New to NJ High School Football?

Here's how the state's football structure actually works, and what the numbers on this site mean — in plain terms, no formulas required.

Conferences: your team's regular season

Every team belongs to a local conference (the Shore Conference, Big North, the Greater Middlesex Conference, and others) made up of nearby schools. Conferences set the regular-season schedule and crown their own conference champions, but they have nothing to do with the state playoffs below — a team can win every conference game and still miss states, or lose its conference and still qualify.

Groups & Super Sections: the playoff structure

Separately from conferences, NJSIAA sorts every public school into one of five Groups (I through V) based on enrollment size, then splits each Group into North and South. Each Group/region combination (e.g. "Group III North") is a Super Section — the pool of teams that compete against each other for playoff spots, regardless of which conference they play their regular season in. Non-public schools are seeded separately (more below).

How you make the playoffs

The top 16 teams by UPR (explained next) in each Super Section qualify for the state tournament. There's one safety valve: any team that finishes undefeated with 7 or more wins automatically gets in, even if its UPR would otherwise leave it just outside the top 16. Non-Public Group A and B don't use UPR for seeding at all — a committee sets that bracket using head-to-head results and strength of schedule instead.

UPR, in plain terms

UPR (United Power Ranking) is the single number that decides seeding, and it's a blend of two separate ideas — lower UPR is better, with 1 being the best possible score:

Power Points reward your own results: 6 points for a win, plus a bonus for how good that opponent turns out to be over their own season (with a cap, so beating one great team doesn't dwarf everything else on your schedule).

OSI (Opponent Strength Index) is more like a live power rating for every team, similar in spirit to VRS below: it moves up when a team beats expectations and down when it falls short, updating week to week over the season. Your OSI credit for a given game is a share of whatever your opponent's strength index turned out to be — more for a win, less for a loss.

Those two components get combined (Power Points weighted 40%, OSI weighted 60%) into one UPR number per team, and teams are ranked within their Super Section by that number.

What else this site adds

Beyond replicating the official UPR formula above, this site publishes two original ratings of its own, unrelated to playoff seeding:

VRS (Varsity Rating System) — a fan-made alternative to UPR, built to try to rank teams more accurately: a statewide strength rating for every team, public and non-public alike, designed to resist rewarding running up the score.

The Predictor — a fun, fan-made predictor of final scores for upcoming games, backtested against real results.