Celebrating the first real N.J. State Football Championships

By Patrick Fitzgerald On Dec 2, 2022

Rutgers University, which is where college football began, will host the first public school group championship finals this weekend at SHI Stadium. This is another first for football in New Jersey.

On Saturday and Sunday in Piscataway, ten public football teams will compete for five NJSIAA/Rothman Orthopaedics championships. These championships have been around for 103 years, so it’s a big deal.

Finally, by playing down to a single State champion in different size classes, New Jersey moves out of the football Stone Age and joins 48 other states that do the same thing.

The NJSIAA’s own rules said that you couldn’t even play for a real state championship for more than a hundred years. Only in the last three years has there been enough support to change the state tournament and the constitution. The last hurdle was cleared last June.

The road to this point has been long, hard, and full of arguments.

Less fighting has been used to make peace treaties. People have been arguing about the pros and cons of group championships since before the year 1000. But when the football is kicked on Saturday, New Jersey will have the finals of a football playoff that may one day be as good as those in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Well, the story is long, but here’s a short version.

The NJSIAA has been around since 1918, but it took 56 years to start a playoff that used real games on the field to decide 16 public and 4 private football champions. Before 1974, the NJSIAA gave out sectional titles.

Yes, awarded. Do you think there would be a lawsuit if that happened now?

On Friday, December 6, the first field-based state championship was held inside at Convention Hall on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. On a temporary grass field, Brick beat Camden, whose fans back then called their team the Purple Avalanche, 21–20.

Brick, which was coached by the late, great Warren Wolf, won thanks in part to two touchdowns that were called back. Camden scored on the first kickoff return. But a whistle from the crowd made Brick kick off before the referee’s whistle, so the game had to start over. With 6:55 left, Brick scored the points that won the game, and with 2:58 left, he stopped a two-point conversion.

The New York Times says that 5,200 people went to the game.

The NJSIAA couldn’t have started out better.

For decades, New Jersey was a joke around the country because it had won 16 different football championships. When Group 5 came out in 2012, that number went up to 20.

From the moment the first playoff game was played, the NJSIAA was criticized for how teams were chosen for the playoffs, the powerpoint systems it created (including the one in place today), sectional imbalances, the divide between North Jersey parochial schools and its public school opponents, and, of course, the desire to play down to group champions.

“I never thought it would happen,” said Darnell Grant, who was the head coach at both West Orange and Shabazz in Newark. “It was hard to get here with all the planning and logistics. People who are willing to do the work are needed. I know that the room for people who want to complain is always full, but there are always seats in the room for people who want to work.

Not Everyone is Happy About Group Titles

Not everyone is thrilled about the idea of playing down to one winner in each of the five groups.

“I think state titles are good for the state, but you just want it to be fair,” said veteran Delsea head coach Sal Marchese, whose undefeated Crusaders play Old Tappan in the Group 3 final on Saturday. “I look at a team like Shawnee. At the start of the season, they were a great football team, but their schedule and injuries just beat them up. We’re neither a school nor a factory. Most teams don’t have a lot of depth when they get to the playoffs.

One bad thing about having only one champion is that some teams won’t get a week off during the regular season.

Shawnee head coach Tim Gushue told NJ.com that his team played for 11 weeks in a row and had eight injuries that ended their seasons.

“In terms of getting hurt, it was the worst season I’ve ever had,” Gushue said.

Gushue said that when the New Jersey Football Coaches Association meets in December, he will talk about his worries about injuries and player safety.

No one said that the first group championships would be perfect, though, because very few first-time events are.

Whether the players like the group championships or not, they are excited about them. Isn’t that what matters most?

Passaic Tech center Omar Kapok said, “It feels great to be a part of something like this for the first time.” “We feel like we’ve done something important. This is my last year playing football in high school. I’m going to do my best.”

Jack Inserra, a senior at Northern Highlands, said, “I want some fake diamonds on my finger.”

From the Start, There Were Issues and Complaints.

Did you know that the NJSIAA has had a system of power points since at least 1937? It helped the NJSIAA back then figure out who should win sectional championships and give them out.

It was also criticized, just as modern point systems are and have been for the last 40 years.

Since the first NJSIAA playoffs in 1974, teams getting into the tournament has been the biggest problem. Early on, a committee chose who would make the playoffs.

The Star-Ledger ranked Westfield as the best team in the state in 1974. They were 9-0 and had been the best team in New Jersey in 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1972. However, they were not chosen to play in the state tournament.

In 1975, members of the Skyland Conference threatened to leave the NJSIAA if the way teams qualified for the playoffs wasn’t changed. This was the first serious complaint.

A power ranking system was made that gives teams points when they play and beat teams from bigger groups.

But this system was criticized when Vineland said that South Jersey didn’t have as many Group 4 schools as North Jersey. Vineland wanted to get credit for beating teams from Philadelphia.

Mike VanZile, the football coach and co-athletic director at Wallkill Valley, came up with the VanZile Plan in 2000. He wanted to get rid of power points and change how teams were spread around the state. The plan was to get rid of conferences, mix public and private teams, start the season at the same time, have no bye weeks, and add two weeks to the season so that a group champion could be named.

