The road to the playoffs: We tell you how many wins every Big Central team needs to qualify for the postseason in 2025

It’s an annual tradition here at Central Jersey Sports Radio.

With the advent of the Opponent Strength Index (see last year’s post here for an explanation) we have a great tool to be able to predict how many wins each team will need to make the playoffs. The only minimum set by the NJSIAA is that a team must have at least two wins against NJSIAA members schools.

How great a tool is it?

We’ve been doing these projections since 2021, and in all that time, our projections held true for 220 of 228 teams – a 96.4 percent average success rate! (Non-publics St. Joseph of Metuchen and St. Thomas Aquinas are not included, since they are seeded by a committee, and all non-publics make the playoffs unless they otherwise opt-out or are disqualified.)

Looking back year-by-year, here’s how many teams were true to our recommendations. That means, if they met the minimum number of wins to make the playoffs and made it, or if they didn’t reach the minimum and failed to make the playoffs. If a team made it with fewer wins or missed while reaching our minimum projection, we got it wrong.

• 2021: 55 of 57 (96.4%)
• 2022: 55 of 57 (96.4%)
• 2023: 54 of 57 (94.7%)
• 2024: 56 of 57 (98.2%)

Are we just that good? We’d like to think so, but really, it’s just math – and all about the numbers!

One of the best things about the Opponent Strength Index – which is 60 percent of the NJSIAA’s UPR formula for playoff qualification – is that we can have an idea going into a season how challenging a team’s schedule is.

And while Strength Index changes every game, most teams will see little overall change to their schedule. On the whole, some teams go up, some go down, and some stay pretty close to where they began the year. Where we’ve been wrong is generally with a team who may have won a good number of games, but more of their opponents went down in SI than went up.

Here’s how we figure it out:

We look at the maximum OSI a team could get, assuming the won all their games, and the lowest they could get, assuming they go winless. We divide that by the number of games on the schedule to find out an average of how many points each game is worth.

Using round numbers, here’s an example: Team A plays eight games against teams that all have the same SI value of 80.

If Team A goes 8-0, they would have an OSI of 80, getting 100 percent of the SI value of each team they beat. (Yes, this number will be different by the end of the year, but for our purposes let’s say it stays the same; some teams went up, some down, and it balanced out.)

If Team A goes 0-8, they would have an OSI of 40, getting 50 percent of the SI value of each team they lost to. (Let’s not get into mutlipliers.)

If Team A went 4-4, they would have an OSI of 60. They would get the full 80 points for the four teams they beat (80 x 4 = 320) and half the 80 points for the four teams they lost to (40 x 4 = 160). That’s a total of 480 points, averaged out over 8 games, giving them an OSI of 60.

So that means each game is worth about 5 points on average. Inotherwords, going 8-0 means an SI of 80. A 7-1 record would get you an OSI of 75, 6-2 would get you a 70, 5-3 would get you an OSI of 65, right back to Team A going 4-4 and getting a 60 OSI, and so on.

Once we find the per game value, we need to find the minimum OSI to make the playoffs. Again, it’s not a set number, but it varies by supersection. We look at the highest OSI team to miss the top 16 cutoff, then find the next team higher than that which qualified.

For example, last year

Since these numbers can vary from year to year, we’ve been using an average over time, and this year’s numbers are based on a five-year average, starting with our target for 2021 through our target for 2025.

That said, here are the “minimum OSI” values teams would need to make the playoffs in 2025, based on a five-year average, and compared to last year’s 2024 target based on a four-year average:

• North 5: 40.50 (down .42)
• South 5: 42.99 (up .55)
• North 4: 43.08 (up .05)
• South 4: 42.84 (down .07)
• North 3: 43.35 (down .11)
• South 3: 42.75 (up .43)
• North 2: 41.06 (up .43)
• South 2: 39.71 (up .29)
• North 1: 37.44 (up .48)
• South 1: 36.85 (up .65)

For a closer look, here’s how each year’s target has fared since 2021, based on playoff qualification from the year before:

With that data in hand, we can predict how many wins it would take a team to get into the playoffs. We call them “steps,” and we assign all Big Central teams two numbers: the first is to just get over the minimum, and the second is a “full step” over.

For example, if the minimum OSI is 42, and four wins gets a team a 43 OSI, we would say they need four wins to get in, and going one full step over, five should make them a lock.

That being said, Here’s the list of all 57 Big Central Conference public schools (the non-publics are seeded differently, by committee) along with their playoff supersection, target OSI, and their minimum wins needed, plus one step over to make them a “lock.”

One note: The NJSIAA has not yet released any update to classifications as of this post’s publication, but few changes are expected other than the new Jackson Township moving to Group 5 after the merging of Jackson Liberty and Jackson Memorial.

Looking at the chart, you might wonder why Piscataway and Plainfield, for example – both in the North 5 playoff supersection – have different win requirements. And what about Bridgewater-Raritan, which we project needs at least two wins to get in? Wouldn’t the target be the same?

That’s because they have different schedules, and based on SI values, Plainfield’s schedule is more challenging that Piscataway’s. If the SI values of their opponents stayed exactly the same, the average SI of the Cardinals’ opponents would be 59.07. The Chiefs’ would be 58.15. That means Piscataway would have more work to do since their schedule is (negligibly) weaker.

Bridgewater-Raritan – with its American Silver Division one of the toughest in the conference, and the only one where all five members have made the playoffs the last three seasons – has an average opponent SI of 70.29. That means they would need to win fewer games to get to the target

Overall, our projections indicate that 50 of the 57 public schools in the Big Central would need between three and five wins to make the playoffs. Three “could” get in with one or two, while four would at least six. None were projected to need seven or eight.

That’s a pretty good situation for most of the league’s schools as the range of three to five wins puts a team right around .500, plus or minus a game, and what was the “old” NJSIAA minimum qualification for the playoffs?

You guessed it: .500 through a team’s first eight games.