Around the Nation board

[ADL70]

Wittenberg clinched too.

http://www.d3football.com/game-release/2009/Nov/07/Wittenberg-vs-Allegheny/fgziel6a5wlokpt7.html

[K-Mack]

Wittenberg clinched too.

http://www.d3football.com/game-release/2009/Nov/07/Wittenberg-vs-Allegheny/fgziel6a5wlokpt7.html

That was this week; we were on top of that. What they were discussing above is that Linfield clinched after Week 9's games and we missed that.

Five clinched Pool A bids in Week 9, seven more clinched this week. Pool B is practically three teams clinched.

Then there are four/five showdown/title games, two conference bids solved rather easily and four with three-way tie potential.

It's discussed in the podcast, but if you prefer it broken down in writing, I'll have this all in the ATN column this week.

[K-Mack]

Got some interesting e-mails to share this week ... some I guess I'll excerpt in the Week 11 ATN, but the die-hards get to see in full here.

Amazing article.  Extremely impressive.  Thank you!

GO TRINE!

Lisa Rickaby

Wait, that's not interesting to you all. Just self-serving. Here you go. This one was very good:

Keith,

Your portion of ATN about the Seniors' Last Game gave me goose bumps. I graduated
from Moravian College in the Spring and just reading your piece about the last time
you get to strap it up brings back so many memories. I did not start following
d3football.com until after I graduated, there is hardly enough time to fit in school
work with all the practice and normal college stuff that following a website week to
week becomes nearly impossible. It's a shame because a piece like that could
probably help things touch home for some Seniors who are embarking on their final
games in the next couple weeks. I finished my regular season career with an upset of
Top 10 ranked Muhlenberg and an 8-2 record. We had felt like we were on top of the
world and to this day my true final memory is of Ryan Rempe jumping through the pile
for the game winning OT score. However, we were selected for a ECAC Bowl against
Salisbury. There seemed to be many mixed emotions about that selection, number 1 it
was below 30 degrees every day of practice that week. Number 2, what could have been
better than upsetting a Top 10 team, let alone a despised rival like Muhlenberg. We
jumped out to a 17-0 halftime lead only to see it slip away to a 21-17 loss in the
second half. Looking back I know we all tried our hardest in the game, but I
sincerely wonder if we realized how lucky we were to be able to play one more
collegiate game. If we knew how we would feel the following fall watching college
football instead of playing, if we would have pulled a little deeper to make one
more play that could've turned that 4 point defeat into a victory. I just wanted to
let you know that your piece was very well written and that I feel it would be a
great message for current players to hear, but unfortunately I would doubt that many
current players follow the website. Thanks and continue the good work.

Marc Braxmeier

[K-Mack]

Keith,

I have been an ardent reader/follower of information/articles on D3football.com for
4 years. While I am well aware that it may not be relevant to those fans that follow
Division I football, for the vast majority of us who have sons that are what I
consider 'true student athletes', who well play for "the love of the game', it is a
source of recognition, inspiration, and information, about 'our world'.

As my son plays has last few games, which I believe will be punctuated by his team's
playoff aspirations being met, I too, as one of the recent articles suggest, look
out over the last few years and realize that there are only a few more times
watching them come down the "Long Green Line", participating in the tailgates during
the warmth of Indian summers and the cold and drizzle of the Midwest in mid Nov. The
meetings with families (mostly dads) discussing the winning or losing, play calling,
great plays, (sometimes with a victory cigar), to remembering to bring the Gatorade
on the away games for the boy's bus ride home. and for me -the enjoyment of watching
my son walk off the field in victory or defeat and meeting with him after the game,
And what hit me as my family trekked from all over this past couple weeks to watch
these few games that are left, I realize that over the last few years while my son
has evolved into a man, and grown before my eyes, he's met some lifelong friends and
I have met some really great people also.

And as one of the articles I read mentioned, that college football will be the last
for most of the boys, I too will probably visit D3 less and less, but wanted to
thank all those involved for the effort and reporting D3 provides us regular dad's.

