The concept of regionally based competition belongs uniquely to Division II. So too does the disagreement over how regionalization should be applied.

The philosophy is nested within Division II Bylaw 20.10, which states that a Division II member "believes in scheduling the majority of its athletics competition with other members of Division II, insofar as regional qualification, geographical location and traditional conference scheduling patterns permit."

The Division II Championships Committee makes certain that sports committees reward teams at championship-selection time for having played Division II in-region opponents. The principal benefits are that institutions save money on travel and that student-athletes have less missed class time.

The philosophy also means that Division II is less likely than the other two divisions to send the very best teams to each of its 25 national championships. That is because at-large selections also are strictly determined by regional alignment while Divisions I and III use varying levels of national at-large selections.

The membership seems comfortable with the general idea, but it definitely has been challenged by how the philosophy plays out. Regions vary greatly from sport to sport, and regions within each sport often change from year to year. While realignments often take place without controversy, they occasionally generate great friction, especially when conferences are moved to regions where the competition will be tougher and access to the national championship made less likely.

Last summer, after one especially contentious basketball realignment, the Division II Management Council formed a Regionalization Task Force to determine what could be done to stabilize regionalization, both from sport to sport and year to year. The task force was charged with developing a new system by the 2007-08 academic year.

The assignment has been challenging. Some segments of the membership are not satisfied that a problem exists while others strongly support the philosophy and believe that the division has strayed from one of its defining beliefs.

"Division II has got to decide if we are based on regionalization or if we aren't," said one institutional administrator who wants to see regionalization more tightly defined. "If that's what's important to Division II, then let's stop haggling about the ifs, ands or buts."

Certainly, there has been haggling aplenty to this point. Earlier this year, the task force advanced a map of how a revised regional approach might look. After a rough reception from various membership components, the map was taken off the table and replaced by a set of five concepts that conference commissioners, athletics directors and the Division II Championships Committee will consider in late June (see accompanying table).

One question seems to be emerging as the examination evolves: Does the membership believe that the existing issues are less problematic than the proposed solutions?

Few would argue that the current system is perfect. At the least, it is hard to understand; at the worst, it is subject to political pressures that can lead to a questioning of motives.

One example in basketball involves the state of New Mexico, where three different institutions are in three different conferences, which are in three different regions. Those institutions would be rivals under most circumstances, but because of Division II's regionalization policy, they are penalized for championship-selection purposes if they play one another in the regular season.

Another example: In volleyball, the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is aligned with the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. However, the WVIAC teams are in a different region from the nearby Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, so the regionalization policy actually discourages a number of natural, nearby rivalries.

As for political pressure, the catalyst for the formation of the Regionalization Task Force last summer involved a controversial realignment in which various conferences complained because they were being separated from traditional regional rivals.

Ralph McFillen, commissioner of the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, acknowledges such flaws, but he said that the current system still is better than the alternatives he has seen to this point.

"Our view is that we don't think it's broken," McFillen said. "We haven't seen the problems. Not everybody likes every alignment that they have, but ... there just seem to be too many issues (from the proposed models) that have arisen in a negative fashion."

In fact, McFillen would like to see sports committees granted more flexibility for dealing with region-specific problems rather than being bound by the more formulaic approaches that are under consideration. He said, for example, he would support permitting Division II football programs in the West to count games against NAIA schools as in-region games because of the extreme problems they have with finding in-region competition.

Sunshine State Conference Commissioner Mike Marcil agrees that the task force might be able to make more progress if it reconsiders the concept of common regions for different sports.

"If that was our goal, we could do it," he said. "But it creates some real geographical issues. It could be that in the end that we decide it would be a really nice benefit but that having most of our schools competing in the same regions with the same sports doesn't work 100 percent across the board. We might have to give in on an area, and that might be a place where we could give." In the alternative, Marcil recommends working toward common regions for most sports, with sport-specific regions being created as needed.

