CAUTION: Our very UNOFFICIAL Week 2 UPR standings; there’s a lot going on out there

Alright, here we go. Take a deep breath.

Central Jersey Sports Radio is publishing today its first unofficial – and we cannot stress this enough, so please let there be no confusion – New Jersey high school football UPR standings. These are the standings that determine playoff eligibility on Cutoff Weekend.

Before we get to the standings, a few key points:

• We have been tracking Strength Index since Week Zero, and many of you have seen our weekly unofficial updates. Previously, Gridiron New Jersey would update the official values from the very beginning of the season. So far, NJ.com has not. So these numbers are very likely mostly accurate, but some may be off by smaller amounts. (Note: We encourage all coaches to check these from the very beginning of the season and let us know if you think there’s a discrepancy.)
• There have been a few issues with SI values for out of state teams. In Week Zero, we neglected to find these in real time from MaxPreps, and has to recreate them with the use of AI research. We believe they are reasonably close. One other issue: the NJSIAA regulations say to find the out-of-state (OOS) team rating, then find the NJSIAA member school above and below them, find their corresponding SI and average. But for a couple of teams, we found an OOS team with the exact same MaxPreps rating as a New Jersey team. Do we still find the ones above and below, or use the exact match? Common sense might say the exact match, but the regulations do not specify. (Perhaps something to fix for next year?)
• On the same topic, we are using what we project to be the out-of-state SI values that NJ.com will release this week. These are post-Week Two values, which will be used for the next several weeks through Week Six. New values will be released before Week 7, and again before Week 8 (Cutoff Weekend), when the SI values of all NJ teams are locked in. It should be noted that SI values of OOS opponents are not “calculated” based on game results throughout the year as they are for New Jersey schools. Rather, they are looked up on MaxPreps separately, regardless of prior scores. Just because a team may rise in MaxPreps rankings, does not necessarily mean they rise in SI, since the two formulas are completely different.

• We also were alerted by the Pitman public address announcer that NJ.com had two different scores online as of 2:30 Sunday afternoon. The Scoreboard page said Pitman had beaten Pennsville 41-6, but the box score for the game had 41-0 Pennsville, which the Pitman P.A. man says is the correct score. It has since been fixed on NJ.com, and we adjusted our numbers with the correct score. Whether this was a reporting issue by a coach (highly unlikely, since the score in one place should automatically transfer to the scoreboard, or vice versa) or a bug in NJ.com’s software (we think that’s more likely), we are unaware of any other incorrect scores as of this publishing. Nor do we have the time to check 155 box scores around the state (after all, the NJSIAA is not paying us to do this). But it may call into question the accuracy of other games, which could affect our standings.
• In past years, each week we checked our standings with Gridiron. Often, in the rare chance of an error, it may have been a game added to the schedule from out of the CJSR-area that we didn’t hear about, or it might be a different opponent compared to the schedules we entered during the preseason. However, there have been Gridiron errors as well, often due to incorrect score reporting by coaches.

All of the above means we make no guarantee on the accuracy since we have seen no prior SI values to look up and check our work. This will be a very fluid situation throughout the year, and we’ll keep monitoring as we move along.

Once NJ.com publishes its official standings – no later than noon Tuesday, though it appears they will have them Monday, we will check our work and see how we did.

That said, here are out entirely unofficial Week 2 UPR standings for public school supersections in New Jersey. (Due to the fact non-publics are seeded by a committee, with the UPR as a guide, but not strictly followed, we do not keep track of non-public standings. However, we do keep track of non-public SI values for our state and Big Central power rankings, as well as for SI calculation of public schools that play non-publics.)