FB: Liberty League

[Jonny Utah]

The Committee is asking for subjectivity, and they did get some piece of it -- starting this year, they can take prior season success in the playoffs into consideration for the purpose of seeding teams.  This could be called the "U-Dub-Dub Rule" after the undefeated defending champs were not placed first in their bracket based on the SoS numbers.  That, in and of itself, is a part admission by the NCAA that the strength of schedule system is already problematic.

The regional nature of the system is sustained by drawing boundaries in a way that doesn't allow for a disproportionate number of Pool A bids in each region.  Obviously, in a larger minimum system, the boundaries might get strained -- too tough to tell presently, though.

My problem isn't with the autobid system.  My problem is that we're going too far in that direction -- and that doesn't seem to be consistent with the intent of playoff brackets or even bowl systems (even the BCS added a game in order to honor the fact that automatic bids and other rules were limiting the pool of teams).

Let me pose the question this way, Bombers (and everyone else who wants to answer):

What aspects of a playoff system are most important to you concerning the makeup of the pool of teams, especially in Division III Football?  I think you've suggested in the post that tipped this discussion off that 5-5 teams don't help the entire system at the end of the day -- and that we might be falling into a trend.  So, instead of dwelling on the negative (i.e., what we don't want in the system), I'm asking you to dwell instead on the positive (i.e., what we do want in the system).  I think that becomes a bigger challenge to answer, but it is more important in trying to shape alternatives or even slight changes.

These are good questions.  I think any sport/division/league that has a "championship game" and a "playoff system", wants the best teams to have a chance at that championship game.  A 5-5 team really shouldn't make the playoffs under any circumstance unless you are allowing more teams into the playoffs.  I think the NCAA should look at every league at the end of the season and decide whether or not that teams deserves a pool A bid or not, especially with leagues that have less than 8 teams like the LL or E8. 

My town mens softball league has it easy.  There are 12 teams, and every team can play each othert twice during the regular season and the top 8 teams can make the playoffs based on record.  Teams don't get to decide who they get to play based on academic credentials of the other team, and they can't say that one of the fields in town is too far to travel to.  You join the league, you play by the rules, and the rules are pretty much the same for all the teams.

The NCAA does not do that.  They let some teams play 8 games, and some teams can play 11.  Some teams can make the playoffs at 5-5, while other teams will need to go 9-1 to make the playoffs.  Some teams can say they don't want to play other teams because of their academic reputation or because they are private schools with different school goals and standards.  Some teams can play teams in other divisions, and some teams can play teams they know they are going to beat.  Some teams can get a pool A bid by winning 4 games in their conference so it doesn't matter who they play out of conference.

Basically since teams can choose what leagues they are in and who they can or cannot play, and how many games they get to play, the entire system will never be totally fair.  But like someone mentioned above, you really know what you have to do to make the playoffs and you can usually point to two games in football that you lost that would have gotten you into the playoffs if you won them.

[Frank Rossi]

Jonny, two problems:

1) The LL will have 8 teams next season (Springfield); and

2) How do you know which conference would have a 5-5 winner for sure?  It's not obvious until the season is over -- we can't predict these things.  It's only more likely to happen in seven-team conferences, but it's far from guaranteed.

[Bombers798891]

The Committee is asking for subjectivity, and they did get some piece of it -- starting this year, they can take prior season success in the playoffs into consideration for the purpose of seeding teams.  This could be called the "U-Dub-Dub Rule" after the undefeated defending champs were not placed first in their bracket based on the SoS numbers.  That, in and of itself, is a part admission by the NCAA that the strength of schedule system is already problematic.

The regional nature of the system is sustained by drawing boundaries in a way that doesn't allow for a disproportionate number of Pool A bids in each region.  Obviously, in a larger minimum system, the boundaries might get strained -- too tough to tell presently, though.

My problem isn't with the autobid system.  My problem is that we're going too far in that direction -- and that doesn't seem to be consistent with the intent of playoff brackets or even bowl systems (even the BCS added a game in order to honor the fact that automatic bids and other rules were limiting the pool of teams).

Let me pose the question this way, Bombers (and everyone else who wants to answer):

What aspects of a playoff system are most important to you concerning the makeup of the pool of teams, especially in Division III Football?  I think you've suggested in the post that tipped this discussion off that 5-5 teams don't help the entire system at the end of the day -- and that we might be falling into a trend.  So, instead of dwelling on the negative (i.e., what we don't want in the system), I'm asking you to dwell instead on the positive (i.e., what we do want in the system).  I think that becomes a bigger challenge to answer, but it is more important in trying to shape alternatives or even slight changes.

