Who’s got the head-to-head advantage? An often overlooked part of football playoff seeding

One of the key aspects of the NJSIAA football seeding is the top-town, head-to-head.

The idea is that, regardless of power points, OSI or UPR rating, no team should ever be directly behind a team it beat. So, the powers that be instituted the top-down, head-to-head comparison to the process.

When all the games are done this Cutoff Weekend, the fist step is to break any ties between teams with the same UPR. The criteria, in order, are:

Head-to-head
Common Opponents
OSI rank
Power Point rank
Coin flip

After that, there’s one more process before the teams can be seeded in their respective sections: the top-down head-to-head.

Simply put, we start at Team 2. Did Team 2 beat Team 1? If yes, Team 2 jumps Team 1. If no, we go down a step and do it again.

Did Team 3 beat Team 2? If no, move on. But there’s also a wrinkle: you can jump as many teams in a row, provided you are directly behind a team you beat.

So, if Team 3 beat Team 2, they swap, and now we ask if Team 3 (now in second) beat Team 1. If it did, they can jump then, too. A team can keep going as long as it beats the team ahead of them. Once they get to a team they didn’t beat (or didn’t play) we move back down to the next one, all the way through to 17. If Team 17 has beaten Team 16, they jump, and the field of 16 is set.

You can check out our Playoff Primer here if you want to see the rest.

For now, we’ll stop on the head-to-head, and we’ll show you what Big Central teams in the running (or maybe even not, but close enough, just to be safe) for the playoffs have tiebreakers over which other teams, and what teams from other leagues have tiebreakers over BCC squads

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