Playoff Time

Personally I have never been that big a fan of the state football playoffs here in New Jersey as they often result in matchups that do little to excite students, fans and followers. In all honestly over the last 20 years or so there have only been a handful of games that I found so compelling that they fell into the category of “can’t miss.” There are many more regular-season matchups which schools and communities find exciting on an annual basis for a variety of reasons, including geography. The other factor is we are only deciding sectional championships so when the dust settles after the first weekend of December there will be 20 high school teams in the state who can rightfully call themselves state champs.

However with all of that said to the players and coaches the playoffs and winning one of those 20 titles it’s what it’s all about and in truth their opinions count more than mine. When this weekend begins there will be a dozen Shore Conference teams who still have the dream alive with at least three of them to be eliminated in head to head matchups.

Central Jersey Group 4 could produce an All-Shore Final as tonight Brick Memorial hosts North Brunswick and Manalapan visits top-seeded Sayreville in the sectional semifinals. The Shore Sports Network will broadcast the Mustangs game with North Brunswick with kickoff at 7pm on 105.7FM. Lacey is the other Ocean County school favored to advance and the undefeated Lions figure to get tested at home Saturday against Winslow Township, just like they did last week against Timber Creek. If they do win Lacey will also host the South Jersey Group 3 finals which would likely be the only sectional final involving a local school played at a high school site. All the others would be played at either Rutgers or Kean universities.

The all-shore confrontations find Matawan hosting Manasquan and Wall visiting Freehold on Saturday and Keyport traveling to Shore tonight with the winners all moving into championship finals. In other games tonight, coming off their first-ever playoff victory Barnegat is a decided underdog at West Deptford, Middletown South will host Hamilton West and Rumson-Fair Haven is home against Carteret.

Hopefully when the weekend is over quite a few shore teams will still have that dream alive.