November 27, 1986: It is Thanksgiving Day, and, as is traditional in New Jersey, high school football teams tend to play their arch-rivals, teams from within the same town or, if they're the only team in town, a team from the town next door.
I was a senior at East Brunswick High School, and our season was already finished: We'd played our entire 9-game regular season, and we did not get enough "power points" to make the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association's Sectional Playoffs. Under the current system, we would have, because 8 teams qualify. But, from 1975 to 1997, only 4 teams did. And, with a record of 6-2-1, we came in 5th in the section labeled Central Jersey Group IV -- IV then being the group for schools of the highest enrollment.
Schools of the smallest enrollment, naturally, are in Group I. In Middlesex County, this includes schools in smaller towns, which usually have the older schools. Two such towns are the Borough of Metuchen, which likes to call itself "The Brainy Boro," and is completely surrounded by the suburban sprawl of the Township of Edison; and the Borough of Highland Park, adjacent to Edison, and right across the Raritan River from the County Seat, New Brunswick.
The Metuchen Bulldogs and the Highland Park Owls had been playing each other on Thanksgiving (or right after it, in the case of postponements due to rain) every year since 1937. But in 1986, they entered the Playoffs with identical records of 7-0-1.
Here's how the power point system works: For every game you win, you get 2 points, times the group number of the team you beat. So, if your school beats East Brunswick 2 times 4 equals you get 8 power points. Then, you get half of that for every team that the team you beat beats. So, if, the following week, EB beats a fellow Group IV team, 1 times 4 equals you get 4 more power points.
A team in a tough league could load up on power points; one in a week league could suffer for them. The Colonial Valley Conference, then as now, was the leading high school sports league in Mercer County. Trenton Central, one of the biggest schools in the State, would annually find their season coming down to 1 game, against Notre Dame High School of Lawrenceville, because most of the schools in the league were Group III or even Group II. If they beat Notre Dame, they'd be 8-0 or 7-1 in the regular season, and make the Playoffs; if not, they'd be 7-1 or 6-2, and miss them.
In 1986, Highland Park had the 1st seed in Central Jersey Group I, and Metuchen, who had won the title the season before, had the 4th seed. In other words, these 2 schools would be set to play each other twice in 5 days: On Saturday in the Semifinal, and the following Thursday in a game that would decide the title of the Greater Middlesex Conference Blue Division. But, since Playoff games had overtime, and regular-season games didn't (until the 1995 season), while both teams would be undefeated going into the Semi, one wouldn't be going into Turkey Day.
In 1980, East Brunswick beat Woodbridge in the last game before the Playoffs, which ended up with EB having the 1st seed and Woodbridge the 4th. But the NJSIAA decided 2 teams shouldn't play each other twice in a row, and rejiggered the seedings, so that EB played Raritan High of Hazlet. We lost, and then Woodbridge ended up beating Raritan in the Final.
In 1986, there was just 0.75 power points separating Metuchen from the 3rd seed, so if the NJSIAA were consistent, they would have a better reason for rearranging things for Highland Park and Metuchen than they did 6 years earlier for EB and Woodbridge. But they wouldn't do it.
Why? Because the NJSIAA gets a big cut of the gate receipts at Playoff games. For regular-season games, they get nothing. So instead of postponing the Playoffs -- the usual schedule was Semifinal, Thanksgiving, then the Final the weekend after -- they wanted the gate receipts for an undefeated matchup between rivals. That didn't sit well with people in either town.
As Gene Haley, the main high school writer for Middlesex County's main newspaper, the New Brunswick-based Home News, and a Metuchen graduate, put it in his picks column the day before the Semifinal, "I refuse to recognize any Bulldogs-Owls game that isn't played on the fourth Thursday in November." And so, for only the 2nd time since the rivalry began -- the 1st time being in 1975, when he didn't yet have enough clout at the paper, and he was assigned to cover a different game -- he didn't show up for Metuchen vs. Highland Park.
Well, the people of Metuchen and Highland Park both proved themselves to be brainy. The Semifinal was played at Edgar Field (named for the adjacent school) in Metuchen on November 22, 1986, and only about 300 people showed up. (It's just as well: Before MHS built their on-campus stadium, Edgar Field was the smallest high school football stadium in the County.) Highland Park won, 22-12. Five days later, at Jay Dakelman Field (the 2nd-smallest stadium in the County, named for the school's longtime football coach) in Highland Park, over 3,000 jammed in to see the real rivalry game, which Metuchen won, 16-7.
