FB: North Coast Athletic Conference

[HSCTiger fan]

Very cool Wally. Thanks for looking thru all that info.

[Mr. Ypsi]

And here's the honor roll...the list of teams that have made the top 25 in every season of the D3football.com Top 25 era (2003-present):
Linfield
Mary Hardin-Baylor
Mount Union
St. John's*
UW-Whitewater
Wabash
Wheaton (Ill.)

*St. John's is not ranked in the 2014 preseason top 25, so they're the only one of these seven that are on the hot seat. 

Members of oh-so-close club which I've arbitrarily decided is everybody who has missed out of the top 25 in only one or two of these seasons:
Bethel (2005, 2009)
Delaware Valley (2003, 2006)
Hampden-Sydney (2006, 2007)
North Central (2003, 2004)
Rowan (2008, 2009)
St. John Fisher (2003, 2009)
Wartburg (2012)
Wesley (2003, 2004)

Well, I came awfully close (without the trouble you took to look it all up!)   St. John's has been so overshadowed by St. Thomas and Bethel lately, I didn't realize they had made the poll in either 2012 or 2013.  Wabash I was reasonably confident in, but Wheaton has had a couple of down years that they must have made the poll just a week or two.

Did you happen to notice if Augie or Millikin had ever been ranked?  The CCIW was once the Big 4/Little 4, with Augie and Millikin both securely in the top group, but that was shattered years ago as they fell out and NCC placed themselves firmly at the top of the Big 3.  Until last year, NPU was firmly embedded at #8, with spots 4-7 up for grabs, but even that certainty of life has been overturned.  While the most likely candidate for #8 this year is Millikin, it would be no real shock if 4-time National Champion Augie finally fell that far.

[wally_wabash]

Six of your eight CCIW teams have been ranked at some point.  Millikin and North Park are the two that have never made the top 25.  Augustana actually got ranked in each of 2003-2007. 

I'll have some more stuff on the conference breakdown later, but just some interesting (to me) things I noted when compiling this stuff:

- Wittenberg was ranked for a minute in 2004 and then not ranked again until 2010.  That's wild. 
- Curry has been ranked twice, both in the final season poll.  The voters love a team that wins a playoff game. 
- There were a couple of seasons where Linfield had to play their way in.  Didn't expect that. 

[wally_wabash]

Also, I read my sheet wrong.  St. John's missed in 2012.  My post game needs a training camp. 

[wally_wabash]

Ok...so here are the conferences (in their 2014 configuration) and how many teams have been ranked at one point or another since the start of the 2003 season...and because I'm a half full kind of guy, I'll point out the teams that have been ranked:

ASC - 4/6; ETBU, Hardin-Simmons, Mary Hardin-Baylor
CC - 5/10; Johns Hopkins, McDaniel, Moravian, Muhlenberg, Ursinus
CCIW - 6/8; Augustana, Carthange, Elmhurst, IWU, North Central, Wheaton
E8 - 5/8; Alfred, Buffalo State, Ithaca, Salisbury, SJF
ECFC - 0/8
HCAC - 3/9; Franklin, Hanover, Mt. St. Joseph
IIAC - 6/8; Buena Vista, Central, Coe, Dubuque, Simpson, Wartburg
Independents - 1/4; Wesley
LL - 4/8; Hobart, RPI, Springfield, Union
MAC - 7/10; Albright, Delaware Valley, King's, Lebanon  Valley, Lycoming, Widener, Wilkes
MASCAC - 0/9
MIAA - 1/7; Trine
MIAC - 7/9; Augsburg, Bethel, Carleton, Concordia-Moorhead, St. John's, St. Olaf, St. Thomas
MWC - 3/12; Illinois College, Monmouth, St. Norbert
NACC - 1/7; Concordia (Wis)
NCAC - 4/10; Wabash, Wooster, Wittenberg, DePauw
NEFC - 1/8; Curry
NESCAC - 1/10; Trinity (Conn)
NJAC - 6/8; Brockport State, Cortland State, Kean, Montclair State, Rowan, TCNJ
NWC - 4/8; Linfield, Pacific Lutheran, Whitworth, Willamette
OAC - 7/10; Baldwin Wallace, Capital, Heidelberg, John Carroll, Mount Union, Ohio Northern, Otterbein
ODAC - 3/8; Bridgewater (Va), Hampden-Sydney, Randolph-Macon
PAC - 6/11; Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Thiel, Thomas More, Washington & Jefferson, Waynesburg
SAA - 3/7; Birmingham-Southern, Centre, Millsaps
SCAC - 2/4; Texas Lutheran, Trinity (Tx)
SCIAC - 3/8; Cal Lutheran, Occidental, Redlands
UAA - 0/2
UMAC - 0/10
USAC - 4/9; Christopher Newport, Huntingdon, Maryville (Tenn), NC Wesleyan
WIAC - 7/8; Eau Claire, La Crosse, Oshkosh, Platteville, Stevens Point, Stout, Whitewater

And if I did all of that correctly, that makes 104 out of 244 D3 teams that have ever been ranked by D3football.com at sometime between 2003 and today. 

