The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- November 8, 1999

GOING FOR TWO

Second bracket enhancement presents football committee with selection opportunities

BY SCOTT DEITCH
STAFF WRITER

Imagine following a rainbow to its end and actually finding not just one pot of gold, but two.

That is somewhat how the Division III Football Committee must feel after having the bracket for the 1999 championship first enhanced from 16 to 24 teams and then from 24 to 28 institutions.

The championship, now in its 27th year, is experiencing its first field-size increase since it rose from eight to 16 teams in 1985. There are 207 schools eligible for this year's 28 coveted spots.

Just seeing the eight-team jump in playoffs come to fruition would have been fine for R. Wayne Burrow, NCAA assistant director of championships, who is the staff liaison for Division III football. Burrow and the football committee had been attempting to have more teams included in the championships for several years.

"The major concern to overcome was adding a fifth week to the tournament," Burrow said. "Once we came up with a format that limited the amount of class time missed for as many teams as possible, the Management Council and Presidents Council supported the proposal."

Another movement taking place with all Division III team championships for the 1999-00 academic year is the implementation of new selection principles adopted during the 1999 NCAA Convention. Rather than a predetermined number of berths being awarded to each region, the teams will be decided through the use of three pools.

The first group, Pool A, will be composed of champions of conferences that qualify for an automatic bid. Pool B is reserved for independents and institutions that are members of conferences that do not meet the requirements for automatic qualification. Pool C will be made up of schools from automatic-qualifying conferences that did not win their conference titles.

In addition, there are no predetermined regional allocations for Pools B and C, and no maximum or minimum number of berths from one region. The previous 16-team Division III football playoffs included four teams selected from each of four regions.

Ratio increase

During the latter months of 1998, the various Division III sports committees with team championships were determining what their three pool sizes would be even though the automatic-qualification proposal had not yet been approved. The football committee was no exception, looking ahead to the makeup of its 24 playoff teams.

In football, 15 conferences met the requirements for automatic qualification. When the Division III access ratio of one championship berth for every eight teams in each sport was applied to the other pools, eight went to Pool B and just one to Pool C.

At the Convention, there were concerns expressed over the limited number of berths available to Pool C institutions in the new automatic- qualification legislation. To address those concerns, the Division III Championships Committee recommended that the bracket sizes in selected team sports be increased to reflect a 1:7.5 ratio.

Just like that, the football committee struck gold a second time as four additional playoff berths were granted.

"Obviously, the committee is pleased to have a 28-team bracket," said Mike Clary, committee chair and director of athletics at Rhodes College. "There are many teams deserving of postseason competition and this will enable some of them to reap that reward."

The new ratio increased the number of Pool C berths from one to four and also added a ninth spot for Pool B institutions.

"Adjusting the ratio was an important step in ensuring that we were being fair in granting non-Pool A schools sufficient access to the championships," said John Biddiscombe, chair of the Division III Management Council and director of athletics at Wesleyan University (Connecticut). "I am particularly pleased for the football committee and coaches that four additional quality teams will experience postseason play."

With the four additional berths came the pleasant problem for the committee of having to determine how the championship would be structured. Figuring on a 24-team, five-week format, the group had decided on four brackets of six teams each with the top two seeds in each bracket receiving first-round byes.

The revised format, which also covers five weeks, varies slightly from that look. A seventh team was added to each group, but only the top seed in each bracket gets the first-round bye.

With the first regular season under the new selection principles reaching its conclusion, Burrow senses both uncertainty and excitement among the Division III membership.

"The uncertainty arises out of the new selection criteria that will be used to determine the Pools B and C teams," he said. "The excitement is being generated by the enhanced field size and the possibility of new matchups during the tournament."

Even though the berths for Pools B and C will be selected on a national basis, and there are no maximum or minimum number of berths allotted to a region, the 207 teams were divided into four "evaluation regions" for the purpose of utilizing the regional selection criteria that are at the heart of the proposal approved at the 1999 Convention.

"The criteria obviously place greater emphasis on not only conference games, but also intra-regional play," Biddiscombe said. "That is consistent with the basic principles expressed in the Division III Philosophy Statement."

The primary criteria to be used in the selection of Pools B and C teams are broken into three categories based on regional and conference competition and in priority order: (1) Winning percentage, head-to-head results, results against common opponents; (2) strength of schedule, as demonstrated by regional opponents' winning percentage (a calculation utilizing both opponents' records and opponents' opponents' records); and (3) results against teams already in the tournament.

To poll or not to poll

In previous years, the football committee published weekly polls during the second half of the season listing the top six teams in each region. Given the ever-changing nature of the strength-of-schedule criterion and the inability to know which teams will be in the tournament, the committee decided not to publish polls this year.

"Teams knew where they stood when the polls were released," Burrow said. "Now there is some anxiety involved, both for the Pools B and C teams in terms of wondering if they are going to receive a berth, and for the Pool A teams in terms of their potential seeding.

"Nonetheless, the committees now have objective criteria that allow for in-depth analysis of the teams."

Clary has been impressed with the usefulness of the criteria. "The criteria have become more meaningful as the season has progressed," he said. "During each of the committee's weekly evaluation calls, our members have found that the guidelines are indeed helping us to differentiate teams."

Added to all of these changes comes the idea of the four seven-team competition brackets not necessarily matching the four evaluation regions. Once the 28 playoff teams are identified, they will be seeded using regional criteria and then grouped into the brackets according to natural geographic proximity.

"Teams on the borders of the evaluation regions may indeed wind up in a competition bracket with institutions from another region," Burrow said. "I believe the most difficult part of these adjustments for the Division III membership to handle will be that the regions are no longer boundaries."

Burrow said not to anticipate seeing many teams boarding airplanes for their early-round destinations, however.

"Flights will be kept to a minimum,"

he said. "Nonetheless, any two schools within 400 miles (the maximum distance at which Division III championships participants are required to travel by ground transportation) of each other is a legitimate pairing."

"The committee also has to look beyond the first round," Clary said. "We need to be cognizant of how the first-round results might impact the number of teams that must travel by air for the second round, and so on.

"The playoffs are still going to have the same kind of regional look as with the 16-team format. What is neat, however, is that there could be some new matchups that will generate a great deal more interest in the first round."

All in all, the introduction of the automatic-qualification principles and the 12-team bracket enhancement are making for a memorable year for those involved with Division III football. "For those teams in automatic-qualifying conferences, a loss or two early in the season to nonconference opponents does not mean a playoff berth is out of reach," Burrow said.