that are based on geography and school size. Power points would be eliminated, with the top four teams in each group making the playoffs. There would be a uniform start date, no bye weeks, Thanksgiving games would remain, public schools would be mixed in with parochials, and two more weeks added to the playoffs to play to group champions, the first serious proposal to bring New Jersey in line with all but a handful of other states. But the plan fails to gather enough support, with many coaches bemoaning the loss of traditional rivals, extended travel, an earlier start to the season that encroaches upon summer vacation, and a later end to the season that bleeds into the winter sports calendar, even though no more than 16 public schools would play an extra week, and only eight would go the extra two weeks. At least three additional attempts to enact the plan, with variations each time – and even a separate plan that would also include group champs proposed by then-East Brunswick coach Marcus Borden – fail over the next 13 years, but the vote would get closer over the next decade or so, losing by just 23 votes in 2010.
• 2003: Up until now, teams have been placed in sections based on geographical lines, mainly on county borders. North Group 1 featured Hudson, Bergen, Passaic and Sussex County teams, while North 2 had Union, Essex, Morris and Warren. Central Jersey had Middlesex, Somerset, Monmouth, Mercer and Hunterdon, while the Ocean and Burlington Counties and south were in South Jersey. But that resulted in an imbalance: 92 schools in the south, 82 in Central, 88 in North 1, and 74 in North 2. A redistribution in the works for a couple of years takes effect in ’03, eventually landing some Somerset schools in North 2, while others stayed in Central. Warren, Morris, Essex and Bergen were split among North 1 and North 1. Eventually, some GMC teams found their way into North 2 as well.
• 2012: In an effort to get more teams in the postseason – and reduce the disparity between the largest and smallest schools in each group, the NJSIAA expands from four to five public school groups, paving the way for 20 public school champions. In order to fill out more eight-team brackets, the state eliminates the rule requiring playoff teams to be .500 or better at the cutoff. The move came after only five teams qualified in North 2, Group 3, in 2011.
• 2013: The last push to play to group champions in nearly a decade – put forth by the Big North Conference – fails by about a 2-to-1 margin, with a two-thirds majority needed for approval. With such a resounding defeat, and at least four losses in 13 years, another vote would not come until 2021.
• 2016: The NJSIAA adopts the concept of “multipliers,” where public schools playing certain North Jersey powerhouses – Bergen Catholic, Don Bosco and the like – are awarded extra points. (Controversially, it also allows mutliplier teams to get points for playing multipliers, making a mess of the parochial playoff seeding.) It’s seen as a way to get more public schools to play the big-time schools, but only three public schools take advantage. Those playing United Red Division teams get two times the power points as if they had won, regardless of outcome. United White opponents garner 1.5 times a typical win. The NJSIAA also changes the “power point” system to eliminate each team’s lowest point total, ostensibly to keep at least one weak opponent from hurting schools’ playoff seeding.
• 2017: After much controversy over the multiplier formulas, teams are now given set amounts for a win or loss against one of those teams. For example, playing a United red team gets a public school 54 points for a win, 36 for a loss. The United White is worth 38 and 32.
• 2018: The NJSIAA enacts the biggest changes to determining state champions since the dawn of the “playoff era” in 1974. The New Jersey United Committee – a group of Athletic Directors and coaches from around the state – devises a plan that merged elements of two competing overhaul proposals. It added a second playoff metric to complement the “power points” system: the Born Power Index, created by math teacher Bill Born, who’s system had been used for decades to seed county basketball tournaments, and was published in North Jersey newspapers. Each team would be ranked in power points – now an average, and no longer cumulative, eliminating the “Game 9” rule – and in the BPI, with power points accounting for 40 percent and the BPI for 60 percent of a team’s UPR – the United Power Ranking. (For non-public schools, the UPR would be considered, but the tournament would be seeded by a Committee.) Further, instead of four pre-determined geographical sections and eight teams qualifying in each group, they’d be split into North and South, with the top 16 in qualifying in each “supersection.” Teams would then be broken into “traditional” eight-team sections by Northing number. The