The 2013-14 Hillsborough boys' basketball team will be remembered as one of the greats in school history, going 22-3 and beating Gill St. Bernard's to win the Somerset County Tournament championship. But the 2014-15 team was a pleasant surprise. While they didn't get close to winning the SCT that year, they made an improbably run in the state tournament, stunning Freehold Township on the road in the Central Jersey Group 4 championship game.

High school football is at it again. According to a report out Thursday from Shore Sports Insider (formerly Shore Sports Network), the NJSIAA's Leagues and Conferences committee has recommended that the NJSIAA move back to snaking playoff brackets in each section, rather than splitting them up geographically. Snaked brackets are intended to "balance" them. In that process, when the top 16 in North and South in each group are determined, teams are placed into sections with, for example, the top overall seed in Central, then seeds 2 and 3 in South, then 4 and 5 in Central, 6 and 7 in South, and so on.

A win in the Group 4 title game over Ramapo makes Winslow Twp. the top-rated New Jersey high school football, according to the Strength Index, a major part of the NJSIAA's playoff formula. In Central Jersey Sports Radio's final unofficial calculations, the Eagles finished the year No. 1, with an SI value of 109.49 points. That's 4.63 points higher than Don Bosco Prep, which was upset by St.

As the folks at Varsity Aces - Twitter home of the Bergen Record high school sports scribes - noted on Friday, conversation among reporters in the MetLife Stadium press box during the first four of seven state football championships centered around the seeding procedure for the state tournament. Specifically, it appeared to center around how the state divides up its "sections" on Cutoff Weekend.

The names of the schools change, but the complaints stay the same. How did this team with more wins get in over this team? They should have played an easier schedule. This team should have played a more challenging schedule? Why did we get in and they didn't? It's a tale as old as time. People complained all the way back when champions were declared, in the 1930s and 1950s and '60s under the Colliton system.

Every year, the NJSIAA seems to tweak the playoff formula a little bit. Last year, it was the multipliers and power points. Group size was taken out of the power points formula, with the NJSIAA essentially saying it was no longer relevant to the strength of a team. And multipliers were moved to OSI, with bonuses for beating one eliminated, and the bonus for a loss curtailed significantly.

The entire high school football season is a lot of fun, from the eternal hope that springs in the hot summer days of August through pre-season camp and scrimmages, to that first time under the lights, to the air getting cooler, right through the sectional and state championships at Rutgers and the Meadowlands. But Cutoff Weekend is one unique ride, indeed.

Week Seven is in the books, and Cutoff Weekend is upon us. This Thursday, Friday and Saturday are the final games of the high school football season for public schools before the NJSIAA announces the playoff brackets on Sunday. This week, all SI values are locked in, so that the values used to calculate OSI - one of two metrics in the UPR system, the other being power points - will not change after this weekend's results, for playoff qualification only.

With Cutoff Weekend upon us, and most teams having played at least seven games, there will be very few residuals to be had this week, though some teams can get an edge if they pick up three points here or one point there. In the power points metric of the NJ UPR playoff formula, teams get three residual points for each win by an opponent they beat, and one for each win by an opponent they lost to.

That headline includes one of our biggest pet peeve phrases: "if they playoffs started tomorrow." Well, of course they don't. The NJSIAA state football playoffs start in two weeks, and Cutoff Weekend is still a week away. But with the new playoff seeding procedure of assigning teams to sections based on geography, things will look a little different this year.

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.

All year long, football coaches in New Jersey watch the scoreboard, especially late in the season, to see how their opponents fared, and whether they'll get major residual points down the line. While the traditional power points system no longer uses group size for points, they still include quality points - six for a win, three for a tie, none for a loss - as well as residuals, a "strength of schedule" factor based on how many wins a team has.

Through the first four weeks of the season, one of the 16 NJSIAA multiplier football teams has dropped out, and three others have dropped down to Category D status, meaning if they lose again, they also no longer will be multipliers. Holy Spirit and Paul VI no longer are multipliers, while St. Augustine and St. John Vianney have slipped to Category D.

When the NJSIAA moved away from using pure power points for playoff qualification in football, bringing in the NJ UPR system in 2018 along with the Born Power Index, it was a major change and confused many, especially since Bill Born's system was proprietary and not shared with the public. Over the years, there have been tweaks and changes. After that first year, the NJSIAA ditched the Born Index for a similar metric called Strength Index, and used the SI value of opponents rather than a team itself, because the original method rewarded teams for having larger margins of victory.

The NJSIAA typically does classifications for each sport every two years, based on enrollment, but occasionally is forced to make changes in the middle of the two-year cycle. For 2025, there aren't many changes. The only real "change," in fact, was the merger of Jackson Memorial and Jackson Liberty High Schools into Jackson Township High School, with the new school being moved up to Group 5 in the South supersection.

The NJSIAA's football comittee plans on keeping overtime the same for now, but is looking at additional tweaks to the playoff system to balance the competitiveness with geography. At its January 21st meeting, the committee discussed a number of topics, but the biggest item to come out of it was about the playoffs. In its Post-Season in review, NJSIAA Executive Director Colleen Maguire presented a proposal from the Football Leagues & Conferences to modify the seeding rules for the public playoffs.

In an effort to cut down on tie games in the high school football regular season, the NJSIAA has been considering changes to how overtime is run. And New Jersey's coaches appear to be in favor of it, but not by a terribly large margin. The New Jersey Football Coaches Association asked its membership before Christmas to weigh in on the issue…

With the book closed on another high school football season in New Jersey, we're publishing the unofficial final Strength Index numbers for the entire state, top to bottom, as well as next year's projected 2025 starting SI values. While the official numbers are calculated by Gridiron New Jersey for the NJSIAA, we also run our own calculations using the same formula.