NJIC Football
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The North Jersey Interscholastic Conference introduced an innovative way to preserve small school football in an area overshadowed by non-public juggernauts and the formation of the largest high school football conference in the country.
The 28-team league featuring Group 1 and 2 schools from Bergen, Hudson and Passaic Counties confirmed Wednesday that it will be implementing an in-season playoff this fall that will put four divisional champions in a two-week playoff that produces an overall champion while also creating competitive balance across the board.
“We really put a tremendous amount of hours into this,” said executive director Stan Fryczynski, who credited Secaucus athletic director and football coach Charlie Voorhees for leading the charge. “We could have kept the existing formula we had, but when we decided to stay contained within the conference and not join the North Jersey Football Super Conference, we started to try to come up with something better. This is the something better.”
Fryczynski said that to an outsider, the format seems complex, but in reality, is easy to follow.
The four divisions — Colonial, Liberty, Meadowlands and Patriot — will spend the first seven weeks of the season playing for their division championship.
During Week 8 (Oct. 28-29), the league will host a pair of “Divisional Bowl Games” that will feature the winners of each division. The winners of the Colonial and Liberty Divisions will play for the North title while the winners of the Meadowlands and Patriot Divisions square off for the South title.
Meanwhile, teams that finished second through seventh in their division will be matched with a team in the other division that also finished in the same position.
During Week 9 (Nov. 4-5), the winner of the North title will play the winner of the South title for the conference championship while another round of “consolation games” – using the aforementioned format – will be played for teams to finish off their regular season before the start of the NJSIAA playoffs.
“There is no conference in the state that has a playoff system that plays the entire conference schedule through,” Fryczynski said. “We are excited not only because we are instituting obviously something different, but it also enables schools to play through the entire season, it’s assisted with power points, it sharpens teams down the stretch for the state playoffs, and it’s turned out to be a win-win all the way through for all of our schools.”
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