[Mr. Ypsi]

And that makes WIAC: 7:8
                       MIAC: 7:9
    AND               CCIW:6:8
                        IIAC:6:8
                        NJAC:6:8

[D3MAFAN]

Great Analysis!

[ExTartanPlayer]

- Curry has been ranked twice, both in the final season poll.  The voters love a team that wins a playoff game.

There is always a bit of a debate about what to do at the bottom of the top 25: should we reward undefeated champs from lesser conferences with a little scrap of praise, or go with cold hard logic, ranking 7-3 and 6-4 teams from better conferences who (probably) would manhandle that undefeated NEFC or ECFC team head-to-head?

While I'm more of a "power rankings" guy, it is pretty understandable to me how any team that wins a playoff game can sneak into the bottom of those final rankings. We're all pretty well-versed in the vagaries of the playoff system, knowing that the playoffs don't necessarily contain the 32 best teams, nor are they seeded in such a way that guarantees the best teams avoid each other in round one, but nevertheless, winning a playoff game makes you one of the last 16 teams playing, and thus likely garners attention from voters (especially if you have double-digit wins), overcoming the cold hard logic that the fourth-best WIAC/MIAC/CCIW/etc team might be better than an 11-1 team with a lucky first-round playof matchup they happened to win.

I'm okay with it. Not to be all "everyone gets a trophy" here, but I think it's good for D3 if schools that have a big season like that are rewarded. Gives them a little feather in the cap for recruiting and an extra little article to post on their website (Gulls ranked 23 in final D3football.com poll). Nor do I really think 6-4 or 7-3 WIAC or CCIW teams would crow that much about being rewarded for something they might perceive as a mediocre season.

[wally_wabash]

Rather than looking for teams that made it ever year, I'd be more interested in all the teams that made the top 25 at least once in the last 5 polls of any given year. Those should be the best teams of each season, and I'm curious as to how many of the 300+ D3 teams rotate through that category. My thoughts are not many...

If you're talking about how many teams have been ranked in one of the last five polls of a season for each season since 2003, I think that list is UWW, UMU, UMHB.  Full stop.  And UWW just barely made the cut- ranked in the Week 8 poll in 2012 before falling out.  2004 got Wabash, 2005 got Wheaton, and 2008 got Linfield. 

[jknezek]

Rather than looking for teams that made it ever year, I'd be more interested in all the teams that made the top 25 at least once in the last 5 polls of any given year. Those should be the best teams of each season, and I'm curious as to how many of the 300+ D3 teams rotate through that category. My thoughts are not many...

If you're talking about how many teams have been ranked in one of the last five polls of a season for each season since 2003, I think that list is UWW, UMU, UMHB.  Full stop.  And UWW just barely made the cut- ranked in the Week 8 poll in 2012 before falling out.  2004 got Wabash, 2005 got Wheaton, and 2008 got Linfield.

No, I'm not interested in teams that were in ALL of the last 5 polls of the years, I'm thinking for teams appearing in ANY of the last 5 polls of the year. In other words, how many teams total out of the D3 universe, at the end of any of the seasons, were considered a top 25 team. It is clearly a number larger than 25, but is it less than 75? I'm really curious over the last 14 years or so, how many teams total had a season that put them in consideration for the top 7.5% or so of D3.

We know at the very top end of D3 it is extremely top heavy and consistent, does the same hold down the chain to the next two tiers. And I'm interested in polls at the end of the season, rather than the beginning, because a lot of the early polls are reputation or previous year based. By the end of the year you are rewarding primarily those teams that have had a good singular season...

[ExTartanPlayer]

Rather than looking for teams that made it ever year, I'd be more interested in all the teams that made the top 25 at least once in the last 5 polls of any given year. Those should be the best teams of each season, and I'm curious as to how many of the 300+ D3 teams rotate through that category. My thoughts are not many...

If you're talking about how many teams have been ranked in one of the last five polls of a season for each season since 2003, I think that list is UWW, UMU, UMHB.  Full stop.  And UWW just barely made the cut- ranked in the Week 8 poll in 2012 before falling out.  2004 got Wabash, 2005 got Wheaton, and 2008 got Linfield.

No, I'm not interested in teams that were in ALL of the last 5 polls of the years, I'm thinking for teams appearing in ANY of the last 5 polls of the year. In other words, how many teams total out of the D3 universe, at the end of any of the seasons, were considered a top 25 team. It is clearly a number larger than 25, but is it less than 75? I'm really curious over the last 14 years or so, how many teams total had a season that put them in consideration for the top 7.5% or so of D3.

