Earlier than usual, here are the estimated starting Strength Index numbers for the 2026 H.S. Football season

With Gridiron New Jersey now off-line after more than two decades, and NJ.com set to take over the official role of playoff calculator for the NJSIAA – as it does for all other sports – many coaches are in limbo if they never wrote down their own Strength Index number from the end of 2025, or those of their opponents.

Well, have no fear; we’ve got them for you!

Though Gridiron never released final SI numbers for 2025, we published our own at the end of the season, which can be found here. However, those are not the starting numbers for 2026. Rather, they will be “centered” toward the generally accepted midpoint of 60. (For example, the average final SI of all teams last year came out to 59.82.)

Here’s how the process works: Each team’s ranking gets “centered” by one-third around a mid-point of 60. Teams above 60 are reduced by one-third of the distance they are from the mid-point (i.e., a team rated 90, which is 30 points higher than 60, would be reduced by 10 and start the year as an 80), while the opposite would happen for teams below 60; their SI value would increase. This is to make the value less reliant on historical data, since – unlike power points – the SI carries over from the previous season.

With this information nowhere to be found online, we are releasing our own “recentered” SI numbers in this story, the ones teams should being 2026 with.

Please keep in mind that the values we calculated through the end of the season can and may change slightly (usually by no more than fractions of a point). Sometimes it’s just hundredths of a point based on rounding and how the number is displayed. The main reason is Gridiron never updated teams’ SI numbers online (though they were calculated offline for the purposes of next season), and it’s possible at the time a score could have been reported wrong, or a consolation-type game missed entirely.

All that said, below are Central Jersey Sports Radio’s unofficial starting SI values for 2026 in a downloadable PDF format. The first file is an alphabetical listing, and the second is ranked from highest SI value to the lowest.