Carrying the torch:  NJSIAA football playoff brackets are live on Central Jersey Sports Radio in wake of Gridiron closure

The news hit like a ton of bricks for football coaches, fans, the media, and just plain, old-fashioned football history junkies.

Gridiron New Jersey, a bastion of simple, easy-to-access, free historical data on high school football in the Garden State shut down last Friday.  The site was popular over the years for its playoff standings and calculations, team records going back to its inception in 2003, and its NJSIAA playoff brackets, documenting every section, public or parochial, in every season since the playoff era began in 1974.

The NJSIAA has playoff history on its site (you can find the football one here) for all sports it sponsors in PDF format, but it only lists playoff champions in sectionals and, since 2023, the Group Finals. 

The only other media outlet with team schedules and records (other than those printed in a weekly “notebook” type story) is NJ.com, which only goes back to 2010.  But their brackets only go back as far as 2018.

So, we saw an opportunity.

This reporter was smart enough to have saved most years’ playoff brackets years ago from Gridiron, compiling screenshots of the brackets for offline reference – you know, just like we did in the dark ages when we’d cut stories out of the newspaper.  Remember those?

But, alas, I was not smart enough.  Back in my radio days, we covered Middlesex and Somerset Counties.  That meant we only needed Central Jersey, the section where all the teams in our coverage area played.  Eventually, we needed North 2, but we only did that as far back as our teams were in it, 2003.

And by the time Central Jersey Sports Radio was founded and the Big Central was formed, and the playoff formula changed to employ snaking, which meant our team could be in any section (don’t get us started on that insanity, please!) things were busy, but hey Gridiron was always there, always reliable.

Now, it’s gone.

I texted Gridiron founder Jon Fass Friday.  Surely his phone was blowing up.  He later thanked me for the kind words.

I messaged him again Sunday.  I thanked him again for his work, and suggested that many coaches will miss the brackets, and mentioned it might be worthwhile to publish them somewhere for all to access, also for free.  I’ve yet to hear back.

We didn’t discuss why he shut the site down, or why it was done so abruptly.  For months, the site was down, but told visitors it was getting a revamp.

Then… “Time to shut it down. 2002 – 2025.  Thank you.”

That Saturday afternoon, we set to work.  Creating our own brackets from what we had saved, and what’s still available via multiple online sources. 

We’ve posted more than half of the content so far, which you can access from our menu under “History.”

That includes:

• All of Central Jersey, Groups 1 through 4 from 1974 through 2025, plus Group 5 since its inception in 2012.
• All of the Parochial and Non-Public brackets from 1975 to 2025.  (1974 still had “declared” NJSIAA champs
• North Jersey, Section 2, Groups 1 through 4 from 2003 (the first year Middlesex and Somerset County teams spilled into North 2) through 2025 as well as Group 5, which started in 2012.
• South Jersey and North Jersey Section 1, Groups 1 through 4 from 2010 through 2025, and Group 5 from 2012, when it made its debut.

We are working on the rest, but without brackets to work from, it’s time consuming.  MaxPreps has brackets going back to 2010, though there were a few inaccuracies we noticed, and may be others we didn’t.  That helped us get South Jersey and North 1, which we didn’t begin tracking until the NJ UPR system came about in 2018, since the NJSIAA generally ignored the four traditional geographic bound sections in its playoff formula.

Of course, this can be a community effort. If you’d like to help, and have any completed brackets or playoff results from the sections we’re missing, please let us know.  We’d love to have them, and we’d be happy to give you credit.  You can email me at mike@cjsportsradio.com.

The sections we’re missing are:

• North Jersey, Section 2, Groups 1-4 (1974 through 2002)
• North Jersey, Section 1, Groups 1-4 (1974 through 2009)
• South Jersey, Groups 1-4 (1974-2009)

The basics we need are matchups, seeds, and all results for each section.  Without them, we can still get it done, but the process is much more laborious.

We’ve at least been able to uncover the matchups and seeds for all the missing years from past newspaper clippings found online.  That means we can reconstruct each bracket, then look at each week’s results, and fill it out.  Luckily, until 1998, sectional playoffs had no more than four teams.  So, that’s two weeks of results for each playoff season.

And, one last thought:  this is a lesson learned for all of us.  Coaches, fans, players and media.

Save stuff. You never know when it’ll be gone.

In the near future, we’ll be posting additional sports reference material in our history section.  Right now it’s just football, but there’s also GMC and Somerset County Tournament brackets for boys’ and girls’ basketball, as well as baseball.  We may start with just finals matchups.  With games on more random dates in those sports – particularly baseball with weather rainouts – that’s even more painstaking research and work.

But back to Gridiron for a moment, the other thing everyone will miss was the historical records and results of teams – complete with coaches’ names – going back to 2003. There’s a place you can find all that.

Dr. Roger Saylor was a Penn State professor, and a mathematical and statistical analysis pioneer with a PhD in economics. Growing up a sports fan, he kept detailed records and later developed several playoff formats, while serving as the official football historian for the PIAA, Pennsylvania’s equivalent of the NJSIAA.

He kept detailed Excel spreadsheets of all Pennsylvania and New Jersey high schools – even the ones now closed. His extensive database is searchable, and can be found here. Dr. Saylor passed away in 2013, and his records end with 2010, coincidentally, the oldest year available on NJ.com. And that would cover the entire history of high school football in New Jersey.

Want to know who won the most games between Colonia, Woodbridge or JFK in the ’70s? Or who won the Bound Brook-Somerville tilt in 1909? Dr. Saylor’s grids are the way to go.

Happy searching?