Interesting question, but to make life easier, why not just look at the final poll from each season and make a composite list of teams that have appeared in a FINAL poll at least once?  As you said, the MINIMUM for this designation is 25 teams (duh), and since wally's mentioned that 104 of the 244 teams have been ranked at least once from 2003-2013, that's the MAXIMUM possible.

I think this number may be closer to 104 than 25, because (as alluded in my post above) a fair number of teams with one or two glamor seasons that had a playoff win will make that year's final poll (a few random cases that I've mentioned being 2006 CMU, 2007-2009 Case Western, 2007-08 Curry, all of whom made the season's final poll on the strength of an undefeated season with a playoff win; another random case that I know offhand is 2005 Thiel, who went 11-1 and won a first-round playoff game, likely made the final 2005 poll, and has gone 19-61 since).

Preseason polls are naturally going to gravitate towards including the traditional yearly powers with a few visitors at the bottom of the poll that had a big season the year before and return a few big-name players.  I suspect that end-of-season polls are, strangely enough, MORE likely to include single-year flashes-in-the-pan for the reason mentioned above.

[wally_wabash]

No, I'm not interested in teams that were in ALL of the last 5 polls of the years, I'm thinking for teams appearing in ANY of the last 5 polls of the year. In other words, how many teams total out of the D3 universe, at the end of any of the seasons, were considered a top 25 team. It is clearly a number larger than 25, but is it less than 75? I'm really curious over the last 14 years or so, how many teams total had a season that put them in consideration for the top 7.5% or so of D3.

We know at the very top end of D3 it is extremely top heavy and consistent, does the same hold down the chain to the next two tiers. And I'm interested in polls at the end of the season, rather than the beginning, because a lot of the early polls are reputation or previous year based. By the end of the year you are rewarding primarily those teams that have had a good singular season...

Ah I see...I would go over 75.  I think most of the teams down on that last that have ever made it have made it in the back end of the season.  The teams that get ranked early in the season based on reputation usually got that reputation from some place of merit (generally by qualifying for tournaments and winning postseason games...which leads to end of year poll placement) and teams that get placed based on previous year's results sort of fall in the same boat...they were probably ranked at the end of the previous year. 

I can think of a couple off the top of my head that wouldn't qualify...Buffalo State and Carleton each appeared just once, for one week.  I'm sure there are a few more that fit that kind of scenario, but I don't think we could take 30 teams off of the list. 

[jknezek]

So probably at least 1/3 of D3 80-90 teams, have had a season in the last 14 years that merited a Top 25 position toward the end of the year. That's better than I would have thought to be honest.

[sigma one]

OK, as long as we are messing with these kinds of things.  Oh, for the start of the season when there are games to post about and the strengths and weaknesses of teams. . . .
     Here are the Top 25 best total winning percentages from 2004-2013, all games including playoffs, and excluding NESCAC:
     Mt. Union                          .945
     UWWhitewater                  .921
     Mary Hardin-Baylor            .872
     Linfield                              .854
     Wesley                              .847
     Wabash                             .829
     North Central                    .818
     Washington and Jefferson  .810
     Curry                                .792
     Hobart                              .790
     Monmouth                        .787
     Wheaton                           .784
     St Norbert                         .783 
     Delaware Valley                 .776
     St John Fisher                   .773
     Wittenberg                        .761
     St John's                           .752
     Wartburg                           .748
     Bethel                               .746
     Central                              .745
     Hampden-Sydney              .743
     St Thomas                         .743
     Franklin                             .739
     Johns Hopkins                    .739
     Trinity, TX                          .738

That's the decade-long view.  The short view--2011-2013-- (the last three years) looks like this:

     Mt Union                            .933
     UWWhitewater                   .925
     Linfield                               .914
     St Thomas                         .897
     Mary Hardin-Baylor             .884
     Johns Hopkins                    .882
     Hobart                               .879
     Wabash                             .879
     North Central                     .842
     Bethel                               .829
     UW Oshkosh                      .824
     Wittenberg                        .824
     Wesley                              .821
     Endicott                            .818
     Heidelberg                         .806
     Illinois College                   .806
     Thomas More                    .806
     Wheaton                           .800
     St Scholastica                   .794
     UW Platteville                    .774
     Lycoming                          .767
     Delaware Valley                 .765
     Framingham St                 .764
     St John Fisher                   .757
     Franklin                            .750
     Greenville                         .750
     Hampden-Sydney             .750
     Illinois Wesleyan               .750
     Salisbury                          .750

This is not, of course, to say these are the premier teams in Division III.  It is to say, perhaps, that these are the most successful teams given the their conferences and level of competition.  All in all, it's a pretty select group, I'd say.
     Make of this what you will.


                                       

[bashbrother]

If you're talking about how many teams have been ranked in one of the last five polls of a season for each season since 2003, I think that list is UWW, UMU, UMHB.  Full stop.  And UWW just barely made the cut- ranked in the Week 8 poll in 2012 before falling out.  2004 got Wabash, 2005 got Wheaton, and 2008 got Linfield.

Thanks #3