Haley did show up for that game, and continued to do so on Thanksgiving until 1991, as he passed away the following year. The GMC named the trophy for winning its boys basketball tournament after him. His sons John and Rich were also local sportswriters.
So, in 1986, each school foiled the other's undefeated season, Metuchen won the GMC Blue Division, and Highland Park went on to beat Keyport of Monmouth County in the Final, by another 22-12 score, to become Central Jersey Group I Champions.
A stranger thing -- and, if you watched TV in the 2020s, you know the 1980s for, among other things, being the decade in which the show Stranger Things was set -- involved the two public high schools in Edison, formerly the Township of Raritan, but, with several other towns in New Jersey having that name, changed its name to reflect that Thomas Edison had a laboratory in the town's Menlo Park section.
Edison High School opened in 1955, when John P. Stevens was the president of the town's Board of Education. It's on the south side of town. A new school opened on the north side in 1964, and it was named for Stevens, who had died in the interim. As a result, his name is on the dedication plaques of both schools.
Despite some success for EHS, JPS became the more successful school as far as football was concerned: While Edison won the Central Jersey Group IV title in 1976, Stevens won it in 1977, 1978, 1982, 1984 and 1985. Despite losing a regular-season game to East Brunswick on Halloween, Stevens was 8-1, had again reached the CJ IV Final, and was in position to win the GMC Red Division as well. Edison was 1-7, and was a big underdog, even though the game was going to be played at their home, Matthew J. Drwal Stadium.
But a long touchdown pass on the last play of the 1st half, which became known in Edison as "THE PLAY," sparked the Eagles to an 18-7 win over the Hawks, giving them the local bragging rights. What's more, in next-door Woodbridge, Woodbridge High beat crosstown rival John F. Kennedy Memorial High School. And, across the Raritan River, the 2 schools in Old Bridge played each other, and Madison Central beat Cedar Ridge. Those 2 results were not upsets at all.
But as a result of those 3 games, and EB's win over Stevens on Halloween, when the dust settled on Thanksgiving, EB, Stevens, Woodbridge and Madison each had Red Division records of 6-2. Against the other 3 schools, EB and Stevens were each 2-1, while Woodbridge and Madison were 1-2. That meant that, while all 4 schools could claim to be Division Champions, East Brunswick had the 2nd tiebreaker, and, if any single school could be called the legitimate GMC Red Champions, it was EB, backing into the title, despite not making the Playoffs.
Nine days later, in the Central Jersey Group IV Final, Stevens lost to Middletown North, a school EB had beaten in the Final in 1985; Stevens had beaten in 1977, 1978 and 1984; and Stevens had lost to in 1983. The score was 27-12. So the Hawks' bid for a 3rd straight State Championship.
For the record, the Central Jersey Group II title was won by Somerville, then the dominant team in Somerset County; and the Central Jersey Group III title was won by Long Branch, in Monmouth County.
In 1994, the 2 Old Bridge schools were reconsolidated into a single Old Bridge High School, and they began playing East Brunswick on Thanksgiving, with Old Bridge usually winning.
In the 2010s, the NJSIAA expanded the State Playoffs to include Thanksgiving Weekend, forcing schools to move their major rivalries to earlier in the season. In some cases, and for a while East Brunswick vs. Old Bridge was one of them, it was the opening game, which felt strange: Instead of building up all season long to the big game, which could decide whether your season is a success or a failure, it could be decided at the very beginning, with the rest of the season as an anticlimax, one way or the other.
But, the NJSIAA wanted more money. And what they want, they get. There would be no repeat of Highland Park vs. Metuchen in 1986.
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November 27, 1986 was, as I said, Thanksgiving Day, and therefore a Thursday. There were 2 games in the NFL. The Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions, 44-40 at the Silverdome in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac,
Michigan. And the Seattle Seahawks beat the Dallas Cowboys, 31-14 at Texas Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas.
There were 2 college football games. Number 1 University of Miami beat East Carolina University, 36-10 at the Orange Bowl in Miami. And Number 10 Texas A&M beat arch-rival Texas, 16-3 at Memorial Stadium in Austin.
Baseball was out of season. Due to the traditional dominance on T-Day of football, the NBA and the NHL usually don't play. This time, the NBA did not. And the only NHL game was between 2 teams in Canada, which celebrates its Thanksgiving in October. The Winnipeg Jets beat the Calgary Flames, 4-3 at the Saddledome in Calgary.
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