What would happen if NJSIAA dropped power points altogether? With one tweak: not much

As the NJSIAA continues to tweak the playoff formula year after year, New Jersey’s high school sports governing body has said it’s committed to power points. The question is: Why?

This coming school year, in all sports, the NJSIAA eliminated the group point component of power points. Traditionally, power points have three factors:

• Teams get 6 “quality points” for a win, 3 for a tie, none for a loss.
• Teams (used to) get “group points” based on the size of a school they beat (1 through 5 in football)
• Teams get residuals: 3 for every win by an opponent they beat, 1 for every win by an opponent they lost to. (Ties make it a bit trickier.)

But now, the group points are out, which means other than the numbers, there’s no real difference between OSI and power points. Both give credit for a win – in OSI you get the full value of a team you beat, half for a loss and 75% for a tie – and both have a strength of schedule component; in power points, its residuals, while OSI itself is the strength factor.

So the NJSIAA has neutered power points in football, making it somewhat toothless. In addition, they moved the multiplier from power points to the OSI formula.

They also brought the values somewhat closer to reality. With power points, a loss to a mutliplier would gain a team more points than they could get by beating a large, undefeated public school. But with the move to OSI, beating a mutliplier gets you the same point value as a beating a public school or non-multiplier, while losing gets you anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of the OSI value, as opposed to 50 percent.

So, where’s the benefit of keeping power points.

We evaluated the 2022 playoff teams a year ago. Out of 160 public schools qualifying for the playoffs (non-publics are seeded by a committee with the metrics used only as a guide) only seven different teams would have made the playoffs. Generally, the teams moved very little.

We just got around to looking at the 2023 playoffs. And a move to OSI would be even better.

Only six different teams would have gotten into the top 16 out of 160 overall. The negative side of that is that five of the six would have beat teams with worse records.

Further, two of those newly-qualified teams were 2-7. Now, we’ve never liked the NJSIAA eliminating the .500 requirement. But, a simple increase in the minimum number of wins from two games against NJSIAA member schools to three would take care of that problem. In that case, a switch solely to OSI would net only three – yes, three – different teams in the playoffs than with the state’s UPR formula, with is made of 60 percent of a team’s OSI ranking, and 40 percent of a team’s power point ranking.

This year will be interesting to watch, with the elimination of group points and the multiplier being moved from power points to OSI, and with more realistic values. That could be the tipping point that gets OSI more in line with the UPR, so close that power points may essentially be worthless.

Many coaches still believe in power points, and the downside of OSI is that strength of schedule is based more on scores (read: performance) than wins and losses. One idea would be to add some sort of residual factor, based on wins, to the OSI formula.

For example, if Team A beat Team B with an OSI of 80 and a record of 6-2, they would get 80 for the win, and add 18 residuals (3 for every win by a team you beat). Losing to that team – which would now be 7-1) would get you 47 points: that’s 40 as half of 80 for the loss, and 7 for their seven wins.

Here’s a look at each supersection from the 2023 playoffs, and how they would have looked if the playoffs were seeded strictly by OSI – no residuals added, maybe we’ll check that another time – instead of power points:

North 5: The top five teams here would stay the same, with Passaic Tech followed by Phillipsburg, Union City, Watchung Hills and Montclair. P’burg and Montclair made sectional finals, while PCTI beat Union City in the North Group 5 semifinal. Paterson Eastside (3-5) would have climbed from 17 to 15 and made the playoffs, knocking out 16th-seed Bayonne (5-4). But they would be one of three 3-6 teams that made the playoffs either way, the other two being Clifton and Bridgewater-Raritan. Piscataway (5-4) would miss the playoffs either way, although they qould have qualified strictly on power points. Overall, only two of the top 17 teams moved more than two spots, and they only moved three places.

South 5: The top 16 remain the same either way, OSI or UPR. South 5 semifinalist Cherokee would remain No. 1, while Toms River North, the overall Group 5 champ, would have fallen two places to fourth. Does that sound right? Maybe, considering they finished as high as No. 2 in the UPR mainly based on playing two multipliers during the regular season: Red Bank Catholic and Donovan Catholic. The top four teams were the same, just in a slightly different order.

North 4: This is another supersection with little change. The top 3 wouldn’t have changed their order – North 4 champion Ramapo, sectional finalist Roxbury, and North 5 semifinalist Mount Olive. The other sectional finalist, Northern Highlands, would have flip-flopped with Ridge, jumping up to fourth. Overall, ten of the 16 teams didn’t budge with the change.

South 4: The top four teams would be the same, but while the top two would remain sectional finalist Millville and South 5 semifinalist Winslow Twp., seeds three and four would flip-flop, putting South 4 champ Mainland third and dropping Brick Memorial to fourth. The other sectional semifinalist was Long Branch, which made a nice run. They would drop two places from 10th to 12th. Overall, seven of the 16 remained unchanged, and no new teams made it; the top 16 was the same either way.