These are good questions.  I think any sport/division/league that has a "championship game" and a "playoff system", wants the best teams to have a chance at that championship game.  A 5-5 team really shouldn't make the playoffs under any circumstance unless you are allowing more teams into the playoffs.  I think the NCAA should look at every league at the end of the season and decide whether or not that teams deserves a pool A bid or not, especially with leagues that have less than 8 teams like the LL or E8. 

That's the $1,000,000 question, though. How do we determine if a team "deserves" something, unless we use something that takes all the guesswork out of it? Look at the NJAC last season. Why did Cortland deserve the Pool C bid over Rowan? Both teams played nearly identical schedules, beating 6-4 teams in their only OOC game. Ithaca played in a tougher conference than Lycoming, which makes their 6-4 more impressive and would seem to give the edge to Cortland, but Lycoming beat Ithaca. It's hard to find two teams where there's less of an ability to differentiate between the two, yet the selection committee had to do so.

Sure, it's easy to see that the NCAA field would be improved by allowing them to remove a 5-5 St. Lawrence from the playoff pool and sliding that Rowan team in, but you're not always going to be presented with scenarios that cut and dry. Eventually, you're going to have an 8-2 team that is in Pool C that's complaining that some 8-2 conference winner shouldn't get in over them. And unlike the NJAC case, we'll likely be comparing schools where they have nothing in common. No common opponents, no opponents who played each other, etc. So what happens there? Tie goes to the conference winner?

[Jonny Utah]

Jonny, two problems:

1) The LL will have 8 teams next season (Springfield); and

2) How do you know which conference would have a 5-5 winner for sure?  It's not obvious until the season is over -- we can't predict these things.  It's only more likely to happen in seven-team conferences, but it's far from guaranteed.

1)  True, but my main point is that you can have pool A leagues with 6 teams or 12 teams, and those teams can play either 8 or 11 games, and can play whomever they want nonconference.  That can make it unfair some years when better teams miss the playoffs simply because of the league they play in.

2)  You won't know which conference will have a 5-5 record, but common sense can take you a long way.  Lets say Hobart ends up 10-0, and Union ends up 9-1 with a loss to Hobart.  Then in the E8 Alfred goes 7-3 and wins the pool A in the E8 with losses to Hobart, Union and RPI.  I say Union should get a playoff bid over Alfred and I have no problem taking the pool a bid away from the E8 for the year.  Those teams know that playoff bids can sometimes be determined during the season.  Pool A should almost be a guideline and not a rule.

[SJFF82]

This may be over-simplifying things, as I have never delved into all the rules of the selection committtee the way Frank knows them, but....Why not do away with the conference auto-bids altogether, and go strictly to a Regional ranking system.  I am pretty sure that is how they constructed the play-off field in 82's day.  I recall that at some point later in the season, Regional Rankings were published and the Top 4 in each Region were on play-off track.

At a bare minimum, that eliminates the 5-5's of the D3 world.  Do we really have any hard and fast reason to give auto bids.  At least in the East, every conference (that deserves a bid) currently earns it anyway.  The E8 has IC, AU, SJF, SC and now Salisbury.  Those teams regularly earn their bids.  Rowan, Cortland, et al...they earn their bids.  The LL is down, but RPI, Union, 'Bart....usually one of them performs well enough to 'earn' a bid.  The MAC earns its bid and so on.  If one conference starts the season pretty much knowing that none of its teams will get in (NEFC, etc), then so be it. 

Of course, there are many potential downsides to this....like a 10-0 Curry-esque team complaining they never get a bid over an 8-2 AU team that may have only lost to SJF and IC who both went 9-1, but so be it.  I guess it depends on what the goal of the play-off pool is?  To get the best 8 in from each region, or to get all conference winners in and then try to pick  the best 7 teams in the WHOLE country with no real comparative data between the 7.

[SJFF82]

Jonny, two problems:

1) The LL will have 8 teams next season (Springfield); and

2) How do you know which conference would have a 5-5 winner for sure?  It's not obvious until the season is over -- we can't predict these things.  It's only more likely to happen in seven-team conferences, but it's far from guaranteed.

1)  True, but my main point is that you can have pool A leagues with 6 teams or 12 teams, and those teams can play either 8 or 11 games, and can play whomever they want nonconference.  That can make it unfair some years when better teams miss the playoffs simply because of the league they play in.

2)  You won't know which conference will have a 5-5 record, but common sense can take you a long way.  Lets say Hobart ends up 10-0, and Union ends up 9-1 with a loss to Hobart.  Then in the E8 Alfred goes 7-3 and wins the pool A in the E8 with losses to Hobart, Union and RPI.  I say Union should get a playoff bid over Alfred and I have no problem taking the pool a bid away from the E8 for the year.  Those teams know that playoff bids can sometimes be determined during the season.  Pool A should almost be a guideline and not a rule.