In an attempt to pay back for all the enjoyment you have provided through your
website, I thought I would reveal the little known secret that there is good
football here in middle Illinois. The Illinois Wesleyan University "TITANS" have
played some pretty inspirational football over the year in the CCIW conference, and
most recently defeated a couple of pretty good teams in North Central and Wheaton
College in their climb to the conference championship, and in what we hope to be a
march to the Playoffs. Their coach, Norm Eash, has taken a group of really great
individuals, and modeled them into a pretty good team, that can score and defend
with the best the conference has to offer, and along the way won his 100th game in
conference play earlier this year, and is the second winningest coach in the
school's 160 year history. So why we might not be a Mt. Union, or a UW-Whitewater,
they play some pretty good football in Bloomington, IL. All coincidently done, on
the 5th oldest field in NCAA history.

Thanks,
Larry Pope, the father of # 85.

[K-Mack]

Case Western Reserve (elsewhere) and St. John Fisher have both been mentioned as candidates for last week's top turnarounds list:

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Subject: St. John Fisher College
                Notes: Hi Keith,

I think St. John Fisher needs to be on your list of teams that have made the biggest
turn-arounds...when I played against them in 2001 we (St. Lawrence) were 0-10 and
they (St. John Fisher) were 1-9 and that 1 win was a 21-14 win agaisnt us...since
then they have been a powerhouse in the Empire 8 which as you know includes several
great programs (Ithaca, Springfield, Alfred, Hartwick...) Making it all the way to
the semifinals and now playing Mount Union in the regular season (I know the games
haven't been too close, except for the 1 playoff meeting, but you have to admit it
is impressive none the less to add Mt. Union to your schedule...10 years ago that
would not have happened)

Hope all is well,

Marc Tapscott
St. Lawrence University '05
                ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

[K-Mack]

And one more. I think I wrote back that we usually include the NESCAC caveat -- we certainly do when we do our own conference rankings -- and that I'm not sure it's meant to imply that Williams or whoever it was last week was the 4th best team in the country, only to show there's another way of looking at things.

Still, George's points are worth considering:

Keith,

I just read this week's Around the Nation, and I saw that you cited the
Massey Ratings while including the NESCAC. He lists them in the D3 rankings,
but he doesn't actually include them when rating. In the rankings, he
separates all college football schools into six groups. Group 1 is almost
all of college football, including the NCAA and the NAIA. Groups 2, 3, 4,
and 6 are junior colleges. Group 5 is the NESCAC. He gives all groups an
average value of 0, which is fine if he's rating these groups separately and
making no assumptions about relative quality unless they've played each
other, as Division 1, 2, 3, and the NAIA have. However, by listing the
NESCAC with the other D3 schools, it implies that he assumes the NESCAC to
be an average college football conference, and by extension the best in D3,
which I'm guessing isn't his intention. The only way you can mathematically
rank the NESCAC with other D3 schools is if you make some sort of assumption
about the quality of the conference. For example, if you subtract the
average D3 rating of -.859 from each NESCAC rating, Williams falls to 49th,
which may be about right for the top NESCAC school. Therefore, if you cite
the Massey Ratings again, unless he changes the formula or simply separates
the NESCAC as he should, I would suggest listing the top 10 non-NESCAC
schools.

George, statistics major at CWRU

[K-Mack]

Here's a little something I slapped together for the Pool C thread, but maybe it belongs here instead.

I was curious to see what criticisms people would have and what they would come up with using one different team or even the same ones, just re-arranging the matchups. I did a few things just to show they could be done, which will likely not be the committee's goals over the weekend.

Just for fun, since the Pool C thread seems to be doubling as this year's playoff speculation thread, I'm going to make field of 32 with matchups I could potentially see. I don't plan to spend more than two minutes thinking about this, I just want to throw something out there that might or (more likely) might not happen.

Feel free to change one Week 11 result, one Pool C selection or both, or just re-mix and match the bracket in a way you potentially see it falling.

