Leaders from the North Jersey Super Football Conference think an expansion of the playoffs would help regular-season scheduling.
The leaders behind a new proposal that would drastically change the high school football playoffs want you to answer this question.
How is this not better?
“We have what we think is a sound plan,” said Westwood athletic director Danny Vivino. “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have. That’s the key word -- better.”
BELOW: Read the proposal in it's entirety
The new proposal, which was crafted by Vivino, River Dell athletic director Denis Nelson and the North Jersey Super Football Conference, is aiming to revamp the entire playoff structure in an attempt to make regular-season scheduling fairer and more equitable.
“The whole plan was motivated by scheduling and making scheduling as equitable and fair as possible,” said Joe Piro, Nutley athletic director and President of the North Jersey Super Football Conference. “This proposal enables you to make great matchups and not be afraid to play great games or perennial powers because if you lose, you won’t make the playoffs.”
The keys of the proposal are to:
• Create public-school playoff brackets by splitting the state into seven groups based on enrollment and two sections based on geography. That makes 14 sections with 16 qualifiers in each from a pool of 22 teams. That increases the number of public-school qualifiers from 160 to 224 and means 73 percent of the state's public schools qualify. In the current format, 52 percent qualify.
• Keep the state's three non-public sections the same but increase the number of qualifiers in each from eight to 12. The increase would ensure automatic entry for every team in Group 3 and Group 4 while five teams would miss the cut in Group 2.
• Maintain eight- or nine-game regular-season schedules despite adding an extra round of the playoffs. Teams can accomplish that by playing from Week 0 to Week 8 or starting Week 1 and using Thanksgiving week.
• Keep the power-point formula used to qualify essentially the same with a slight tweak to accommodate the new seven-group format.
"We want to be as transparent as possible," Piro said. "We don't want to hide anything. We want everybody to take a look at it and understand it. We're willing to speak in front of any organization to explain what it's all about and hopefully by the 2018 season, we would be able to institute it."
The proposal, which was presented to league presidents last Tuesday and will be presented to the NJSIAA's Football Committee tomorrow, hopes to fix several inequalities that popped up this fall for teams like Butler and Northern Highlands.
Butler missed the NJIC-based North 1, Group 1 playoffs at 6-2, losing to North 2, Group 1 finalists Weequahic and Shabazz by eight total points, while Northern Highland missed the cut in favor of a Fair Lawn team that it beat, 44-14.
In this case, Fair Lawn was 7-1 at the cut against teams that finished 20-59 while Northern Highlands (4-4) lost four games to two sectional champions and two finalists during an eight-game stretch against teams that finished 55-33.
It brings up this question.
"With football under attack and programs potentially folding, do you want to give Fair Lawn a murder's row and let them go 1-9?" asked Vivino. "On the other side, is it fair to Northern Highlands when it was clearly one of the top eight teams in the section?"
Whether that question can be answered or whether those types of issues exist around the state is still to be determined but critics of the proposal argue that expanding the playoffs creates more problems.
Bud Kowal, Ewing athletic director and President of the West Jersey Football League, argues a team like Northern Highlands would have been out-matched anyway.
“If you want to say that some teams are not getting in that deserve it, I’m going to say that more teams that don’t deserve it are already getting in anyway, and the teams that theoretically deserve to get in don’t really have a chance to win the championship," Kowal said, pointing out first-round games that would pit a No. 1 seed against a No. 16 seed.
In the case of the hypothetical section South Jersey, Group 6, top-seeded Manalapan would play a West Windsor-Plainsboro South team that was 2-6 at the cutoff.
On the other side of the argument, Vivino said one-sided games already happen, noting that the top two seeds in each section went 37-3 in the first round with an average margin of victory of 29 points.
Last season, there appears to be seven teams that missed the playoffs with records better than .500. If the proposal was put in place last season, 57 teams that were sub-.500 at the cutoff would have qualified.
Kowal said that's the type of situation that led to conference expansion in the first place.
"The West Jersey Football League got together because we had mismatched games that we couldn't do anything about," Kowal said. "Now you're going to put those type of games in the playoffs?"
Kowal, who also questioned the proposal's schedule, is a member of the NJSIAA's Football Committee that will listen to the proposal tomorrow morning.
"I'm not opposed to change, but it has to be change that's good for everyone and not just good for the elite that want to say we half a half state champion. That's the end game."