problem was with the entire setup was that Born’s formula was proprietary, and never released, despite calls for transparency. On the air at WCTC at the time, with the help of Piscataway assistant coach John Thompson, I was able to crack the code, using results from the first few weeks games to figure out how much each team’s Born Power Index ranking would change, and working backwards, eventually able to correctly predict the next week’s Born Power Index rankings. (I never figured out the actual formula, but another path to arrive at the same numbers as Born, even correcting a handful of mistakes made with the official calculations.) But the results showed that teams were being rewarded for blowouts; the more a team won by, the higher their rating went. In addition, there was no blowout cap, so teams could be encouraged to run up the score just to improve their ratings. That was altered a couple of weeks into the season. But by the end of the year, as more coaches and administrators learned of the system, how it worked, and what its results were, the uproar over the Born Power Index being used grew so loud, the NJSIAA promised to take a hard look at the system in the offseason. The other big change, though, was that for the first time, the playoffs wouldn’t end at sectional championships. The North 1 and 2 winners, and the South and Central winners in each group would play each other in “bowl championships” to be held at MetLife Stadium. Sectional finals were moved out of venues like Rutgers, Kean and The College of New Jersey and back to higher seeds. The change got lukewarm reaction, as it was halfway to a group championship, but didn’t go all the way. Some saw – including this reporter – saw it as a “test run” for the idea of playing a longer season.
• 2019: The NJSIAA ditches the Born Power Index and adopts a similar formula, the Strength Index. They’re essentially the same in that a team’s rating depends on how well it does against an opponent, based on the team’s ratings at the time they play, and the final score. But rather than using a team’s own Strength Index towards a team’s UPR, it uses that number in reverse: the Opponent Strength Index, also known as OSI. Team’s get the full value of an opponent’s SI for a win, half for a loss. In that way, winning by more points doesn’t benefit the team itself; in fact, blowing out a an opponent can hurt a team, by lessening their opponents’ value to that team. The NJSIAA also scraps the “northing number” sorting in favor of “snaking” the top 16 in each section. Team 1 goes with teams 4, 5, 8, 9 etc… and Team 2 goes with team 3, 6, 7, etc., similar to the NCAA college basketball tournament. But it leads to long trips for some games, since about two-thirds of the state’s teams are concentrated in the Northern third of the state, with the rest in the South.
• 2020: For the first time since the playoff format began in 1974, there are no playoffs, a casualty of the global COVID-19 pandemic, as teams play six-game schedules, with leagues allowed to have two weeks of postseason, in any format they choose. But the beginning of major changes come quickly after the season.
• 2021: In January, the NJSIAA membership votes to allow football championships by eliminating the language that “no state champions shall be declared in football.” (We think it never had to be, since playoffs to determine group champions is different from declaring champions. But anyhow.) That paves the way for an official playoff proposal to be made, one in which the season would start earlier, but be shortened by a week, preventing the season from ending any later than the first weekend of December, as it has for decades now. Thanksgiving games would be maintained with an off week between the group semifinals and group finals. With something to seemingly please everybody, by June, the tide of oppositionhad turned so much that all but a handful of member schools voted overwhelmingly to have public schools play all the way down to group champions.
• 2022: The NJSIAA will hold its first-ever public school football Group Championships, with the finals being played at Rutgers University’s SHI Stadium on the first weekend of December.

It’s been a long time coming!

Read more on our coverage of the historic vote that brought New Jersey group championships:

• NJSIAA unveils 2022 football proposal calling for Group champs
• OPINION – Play on to Group Champs: Why Article IX doesn’t matter
• NJSIAA holds “vote” on allowing football state champs, results to be known next week (AUDIO)
• Marcus Borden – winner of two titles – says group champs won’t cheapen sectional crowns
• Hillsborough’s Carty hopes momentum carries over from historic NJSIAA vote
• Hackensack’s Wimberly reflects on historic NJSIAA vote, and the value of HS sports during COVID-19
• In historic vote, NJSIAA members decide to play to Group Champs in football, starting in ’22