I agree...was the point I was making in my post that I was typing while you posted.  In your scenario, Union deserves the bid over AU hands down.  I think the best way to accomplish this end, is to go back to regional rankings that account for the overall record, SOS, last 3 games perhaps, record against other ranked teams in the Country, etc...

[Pat Coleman]

It's not really a Division III kind of thing. Part of the Division III philosophy is allowing championship access, and that means giving every eligible conference an automatic bid, regardless of the perceived quality of play in that conference. (You know that Division I does this too -- I mean, the MEAC and the Atlantic Sun are taking bids away from schools in power conferences in basically every sport.)

I do think there is room to work within that philosophy to provide some relief in football, which is already overcrowded and will only get worse. Division II has a process that I think might be helpful if applied to Division III football on a much more forgiving basis. But it may take a couple more occurrences like we had last year before that is seriously considered. I threw out my proposal and it wasn't exactly embraced. (But it wasn't laughed out of the room, either.)

[lewdogg11]

Everything mentioned is difficult, because in the Alfred case mentioned above(losing to a good Union, Hobart, and RPI) but going 7-0 in their conference, this discourages teams from scheduling tough opponents.  They shouldn't be screwed out of a playoff spot with 3 OOC losses to good teams if they swept their division. 

Let's just make it easy and eliminate 2 auto-bids, 1 for the NEFC and 1 for the ECFC.  They COULD get in with an at-large bid of course.  An undefeated team should never miss the playoffs.

Oddly enough, with all of this talk, it's kind of geared at St. Lawrence having no right to make the playoffs last year, but seriously, who would've made it that would have even done anything?  Probably no one.  So giving St. Lawrence a chance to play in the playoffs is something special for that program and I think they did what was needed.

[Yanks 99]

Here are my two cents on the issue of what to do regarding the number of Pool A bids (where some are completely undeserving) vs. Pool C bids (where good/great one or even two loss teams get left out):

1) Increase the total amount of teams who make the Division III playoffs from 32 teams to 48 teams total.  Set each assigned region with 12 teams.  Give the "Top 4" seeds in each region a bye week, while the other 8 teams square off against each other for the right to move on in the playoffs.  This would immediately ensure that good (to great) one-loss teams in each region, and even hard luck two-loss teams, could earn a shot to advance in the playoffs.  Because of the limited amount of regional non-league games played during the regular season, and pretty much the non-existence of regional cross over non-league games, this would give everyone a better sample of which leagues are the strongest moving forward, as it would provide more inter-league match ups involving the top teams from each league.  Will there be some complaining about who gets shipped where, whether or not the #4 seed should be ranked ahead of the #5 seed in the region, or how this two-loss team didn't get in over that two-loss team?  Sure...but at the very least we wouldn't see a one-loss Rowan team get left on the sidelines even though they were in a three-way tie for the league title....while a .500 Liberty League Champion gets in, a terrible ECFC Champ gets destroyed by 60 points in the first round, and another NEFC (not named Curry) gets beat in the first round of the playoffs.  Would SLU, Endicott, and SUNY-Maritime earned the right to play in the NCAA's by virtue of winning their leagues?  Absolutely...and they deserve it because they did what they needed to do in league play...but now it wouldn't be at the expense of a 9-1 Rowan team or an 8-2 Springfield or SJFC team.

2) How do we do this without extending the season?  Limit the "regular season" for those teams/leagues who want to participate in the NCAA playoffs to eleven weeks and ten-games maximum, using the last weekend in August as the earliest allowed week one game and having the first weekend in November be the latest final week game.  Currently, the last game of the season is normally scheduled on the second weekend of November, with the first round of the playoffs starting the third weekend of November.  Changing to the "11-Week, 10-Game Max" regular season schedule will allow schools some leeway when creating their schedule while giving a first round bye to the "Top 4" teams in each region (as a reward), and having the "new" first round of the playoffs start on the second week of November.  If the school doesn't want the kids to start until the first week of September...no problem ...however, they will not get a bye week during the season and will play ten straight games/weekends.  If a school (or schools) wants to have their first game be the last week of August and a bye week during the regular season...go for it.  Even the NEFC with their championship game could adjust by dropping one of their Boyd-Bogan cross over games during the year.

3) This would keep the current playoff schedule relatively intact, with the National Championship game still being played on the weekend before Christmas, as usual.  That way, you really aren't impacting the overall length of the season for too many teams.  And let's face it...no one knows what it is like to play after the second weekend in December anyways over the past seven years, except for MUC and U-WW.