The VanZile idea, which was unusual at the time, never caught on.

Boyd Sands, who was Executive Director of the NJSIAA from 1993 to 2006, said, “Administrators began to wonder how much it would cost.” “Not only did the football team go, but so did the band, the colour guard, and the cheerleaders. There would be food and sometimes a place to stay.

“I told one principal that the cheerleaders, bands, and colour guard should just stay home. He told me that if he left them at home, he would be fired.

“At the time, the media thought that high school facilities couldn’t handle that many people. Administrators worried about how much it would cost to pay for security and custodians. At the same time, it seemed like the colleges around the state didn’t want to be bothered.”

Most of the time, proposals to add group playoffs were shot down for the same reason: people didn’t like how teams qualified or how playoffs were set up.

People thought they were unfair or left people out.
Provincialism
There are worries about the end of long-running rivalries, many of which take place on Thanksgiving Day.
Extra costs and longer travel
Summer vacations are getting shorter and the season is starting earlier.
The season will end later, so there will be a gap between the end of football and the beginning of winter sports.
There are worries about playing too many games and getting hurt more.
Fear of the unknown and not wanting to change in general.

“New Jersey is funny, and not just in football,” said Dennis Nelson, the athletic director at River Dell. Nelson is known for being the voice of reason during sometimes heated discussions about expansion. “Even though it’s a small state, it can be very provincial and focused on leagues and conferences.”

Dan Vivino, who is in charge of athletics at Westwood and is known as the NJSIAA’s power points guru, added, “There is no perfect system.”

Coaches, athletic directors, and school administrators have often been their own worst enemies for decades.

Gushue said, “When I look back, I wonder if we put the cart before the horse.” “We all wanted a group playoff, but I don’t think anyone really thought about how much it would cost.

“I once asked some of my bosses what they thought was causing the delay. There were two parts to their answer. One, games were a big part of Thanksgiving. Second, they didn’t want to mess up winter sports, even though it would only affect a few teams. Everything seemed to come back to those two things over and over again.

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“In our district, it was a big no-no to play games before Labor Day. We played two games before school started this year. I was shocked that no one disagreed with that. But as the group playoffs went on, our district couldn’t do anything else.”

Coaches and athletic directors may have wanted one thing, but it was the school’s higher-ups who made the final decision.

“I remember we had a meeting up north, and another AD said that the plan to grow was nonsense,” Vivino said. “He was angry because he hadn’t heard about the plan ahead of time. I told them that this was the first time anyone had seen the plan. He thought that there should have been a plan to start making a plan.

“In the beginning, the process had a lot of layers,” Nelson said. “There were worries about doing what was best for football in New Jersey as a whole, as well as for your conference and your school.”

But what was best was different from one conference to the next, from one school to the next, and from one sectional to the next.

Rich Carroll, the athletic director for Middletown North and South, said, “I remember we had a North-South meeting at the AD’s Convention in Atlantic City, and the South representatives got up and left.” “There was so much hatred in that room, and I was one of the people spreading it.”

“I remember taking a carpool to a meeting in Marlboro, and one of us told the rest of us to keep our cool or not blow up when this or that happened,” Vivino said. “The one of us who told everyone else to stay calm was always the one who lost it.”

Jack Dubois, a retired assistant director of the NJSIAA who is known as the person who got New Jersey football to the group playoff level, recalled early meetings of the Group and Conference Football Committee.

“We didn’t get anything done at the first two or three meetings,” said DuBois, who used to be the athletic director at St. John Vianney, Manchester Township, and Morris Hills. “There was so much fighting at the meetings.”

“After one meeting, I remember going to Jack and telling him that this was never going to happen,” Carroll said.

And Carroll’s prediction was right for a while.

Vivino said, “At one point, there was a North proposal and a South proposal, and both of us wanted the same thing.” “Neither was going to get through.”

cjsportsradio.com says that in 1919, a one-sentence change was made to the NJSIAA constitution. It just said, “No football state champion should be named.”

The report says that there is no explanation for why or how the clause was added. But some members of the NJSIAA tried to get rid of it for the next 100 years. Four times in 13 years, people tried to get rid of the clause but failed. It was finally taken out in January 2021.

Before 2021, a proposal by the late Bill Bruno, who was the athletic director of Brick Township and later became an assistant director of the NJSIAA, and the late Marcus Borden, who was the coach of East Brunswick, came within 23 votes of passing.

Two years later, in 2013, the Big North Conference tried again, but this time with a different plan. This plan was soundly rejected by the members.

It made the people in charge of the NJSIAA think that New Jersey didn’t want to play past sectional champions.

Nelson said at the time, “I don’t know what else we could have done.” “It looks like the state doesn’t want it right now. They would rather keep the schedule and way tournaments are set up as they are.”

Steve Timko, who was the Executive Director of the NJSIAA at the time, said, “I thought the vote was a clear answer to the question.”

Not until 2021 would there be another vote on a group championship tournament.