The names of the schools change, but the complaints stay the same.
How did this team with more wins get in over this team? They should have played an easier schedule. This team should have played a more challenging schedule? Why did we get in and they didn’t?
It’s a tale as old as time. People complained all the way back when champions were declared, in the 1930s and 1950s and ’60s under the Colliton system. So, we decided on two-team playoffs, where applicable. Sure, that will solve it!
That was how the “playoffs” started in 1974. Soon, it was four teams per section, then eight. Now it’s 16 teams in each half of the state, split on the whims of whatever the football committee decides that given year, with a formula so complicated that most football coaches in New Jersey still don’t fully grasp (after being used for seven years) and our counterparts in other states bug their eyes out.
One actually said to me “Holy cow! That is a ‘complex’ system. I am DEFINITELY NOT a fan of any system that bases points on how teams are ‘rated’. Anything that keeps it on the field and common criteria gets my vote.”
But before we talk about any meaningful tweaks or reforms to the playoff system or formula, let’s get a few truisms out of the way:
- No system is perfect.
- Someone will always complain.
- Someone always thinks they know better.
That last one is important, but we’ll get back to that.
What are the issues?
The problems with the current system have been well-documented. Not everyone agrees there’s a problem, which is one in and of itself. Seems that every time you talk to someone in the loop on this stuff, they fall back on “Well, the best team won, and the best two teams made the finals, so it works.”
That’s a weak position at best.
If you’re going to have 160 public schools out of over 300 in the state qualify for the playoffs, you should be concerned about all of them. If not, just go back to four-team brackets, four groups, and the 64 teams in all – when enough qualified, or did you forget you had to be .500 to make it?!? – like we had in the early 1990s.
But this is true of all sports, high school, pros, even the NCAA Tournament. Expand, expand. Before you know it, there won’t be a regular season We’ll start with playoffs on opening day and anyone who loses is in consolation games the entire year.
Geography
A great politician once said, “All politics is local.” So is high school sports.
Does anyone in Middlesex County really worry about what’s going on in the NJIC? Does Warren County follow the Cape-Atlantic League? Not until it’s time to face one of those teams in the playoffs, in any sport.
But virtually every other NJSIAA sport still has pre-determined geographical sections. Why? Because high school sports, in and of itself, is regional. Let’s get back to that.
The excuse you’ll hear is “well, now we have state champions, so it’s essential we get the best 32 teams in the state.”
But we don’t hear that in basketball, or baseball. They even had a Tournament of Champions in some sports. (We miss that, too.)
Winning a South Jersey Group 3 title in whatever sport you care to think about matters because you are the champion of all the Group 3 schools in South Jersey. If one day, Dunellen football was reborn and they sneak into a snaked bracket in the South because all of a sudden Middlesex, Somerset, and Union County small school football reigned supreme, how fast do you think the West Jersey Football League coaches would be up in arms??
(Ooh! Ooh! I know!)
Dunellen is a Central Jersey school, not South Jersey. (Then, again, maybe these South Jersey people just don’t believe in Central Jersey. Hard to argue with people who don’t think you even exist!) They should play in a Central Jersey bracket.
Other states play in their “regions.” Stop making it up.
Winning Matters
Football is great because it teaches student-athletes about life, working as a team, dealing with adversity, winning with humility, etc. At least it’s supposed to.
And when you lose in life, you pick yourself up, and live another day. Just like when you fumble, you pick yourself up, and play another play.
Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t. You get rewarded if you succeed. It might be a trophy, or a raise. But you get rewarded for doing something well.
In every other high school sport in New Jersey, its about wins. The new NJSIAA power point formula for all sports (besides football) is made up of three things:
- A team gets 6 quality points for a win
- A team gets 3 residuals for every win by an opponent they beat
- A team gets the value of their opponents’ opponent winning percentage
What you’ll notice in that list is that each factor has the same word or variation thereof: win.
Wins matter. Losses don’t.
Not just rewarding losing, but losing BIG:
The simple fact is this: New Jersey’s current playoff formula rewards teams for losing by larger margins than for losing by close margins.
When Team A with a 60 SI loses to Team B with a 70 SI by ten points, they get 35 OSI points.
When Team A with a 60 SI loses to Team B with a 70 SI by 40 points, they get 38 OSI points.
Those are the undeniable mathematical facts of the system, and this is crucial for all to understand.
The system rewards teams who lose by blowout than teams who lose competitive games.
That must change, moving forward. Unless your philosophy is to reward teams with poorer performance over teams with better performance.
What is seeding?
Sure, you all know the answer to this question, but do you really?