Is this a fool-proof plan?  Nope...as there will surely be some hiccups.  But using an example of two teams that didn't make the tournament from last year...wouldn’t a 9-1 Rowan vs. a 8-2 Springfield team in the first round of the playoffs with the winner playing Alfred or Cortland in the second round be an awesome match-up?  I am sure there are other examples from other regions as well...but by increasing the field, in smart and thorough manner, we really could get the best of the best and have some fantastic match ups over the course of the first two playoff weekends.

[Knightstalker]

Yanks, the NCAA would never go for it.  It actually makes sense and is a very reasonable proposition in my deranged opinion.

[Yanks 99]

Yanks, the NCAA would never go for it.  It actually makes sense and is a very reasonable proposition in my deranged opinion.

Thanks KS...I am sure there would be a million logistical requirements involved with this, but this is one of the few "sane" ways that I see that will give league champions the auto-bids that they covet (and most cases deserve), without penalizing great one-loss (or even two-loss) teams from playing in the playoffs, and keeping with the spirit to challenge yourself to schedule tough opponents during the regular season without the fear of it ruining your playoff chances.

It doesn't even have to be adding an additional four teams to each region.  Four just felt like the right number for each region.  At that point, if you are arguing that the #13 team should have made it in the playoffs over the #12 team, at the very least that #13 team had the opportunity to prove that it belonged on the field, and failed.

[Bombers798891]

Oddly enough, with all of this talk, it's kind of geared at St. Lawrence having no right to make the playoffs last year, but seriously, who would've made it that would have even done anything?  Probably no one.  So giving St. Lawrence a chance to play in the playoffs is something special for that program and I think they did what was needed.

Of course, St. Lawrence had the right to the NCAAs. You play by the rules of the system you're in, and make no apologies. They won the games they had to win. That said, it doesn't really change the fact that they weren't one of the 32 best teams in D-III last season, which, in theory, should be the teams who make up the NCAA field.

In fairness, it has happened before, and of course, it will happen again. This is true of any auto-bid system. But this was the most recent example, and in all honesty, probably the most glaring.

Define "make noise." Win the East Region? Doubtful, being that it's still an MUC-UWW world. But there's no reason Rowan, Fisher, or Springfield couldn't have made it to the East region finals. Springfield gave Alfred all it could handle, Rowan had topped Cortland once. Fisher had defensive issues, but had the best offense in the East, and were hardly Team Boltus on defense. At the end of the day, those three teams would have made much more noise, even if it wouldn't have been enough to swing the balance of power overall. But if those were the standards, well, we'd have a pretty small field.

It was nice for St. Lawrence's program to make the NCAA's, and I think several posters from other schools offered sentiments like that when they qualified. But it would have been special for Utica too, but they weren't in the LL last season. And, while it wouldn't have been the same on an institutional level, I'm sure seniors on Rowan and Springfield would have liked to make the NCAA's once.

[Jonny Utah]

I think the NCAA should be able to dictate some league/schedule policies too.  Tell the LL and E8 that they can't have a pool A bid unless both leagues take 2-4 SUNY teams.  Tell the NEFC and ECFC that they will have 1 pool A between them unless they start to play some non-league games (which the NEFC has started to do) or show that they belong.

I do understand the thought of d3sports and the "allowing" of championship access.  But here is where the NCAA can step in and tell the weaker leagues like the NEFC and ECFC that those conferences need to combine for playoffs spots, or actually play a game for those spots.  Yanks99 kind of touches on that, but the NCAA can basically tell the weaker leagues:

"hey, listen. (NEFC, ECFC, league x, league y) can only play 8 games next year because your 9th and 10th games we are going to make you guys play each other to determine the playoff bid."

[Frank Rossi]

Jonny, the NCAA can't do it in D1 -- they're sitting helpless in the realignment phase as we speak.  Conference decisions are the teams' determination once the NCAA endorses the existence of a conference.  Take that idea off the table and try to consider some options the NCAA actually has and legally can use.

[Jonny Utah]

Jonny, the NCAA can't do it in D1 -- they're sitting helpless in the realignment phase as we speak.  Conference decisions are the teams' determination once the NCAA endorses the existence of a conference.  Take that idea off the table and try to consider some options the NCAA actually has and legally can use.

First off you are right I'm just throwing some things out there,  but in theory the NCAA is the colleges and vise versa.  The colleges make the rules, and if enough colleges agree on something, they can change it.  They can leave the NCAA and form their own orgainization if they wanted to.