I think I'll make my six Pool Cs be UMHB, St. Thomas, Coe, Wabash, Redlands and LV/Albright (really wanted to do ONU. Maybe next time)

Okay, here's a hastily assembled suggestion:

1 MUC
8 Union

4 Thomas More
5 Alfred

3 Case Western Reserve
6 MSJ

2 Wittenberg
7 Trine
------------
1 UWW
8 Wabash

4 Ill. Wesleyan
5 DePauw

3 Monmouth
6 Coe

7 St. Thomas
2 Central
-----------
1 Wesley
8 LV/Albright

2 H-SC
8 NCWC/Averett

3 Kean
6 Curry

2 Del Val
7 Johns Hopkins

------------
1 St. John's
8 Conc Ill

3 Miss Coll
6 Hunt

4 Cal Lutheran
5 UMHB

7 Redlands
2 Linfield

-----------
Okay, some observations:

-- This took much longer than two minutes. If you do it yourself, I advise you to list your 32 teams and have them in front of you before you start mixing and matching, rather than the way I did it ... making up matchups that make sense, then trying to remember who I was missing ... only to have that team not have a good fit.

-- There's a severe shortage of low seeds in the West/North, especially if you split St. John's and UWW

-- That last bracket features a weird flight into St. John's 2nd round. Probably not ideal, but I think I kept it to minimum flights in the first round based on the teams I had in.

-- This is by no means what I think will happen; just something I wanted to do to see if it could happen.

-- Use a map. You'll be surprised how close Alfred is to Ohio. They can get to Case and Wittenberg. Trine can get to Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. If you sub Union for Susquehanna, there are a ton more places the LL champ can go, with it being in Central Pa. stead upstate NY.

-- Do one yourself, but switch one Pool C team and watch the dominoes fall.

[K-Mack]

One thing I found that would be really helpful, besides having all 32 teams in front of you before you start, would be to have a list of where each team could travel by bus and by air to refer to as you're considering a pairing. I hope the committee already does this.

Then you could do two things: Take your 32 and make geographically-assembled groups of eight, or rank teams 1-32, then take 1-4 and hope they shake out as your 1 seeds, 5-8 as 2s and so on down the line, so 29-32 are your 8s. (I think the committee does this, actually)

Being able to look at, say, Illinois Wesleyan, and know immediately where you could send them based on how far Bloomington, IL is from the other playoffs contenders, would then make things much easier.

IWU's list might look like:
Bus: Monmouth, Concordia (Ill.), Coe, Central, St. Thomas, UW-Whitewater, Trine, DePauw, Wabash, Wittenberg, Thomas More, Mount St. Joseph, etc.
Flight: St. John's, Mount Union, (all the obvious ones on the coasts & in the south), etc.

Anyway, I'm sure selection committee members have a proven system ... it's fun to force yourself to try to go through the process, even hastily, and see what pops up

[BlueRebel94]

A lot of chatter on the boards regarding Thomas More being moved to the North for the playoffs which makes travel sense but how do they seed a team that would have only one regional opponent from the North? Pat, Keith, anyone?

[K-Mack]

A lot of chatter on the boards regarding Thomas More being moved to the North for the playoffs which makes travel sense but how do they seed a team that would have only one regional opponent from the North? Pat, Keith, anyone?

Dang, I wrote you a long response but the server timed out and it didn't take. Will have to try again later, I'm on my way out the door.

[BlueRebel94]

K-Mack while you are working on the first assignment of what region and what seed TMC will be.  I have a second one for you.  How is HS-C still higher in the regional rankings?  TMC has a higher strength of schedule.  I know if TMC takes care of business on Saturday against a ranked 9-0 team from the North (regionally ranked #3), they should get a decent seed in the tourney, but what should I realistically expect?  I mean going 10-0 (hopefully), ranked #11/10 and beating two 9 win teams and one 8 win team to close the season should mean at least a 3 seed shouldn't it?

[Ralph Turner]

K-Mack while you are working on the first assignment of what region and what seed TMC will be.  I have a second one for you.  How is HS-C still higher in the regional rankings?  TMC has a higher strength of schedule.  I know if TMC takes care of business on Saturday against a ranked 9-0 team from the North (regionally ranked #3), they should get a decent seed in the tourney, but what should I realistically expect?  I mean going 10-0 (hopefully), ranked #11/10 and beating two 9 win teams and one 8 win team to close the season should mean at least a 3 seed shouldn't it?

Let's see if beating a regionally ranked team boosts TMC over H-SC.  Being 9-0, and beating two 9-win teams and one 8-win team has been considered in the current ranking.

(The poll rankings don't count.)