Are we trying to predict who will win? Are we ranking the teams? And how do we decide this?
District III in Pennsylvania’s PIAA – which has a page on its website with FAQs that also gets into its philosophy – hits the nail right on the head:
“The District III Committee is not in the clairvoyance business. That is to say, when a team is seeded first in a district playoff bracket, the district is saying that team’s body of work, measured by an unbiased mathematical formula, merited that slot on the bracket. It is not saying that No. 1 seed is necessarily the best team or the guaranteed champion in that classification. That is why we have playoffs to begin with: for the schools themselves to determine their playoff outcomes. Seeding provides an orderly process; it is not a projection.”
In essence, home or away, top-seed or 16, the best team should win. If they are truly the best of all teams, where they play, when they play and who they play does not matter. The best team is the one that wins.
(And yes, there’s that word again: win.)
Oh, and one more side note. Did you know that in Pennsylvania, each “district” – like a “section” in New Jersey – has its own self-governance? Each had different playoff criteria, recognizing the “local” characteristics of each district might be different. And they all go into the main playoff bracket in their respective size group, 1A through 6A.
Solutions? We have a few…
Complaining is meaningless without ideas. A few thoughts:
- Keep the current system, but make wins more valuable. This could be done a number of ways. Perhaps the OSI component should be 100% for a win, but only 25% for a loss. Consider that power points – which don’t take the quality of wins into an account – still was always about a 4:1 ration winning to losing. But OSI is 2:1. There’s too much credit for losing a game, not enough for winning.
- Cap blowouts. When a 7-win team gets left out over a 3-win team, everyone says the 7-win team should play a “tougher” schedule. What does that mean? Play up? Why should a Group 2 school play a Group 4 to make the Group 2 playoffs? And group points aren’t awarded anymore, so that’s an antiquated way of thinking. Play tougher SI schools? Sometimes they are significantly bigger or there are not enough good small schools in one area. So why penalize the few good ones? Capping blowouts at 30 when calculating SI could help that case.
- Go back to SI instead of OSI. Actually, we never used it. In 2018, when the UPR system was installed, we went right from the Born Power Index (which Strength Index is derived from) to OSI, the reverse form of SI. The main reason was that blowout wins were encouraged because it led to higher SI values, and higher seeds. But if a cap is put in, that could work. We figure few teams come back from a 28-point deficit, and 33 is the running clock, so split the difference because a 30-point margin is a nice, even six-point SI change for either team.
- Use what all the other sports use. This would mean going back to power points, under the formula described above. So, if Team A is 4-4, for each win they get just what they get now, six quality points for each win and three residuals for each win by an opponent they beat. But they also get the winning percentage of the teams their opponents played, plus .500. So if Team A beat Team B with 4 wins, the get 6 quality points, 12 residuals, and if all the teams on Team B’s schedule come out to a .617 win percentage, they would add 1.117 to that total, to get 19.117, their power point number. We get it, basketball has more teams, and most teams make the playoffs. Public school sections have around 21 or 22 teams each, and the top 16 make it. But here are last year’s final standings from NJ.com. Did anyone get massively cheated? No. And if they did, they results likely took care of themselves on the court.
So, will any of these work?
That’s a job for the football committee to figure out. This is the group that tweaks the rules each year.
They have done some good work.
Remember when mutlipliers gave teams more points for losing to a powerhouse non-public than winning against the best public school? Sound familiar? Guess what? The NJSIAA reduced that greatly last year, to the benefit of everyone. Good job there!
In the last few years, the NJSIAA also raised the minimum win level to get into the playoffs to two. Good start, but we think it should at least be three, maybe four. If you can’t win three games – enough to win a sectional title – you don’t deserve the chance to win three more to win a title. For those who say “talk to your league, 8-1 teams, and get a stronger schedule,” how about those teams get an easier schedule from their own league.
Not so easy, is it? Of course not, or you wouldn’t be 3-5.
But our question is this: If no wins or 1 wins is not good enough for the playoffs, and you have to get to two on the bottom end, why isn’t eight wins – or seven if you play on Thanksgiving – a guaranteed playoff berth?
Don’t get us wrong. We don’t propose doing this immediately. But maybe a good idea would be to run a few systems concurrently next year and the year after. Or reconstruct this year and last year, having known the results already.
There’s only one catch to this: What do you believe about sports? If you believe wins don’t matter, you’ll probably want more of the same. If that’s the case, we’re not going to convince you.
But if you truly believe wins matter – at least when it comes to playoffs and awarding trophies – you should want some change. Because this system isn’t rewarding winning. It’s rewarding losing, and losing big.
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