Tag: Gridiron New Jersey

by Mike Pavlichko

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?

by Mike Pavlichko

After more than two decades as a source for coaches, fans – and journalists – Gridiron New Jersey shuts down

Forget transfer scandals, playoff format changes, and big upsets.

The biggest news to rock the high school football world in New Jersey in recent memory came on Friday, June 26, 2026: the shutdown of Gridiron New Jersey.

Since 2002, and especially since 2018 when the NJSIAA drastically altered its football playoff formula in favor of the NJ UPR model – which at the time included the Born Power Index, Jon Fass has run the website Gridiron New Jersey, an easy-to-navigate site, free for all users, featuring all team results, power point calculations, and UPR standings. It also included every single NJSIAA postseason bracket dating back to the start of the playoff era in 1974.

But now, it’s all gone, per an announcement made on the site’s main landing page Friday morning.

It began in 1999, when Fass was working at WGHT in Pompton Lakes with a young Kevin Burkhardt, according to a 2017 profile of Fass and Gridiron in the Cherry Hill Courier Post. They began a high school football radio show on multiple local stations, then three years later branched our when Fass was dissatisfied with how long it took the state to release power point standings.

Eventually, the site and the power point standings took up so much time, Fass decided to ditch the show altogether and focus on the site. Eventually, he’d be correcting the NJSIAA on power point totals.

Then came 2018, and a massive overhaul of the playoff system that included two metrics that made up the UPR (United Power Ranking) system: traditional power points and the Born Power Index, the second of which was a proprietary ratings system developed by New Jersey math teacher Bill Born decades prior. It rated teams based on their relative strength rating, and the scores of games.

But as this reporter sought to learn about the system while covering high school football at the-1450 WCTC for its Saturday “Football USA” show, it was learned that teams were being rewarded with better playoff seeding by winning games via larger margins. Essentially, running up the score was rewarded.

The NJSIAA did an abrupt about face, and kept the UPR, but made its own version of the Born Power Index and used it in reverse. Instead of rating teams on their own strength, buoyed by the number of points they won by, teams would be credited with the value of the opponent, which discouraged running up scores. Teams would get the full value of an opponent for a win, half for a tie.

And Gridiron New Jersey was selected by the NJSIAA to do all the calculations, already having the bulk of the infrastructure in place.

After this 2025 season, Gridiron’s site appeared to go down temporarily, with the site informing visitors that it was “under construction,” suggesting that it would be back soon. Such shutdowns would happen from time to time as Fass adjusted coding, and even the look and feel of the site, eventually making it more mobile-friendly.

But as the months passed, many started asking questions about whether it would really be back, as the NJSIAA announced earlier this year that NJ.com would be the official calculator of power points, Strength Index (the successor to the Born Power Index), the UPR and playoff standings. NJ.com had not previously posted that information.

But the site had its own issues in the fall when all of its sports webpages went down right in the middle of the high school football playoffs for more than a week, driving coaches (not just football coaches, as all coaches were affected) into a frenzy, unable to report scores, or to look at their own statistics. The source of the issue was never publicly disclosed.

It’s also received some criticism from coaches, since they are asked to input stats and results, but can’t actually see them online without an NJ.com account. It’s unknown if users must simply have a free account or actually purchase a subscription of some kind.

Reaction comes in…

“I will miss it,” Edison head coach Matt Yascko told Central Jersey Sports Radio on Friday. “Like many coaches, I was on that site multiple times a day, even in the off-season. It was the easiest way to find playoff brackets, schedules and standings.”

John Thompson, a volunteer assistant at Piscataway, has long been the program’s power points guru. Late in the season, he and this reporter would collaborate to see what the other guy had, even when the formula was “just” traditional power points, and we even worked together to crack the code of the Born Power Index.

“Gridiron New Jersey was the one-stop shopping site for New Jersey football stat heads such as me,” Thompson said Friday. “It was the reliable, historical place to go for scores, records, power points and playoff scenarios.”

Thompson says it’s been a huge part of the program for 20 years, helping them figure out what teams might be in their line of sight come playoff time, so they’d know who to prepare for, adding, “This is a big loss to New Jersey high school football.”

Hillsborough’s Kevin Carty also weighed in: “I love Gridiron New Jersey,” he said Friday, noting while he may not use it as much as members of the media, “I used it a ton. It pretty much spanned my entire coaching career. And it’s rare to have something be so useful for so long.”

What happens in 2026?

NJ.com hasn’t posted team schedules or any content in advance of 2026 yet, so it’s unknown how any display would look. If it’s anything like how they keep track of power points, it could be pretty robust. And they certainly have the resources to do it.