[K-Mack]

A lot of chatter on the boards regarding Thomas More being moved to the North for the playoffs which makes travel sense but how do they seed a team that would have only one regional opponent from the North? Pat, Keith, anyone?

Dang, I wrote you a long response but the server timed out and it didn't take. Will have to try again later, I'm on my way out the door.

I think my original response was something like "the same way they seed any other team."

In other words, don't focus too much on the word regional in the criteria. While they use North/South/East/West regions and put emphasis on games within those regions, there are other ways to define regional game. Though Thomas More's opponents are North and South region teams, they're all regional games.

So their record, either 9-1 or 10-0, has everything to do with where they land. So does their proximity to several North region schools. If I had to guess, regardless of whether they are at home or on the road, I'd put them in a bracket with Mount Union and a bunch of the Ohio schools.

In the criteria where it says wins over regionally-ranked opponents, it doesn't have to be only South Region teams ... anyone on that list is taken into consideration. So a win over MSJ, and if you're lucky, W&J staying ranked, would give you a 2-0 record to H-SC's 0-0.

Basically what I'm saying is it all comes down to this week. You win, you're in with a high seed and a home game, likely against a North region team. (Thomas More and Averett, NCWC or H-SC don't seem to be in driving distance.)

You lose, you're on the road drawing perhaps a very tough assignment.

Whichever 9-0 team loses the Bridge Bowl is not going to like their playoff assignment all that much. If you could lose and draw Case or Witt, that might be a best bet.\

Did I actually answer your questions in all that?

[HSC85]

A lot of chatter on the boards regarding Thomas More being moved to the North for the playoffs which makes travel sense but how do they seed a team that would have only one regional opponent from the North? Pat, Keith, anyone?

Dang, I wrote you a long response but the server timed out and it didn't take. Will have to try again later, I'm on my way out the door.

I think my original response was something like "the same way they seed any other team."

In other words, don't focus too much on the word regional in the criteria. While they use North/South/East/West regions and put emphasis on games within those regions, there are other ways to define regional game. Though Thomas More's opponents are North and South region teams, they're all regional games.

So their record, either 9-1 or 10-0, has everything to do with where they land. So does their proximity to several North region schools. If I had to guess, regardless of whether they are at home or on the road, I'd put them in a bracket with Mount Union and a bunch of the Ohio schools.

In the criteria where it says wins over regionally-ranked opponents, it doesn't have to be only South Region teams ... anyone on that list is taken into consideration. So a win over MSJ, and if you're lucky, W&J staying ranked, would give you a 2-0 record to H-SC's 0-0.

Basically what I'm saying is it all comes down to this week. You win, you're in with a high seed and a home game, likely against a North region team. (Thomas More and Averett, NCWC or H-SC don't seem to be in driving distance.)

You lose, you're on the road drawing perhaps a very tough assignment.

Whichever 9-0 team loses the Bridge Bowl is not going to like their playoff assignment all that much. If you could lose and draw Case or Witt, that might be a best bet.\

Did I actually answer your questions in all that?

K-Mack,

The question that I have with your last post is with the final regional rankings.  Doesn't the committee put all the teams in the field into the final regional rankings?  If that is the case then the Averett/NCW winner will move into the rankings.  Depauw must stay in the rankings.  That would leave no room for W&J if they don't make the field and Dickinson stays in front of them.  The South region would have 9 teams in the playoffs with the 6 pool A qualifiers, two pool B qualifiers, and at least one pool C with UMHB.  If Dickinson stays in front of W&J then they would be in the regional rankings too.  Also, if NCW wins and gets moved into the regional rankings then that would give HSC a regional ranked win and Thomas More may be left with only one if W&J falls out.  The SOS would still be in TM's favor and they still may jump HSC but they may have the same regional ranked wins. 

[Ralph Turner]

...

In the criteria where it says wins over regionally-ranked opponents, it doesn't have to be only South Region teams ... anyone on that list is taken into consideration. So a win over MSJ, and if you're lucky, W&J staying ranked, would give you a 2-0 record to H-SC's 0-0.

...

I wish that the Regionally ranked teams, in the last "weekly" (penultimate) rankings, were considered in the final deliberation.  If a school has managed to be respected thru 90% of the season, then that should be good enough going into that last weekend of games when everything is on the line.