Another year, another round of early playoff projections for 2023 in the Big Central

Win the division, make the playoffs, win a championship. Those are the three main goals for any competitive high school football program.

Since there hasn’t been a .500 rule for playoff qualification in New Jersey for some time now, how do we know that magic number a team needs to get to in order to gain a postseason berth?

We at Central Jersey Sports Radio think we have a really good method. It’s based off the state’s Strength Index values, and the Opponent Strength Index, which is 60-percent of the formula for playoff qualification.

It’s not foolproof, but the way it works is this:

We take Team A’s schedule, and add up the SI values of all their opponents, then average them. That would be Team A’s OSI assuming they won every game. Then we halve that number, which would be Team A’s OSI assuming they lost every game. Finally, we average the difference between the two, to find out how much a win is worth.

For example, if the OSI of Team A in North Group 5 having won all of its eight games is 60, its OSI going winless would be 30. The difference is 30. Divide that by eight and each game is worth – on average – 3.75 points.

Now we find the Target OSI for their section. For example, in North Group 5 last season, no one with an OSI lower than 38.95 missed the playoffs. So, Team A has to get at least to that point – the Target OSI. If a winless season gets Team A 30 points, one win would be 33.75, two wins would be 37, and three wins would be 40.5 points, which is higher than the Target OSI. We would say Team A needs at least three wins to make the playoffs, and four should be a lock.

How have we done in our projections with this system? Very well, thanks!

In 2021, we got 55 of 58 teams right. Last year, we got 55 of 57 right. That’s a pretty good record of 110 correct and just five wrong, a winning percentage of 95.6 percent!

Surely, this system of projection isn’t foolproof. Last year, the two teams we missed were Middlesex and Roselle.

We predicted the Blue Jays would need four wins to make the playoffs. They did, but finished 17th in South 1. We said the Rams would need three, but they got four and also missed. Mainly, they were hurt by three extreme SI value drops over the course of the season: New Providence by 12, Belvidere by 20, and Bound Brook by 28.

Most opponents on a team’s schedule will end up balancing out over the course of a year; some will go up, some will go down, and some will barely change. The large drops – by Belvidere and Bound Brook – with no corresponding jumps by any other teams, were rare.

It’s important to note that the number of wins a team has is not considered for playoff qualification. But we’ve simplified it to that in order to have an easier baseline to measure.

We use historical averages over the last several seasons for Target OSI. The first full season of OSI use was in 2019, but with no playoffs in 2020, the state recentering adjustments were made based on two seasons, rather than one, so we used 2019 for our 2021 Target OSI, and so on. We’re missing South 4 and North 2 in the table below because we didn’t have any Big Central teams in those sections in 2019, but decided in the future to track all sections.

Below is a full chart of Target OSI for this year and the last two seasons, with an average of all three in the final column. This average is what we use for our projections.

Note: CJSR has no target OSI for South 4 and North 2 in 2021 because there were no playoffs in 2020 and there were no GMC or Skyland Conference teams in those sections in 2019, which would have determined the 2021 target OSI. These numbers are tracked in 2022 since the NJSIAA moved to the group championship playoff format.

Next, is our chart of projections for all public schools in the Big Central Conference. (St. Joseph-Metuchen and St. Thomas Aquinas are not included because the NJSIAA seeds those sections by committee.)

Note: “Closest Over” represents the closest to the Target OSI each team can get while going over that number. (Example: For a team with a Target OSI of 40 where 3 wins has on OSI of 37 and 4 wins has an OSI of 43, the “closest over” would be 4 wins.) “Full Step Over” represents one additional win, which would be considered a “lock” in our projections.

Let’s take a closer look at a few examples, again remembering that SI and OSI values will change for all teams over the course of a season on a weekly basis. Generally, some teams go up and some go down, and things tend to average out. (Of course, that was not the case for Middlesex and Roselle last year, as three teams on both of their schedules took a nosedive in SI.)

Union is North Group 5 has a 67.69 Team OSI in the preseason, which means if every team had the same value at the end of the year (or, more accurately, all average out to the same value at the end of the year) and they won all their games, they would have a 67.69 OSI. Going winless would give them a 33.85 OSI. Each win is worth about 4.23 points. Their Target OSI in North 5 is 38.95, and so they would need two wins to top that. A third would virtually guarantee it.

Playing a tough schedule helps. But when you don’t it can make the road to the playoffs tougher.

Let’s take the example of Governor Livingston, which we project would need to win six games to make the playoffs. The Highlanders are in North 3, with a Target OSI of 42.89, but their strength of schedule is low. They would max out at 55.47 if they went undefeated. That leaves them less margin for error.

The Big Central Conference is in its second season of a two-year scheduling cycle, so this year’s schedules aren’t much different than last year, but what’s interesting to note is that last year, we projected five teams would have to win at least six games, maybe seven, to get in the playoffs, while Spotswood had the steepest hill to climb: at least seven, maybe eight wins.

This year, Governor Livingston is the only school from the BCC we project to need a minimum of six wins or more to make the playoffs.