At the back of all of this discussion is a concern that some lesser teams are reaching Division II championships at the expense of higher-quality teams. That is, of course, primarily a function of automatic qualification for conference champions, a circumstance that commonly exists in all three divisions, but it is exacerbated in Division II because at-large teams are selected regionally rather than nationally.

Division II currently applies a complicated ranking system that awards or deducts points based on whether the opponent was from Division II, whether it was in-region or whether its opponents' won-lost records were good or bad. Jill Willson, the chair of the task force and director of athletics at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, said that the regionalization examination has made clear to her that the membership wants a different measurement of quality.

"What I am finding more and more is that it's really important to coaches and really important to committees that we start to look at the RPI (Rating Percentage Index)," she said. "For whatever reason, they are concerned that if we don't use the RPI, they can't determine who's the best team in the region."

The RPI, as applied in Division I, relies 25 percent on winning percentage, 50 percent on strength of schedule and 25 percent on the opponents' strength of schedule.

Jim Wright, NCAA director of statistics, said that the RPI can be useful but that it has more value if teams are competing against a reasonable number of common opponents. For instance, he said that the Division I baseball RPI helps with many comparisons but that it will not help as much with a comparison of Pepperdine and Delaware because they have few, if any, common opponents.

The extension of that, Wright said, is that Division II has to guard against making its regions too big if the RPI is going to be useful for making regional comparisons. If the number of common opponents dwindles, then so will the value of the RPI, he said.

That would cause concern for McFillen, who said that the membership of his Kansas- and Missouri-based conference prefers having the flexibility to schedule games against teams from the North Central or Lone Star Conferences without being penalized at championship selection time.

That approach stretches the term "region" to its limit since it includes possible opponents from Duluth, Minnesota, all the way to Kingsville, Texas. It is the sort of dichotomy that Willson says is at the center of the issue.

"They won't say that (they don't believe in regionalization)," she said, "but they want to decide who's in their region. They want to decide how far up or how far down the line goes."

As the work of the task force has unfolded, some of the most vexing issues have involved volleyball. The stronger teams are in the West, the Plains and the Southeast. The weaker teams are in the East. Some of the models under consideration would equalize regional access and, in the minds of some, put a disproportionate number of (weaker) Eastern teams into the championship.

"I say, 'What if we give them access?' " Willson said. "Maybe they'll get better. And they'll say, 'No, Jill, you don't understand.'

"Not even with the same people sitting at the table, that's been the complaint every time."

The task force has advanced one model that would provide each region with a prorated set of teams based on the championship-access ratio. That concept, however, has been a nonstarter in the West, home to a number of high-powered volleyball programs in a sparsely populated region.

Marcil said that sort of issue has led to alternative suggestions, such as a rounding principle that would be used to reward historically strong regions. "If you had an odd number so that it didn't work exactly, some of the extra berths would be handed out based on a six-year history of how a region did," he said.

While such solutions are interesting, they re-raise the question about Division II's philosophy of regionalization. Does it mean equal access for all regions or does it mean access based on historical strength? The concepts are quite different.

In that regard, Marcil said that the task force should not rush its work.

"My feeling is that we might not be able to move as quickly on this as we thought we might be able to at one time, that we might need a little bit more time to build a stronger consensus overall," he said. "I think that would be preferable to trying to meet that 2007 deadline where we hoped to have things implemented."

Willson, who also chairs the Championships Committee, said she would like to hear more from the membership, which will have the opportunity to discuss the matter at the January Convention in Indianapolis.

"I think we need a little more feedback," she said. "Our mission was never to do something that wasn't going to be better than what we have. And if this isn't going to be better than what we have, then let's not do it. But if it is better than what we have, then let's move forward."

Regardless of which way the division goes on this issue, it will continue to be a work in progress.

"We're always going to be in a sea of change in terms of the number of schools in a particular region and whether down the road that causes a particular region to get smaller in geographic size or get larger," Marcil said. "We're trying to look at the world of Division II as it is right now and come up with the best plan for now, taking into account the changes we know are going to occur.

"But we also know that in some ways that our work will never be done."