Bruno to Defend Football Championship Proposal at Rutgers Tonight

Brick Township School District Athletic Director Bill Bruno will seek feedback on his proposal to achieve one true, group champion among high school football teams Tuesday night.

Bruno, as well as East Brunswick head football coach Marcus Borden, will each present proposals to restructure the playoff process at Rutgers University's Hale Center at 5 p.m.

Bruno aims to eliminate bye weeks, along with Thanksgiving Day rivalry games in order to reach one group champion, state-wide, which would end playoffs in the beginning of December, much like it is under the current system.

As of now, all four classifications — North Jersey I, North Jersey II, Central Jersey and South Jersey — have four separate groups, all of which have one champion.

Bruno says he aims for schools in the same groups to all play in a four-way playoff.

For instance, the North Jersey I Group III Champion and the North Jersey II Group III champion would play each other while Central Jersey Group III champion and South Jersey Group III champion would play each other as well.

Any teams that would potentially be playing in sectional title games would not participate in Thanksgiving Day games. Additionally, teams that normally play on Turkey Day would consider facing each other during the season in a "rivalry week."

Last year, Brick Memorial and Brick Township, which normally face each other annually on Thanksgiving, went toe-to-toe in the season opener. The Mustangs won 34-0 to begin a season in which they tied a school record in wins but eventually lost 14-0 to Sayreville in the Central Jersey Group IV sectional title.

As of the new classifications that were updated on July 16, 2010, Brick Memorial, with an enrollment of 1,372, is listed in Central Jersey Group IV, while Brick Township, with an enrollment of 1,029, is in South Jersey Group III.

With Bruno's proposed playoff system in place, Brick Memorial would have had a chance to contend for an overall group IV champion, had they beat Sayreville.

The new system would begin the playoff process earlier in November, making time for the additional three playoff games to find an overall group champion.

Those final three games would likely be played in a 10-game span, ending in the first week of December.

There are currently 16 sectional public champions in New Jersey; Bruno's proposal would slash that total to four. According to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer, any proposal would need to overcome a number of regulatory hurdles within the state's scholastic athletics bureaucracy before being put into place. That process would take until the start of the 2013 season at the earliest.