However, one of the challenges Fass often encountered were all the “caveats” of the formula. For example, at one point, teams could only count one “multiplier” game against non-public programs toward their power point total. For Fass, that meant having to manually go in and change the numbers on his own. Any new system would have to take that into account.

It’s all just a reminder that sometimes the only constant is, indeed, change.

by Mike Pavlichko

NJSIAA, Gridiron New Jersey emphasize urgent importance of reporting football scores this weekend and at the Cutoff

The NJSIAA is reminding football coaches across New Jersey to report their scores as soon as possible after games this week – and next week, Cutoff Weekend – to Gridiron New Jersey, the website that performs all the official calculations for the state’s playoff seeding.

Score reporting to Gridiron is required by NJSIAA rule, and it’s the only outlet that teams are required to do so. Yet, often, they end up on other media outlets first.

In a memo sent to schools and noted in an NJFCA email newsletter Tuesday, coaches are reminded that both schools – winning and losing teams – are required to report their scores, to assure accuracy. Particularly this week, scores still affect the Strength Index, which is used to calculate OSI, 60 percent of the NJ UPR formula, along with power points, which account for the other 40 percent.

Per the NJSIAA’s 2025 Football Tournament Regulations, which are publicly available on their website, “Final scores must be reported within 2 hours of the conclusion of each game to Gridiron New Jersey via email to football@njsiaa.org or via text to Jon Fass. … Please be sure to include both team names and final score. For those schools not timely reporting their game results, as indicated above, a warning will be given the first time the school fails to comply. Future failures to timely report results may be subject to a $150 fine.”

In addition, the NJFCA email to coaches Tuesday reminded all coaches to notify Gridiron of any Week 8 games (Cutoff Weekend, next weekend) that will start at 4 pm or later. The email says “In order to have brackets released as early as possible on Sunday, October 26, then we need scores reported as timely as possible on Saturday, October 25.”

According to the schedule on NJ.com, only one game involving NJSIAA member schools is set to start after 1 pm, that being Lawrence and Riverside in a West Jersey Football League game slated to kickoff at 1:30 pm, while there’s one TBA game in the NJIC: Palisades Park at Bogota. However, the Bogota athletic website indicates that game is at 6 pm. While Palisades Park is currently 24th in the North Group 4 standings and shouldn’t affect anything there, Bogota is 11th in the North Group 1 standings and that results surely will impact that supersection.

However, it would likely only affect the standings in North 1 Group 1, as the sections are determined by Northing. It’s unlikely a Bogota win or loss would affect the 16th or 17th team in the standings, which means the same teams should be in the field regardless, and all that could change is jockeying of position in North 1 Group 1.

Since SI values are locked in prior to Cutoff Weekend, the score won’t affect the standings. Additionally, since Bogota has already played seven games and Palisades Park will play its seventh this week, that game will not count toward residuals for any of their opponents.

That means Bogota, and only the teams in the North 1 Group 1 section would be affected.

by Mike Pavlichko

Some H.S. football teams still not reporting scores to Gridiron New Jersey; NJFCA reminds coaches of their obligations

For the second week in a row, the New Jersey Football Coaches Association is reminding high school coaches in its weekly email that they must report their scores to Gridiron New Jersey as soon as possible after their games are completed.

While many log in and add scores and update statistics on NJ.com, the only mandate from the NJSIAA is that all scores of all games must be reported to Gridiron New Jersey within two hours of a game’s completion, and they need to be reported by both teams for the sake of accuracy.

According to the NJSIAA’s football regulations for 2024: “Final scores must be reported within 2 hours of the conclusion of each game to Gridiron New Jersey via email to football@njsiaa.org or via text to Jon Fass. Please be sure to include both team names and final score. For those schools not timely reporting their game results, as indicated above, a warning will be given the first time the school fails to comply. Future failures to timely report results may be subject to a $150 fine.”

On Week Zero, dozens of scores were not reported around the state, and the NJFCA sent coaches an email reminder.

So far in Week One, with 16 games scheduled Thursday night, four of them were missing as of the NJFCA’s email sent out around 10:15 am. By lunchtime, the missing scores had been reported.

Because the NJSIAA uses Strength Index to determine OSI, which is 60 percent of the UPR playoff formula, and Strength Index is reliant on the scores of game, it’s important scores are reported in a timely fashion, and are accurate.

A wrong score, discovered weeks later, not only affects the two teams in that game, but any subsequent games played by those two opponents, and anyone else they played.

For example, if Team A and Team B play, and their score is wrong, and it’s discovered two weeks later, it also will affect Team A’s next two opponents, and Team B’s. And when Team A plays Team C the following week, it will affect Team C’s and Team A’s opponents the following week.

So, one wrong score, can affect up to a dozen or more teams just two weeks down the line.