North 3: Summit would have dropped to the second seed overall, but they still would have been in the top two, meaning they still could have hosted a sectional final if they got that far. (They didn’t.) Old Tappan would flip-flop with them and be No. 1 overall; they made it to a sectional final. North 3 champ West Essex would hold at No. 8, while North 3 finalist West Morris would jump from 11 to 9. Passaic Valley, the other sectional semifinalist, drops one spot to 13th. This is one section where it doesn’t work out well, with Governor Livingston – which had a nice year at 6-3 – would get bounced using OSI. They made it at No. 16, but would fall all the way to 19th with OSI instead of UPR. With six wins, though, maybe they would have benefitted from moving residuals over to OSI? The new team that got in? Mendham, which was 4-5, not an egregious switch, to be fair. Only one three-win team qualified – Sparta, with a 3-5 record – but they would have made it either way.

South 3: Here’s one where a bad team would have made it over a good one, at least on the surface, based on wins and losses. Burlington Township (2-7) was 17th in the UPR standings, but would have made it at No. 13 going straight OSI. That would knock out 6-2 Hopewell Valley. But, if the NJSIAA raised the minimum win requirement to three (which we think is fair because it takes 3 wins to clinch a sectional title) Burlington Twp. would be out. Hopewell Valley still wouldn’t get in, but at least the others would be Ocean Twp. (3-5) and Nottingham (4-4). Otherwise, only one team in the Top 16 moved more than two places. South 3 champion Delsea would fall from No. 1 to No. 2 overall, but still would have been a top seed in their section and hosted their sectional final. South 3 semifinalist Camden would have improved is six-seed to No. 4. And sectional finalists Seneca would have dropped one place, while Cedar Creek would have held steady at seven.

North 2: The top seven teams all stayed the same, three sets of two teams flip-flopped, and overall eight stayed put in the switch to OSI. Top overall seed Caldwell didn’t move, North 2 champ Westwood held in second, sectional finalist Rutherford held third, and North 3 semifinalist Bernards stayed at No. 4. Lakeland, a sectional semifinalist, improved from 9th to 8th. One new team made the field, with 17th-place Becton (4-4) moving up to bounce out 16-seed Madison (3-5). Call that one a push.

South 2: The top four teams remain the same here, but with the middle two in a different order. Sectional finalist Point Pleasant Boro remained No. 1 overall, while sectional finalist Haddonfield and South 3 champion Rumson-Fair Haven flip-flopped to 2 and 3 respectively. South 3 runner-up Willingboro held fourth. Overall five of the top seven teams would have ended up in the same spot. One downside is that Spotswood would get left out at 8-1 – they were 16 in UPR and finished 18 in OSI – while Delran (2-7) would get in. But guess what? If the NJSIAA raised the minimum win threshold from two to three, that would eliminate Delran as well as Raritan (2-6) which got in at 14 in power points and 11 in OSI. Knocking them out would put in Mastery Charter of Camden (3-5, 18th in UPR) as well as Spotswood, in the same 16th slot they got with the UPR formula.

North 1: Remarkably, the top ten teams wouldn’t have moved an inch going with OSI instead of UPR. That includes sectional finalists Butler (No. 1 overall) and Hawthorne (4th overall). North 1 champ Mountain Lakes also would have held in 8th, while North 1 runner-up Shabazz would have dropped from 11 to 14. At the bottom, North Arlington (3-5, 17th in UPR) would have gotten in, and Glen Ridge (5-4) would have dropped from 15th to 17th and been bounced by OSI. But again, raising the win minimum to three would have eliminated Verona, which was 2-7, and made the playoffs on UPR at No. 16. OSI would bump them to 11, but again, we think two-win teams don’t belong in the playoffs. Take them out, and Glen Ridge is back in.

South 1: South 1 runner-up Woodstown would remain No. 1 overall with a switch from UPR to OSI, while sectional finalist Schalick would have jumped from 6th to 2nd. South 1 champion Glassboro would edge up from fifth to fourth, while sectional finalist Woodbury would move from seven to No. 2. This section actually had the most volatility. Only two teams would have had the same seeds, and the average move was 2.8 seeds, with two teams going up five spots and one – Penns Grove – moving up six places. (By the way, we looked purely at standings, not head-to-head tiebreakers.) The only downside here is that Paulsboro – somehow, since they’re 1-7 – would have jumped from 18 to 12, but they don’t even meet the current NJSIAA win requirement. This is where the rule works, and it would have kept them out of the playoffs, and everyone who got in on the UPR formula also would have gotten in with the OSI formula, including Dunellen, which fell to 17th on Paulsboro’s jump.