D3 Championship Belt

[Gregory Sager]

1985
Wabash
DePauw
Washington (MO)
Rose-Hulman
Sewanee
Centre
Earlham (non-champion)

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

Not to throw a wrench in, but McKendree was never a d3 school, right?  Or did I screw that up somewhere?

[Gregory Sager]

1986
Earlham
Rhodes
Centre
LeMoyne-Owen
SUNY Potsdam

1987
SUNY Potsdam
Clark
North Park

1988
North Park
Aurora
Augustana
Central
Loras
Simpson
Dubuque
Nebraska Wesleyan
Ohio Wesleyan

[smedindy]

Sorry, my wife and I had to go to lunch!

[Gregory Sager]

Not to throw a wrench in, but McKendree was never a d3 school, right?  Or did I screw that up somewhere?

McKendree's never been a D3 school. It was NAIA for generations, then moved to D2 within the past ten years.

[Gregory Sager]

Sorry, my wife and I had to go to lunch!

No prob. I can take it from here, I think. Slow day at work.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

Wow, I really thought this would take longer.  Pretty cool.

[smedindy]

The NCAA stat archive is great. I've found a new rabbit hole.

[hopefan]

FUN RESEARCH!!!!   I kinda wish there had been a little more to each line... ie date, score.... but will be fun to summarize all the data when completed  ie multiple time schools etc...

[lmitzel]

I'm gonna have to seriously update the map when all this is said and done...

[Gregory Sager]

1989
Ohio Wesleyan
Grove City
Mount Union
Otterbein
Capital
Wittenberg
Otterbein
UW-Whitewater

1990
UW-Whitewater (non-champion)

1991
UW-Whitewater
UW-Oshkosh
UW-Whitewater (non-champion)

1992
UW-Whitewater
UW-Platteville
Rochester
Calvin

1993
Calvin
Albion
Kalamazoo
Hope
Calvin
Ohio Northern

1994
Ohio Northern
Baldwin Wallace
John Carroll
Ohio Northern
Heidelberg
John Carroll
Mount Union
Muskingum
Otterbein
John Carroll
Heidelberg
Otterbein
Washington & Jefferson
Wittenberg
Lebanon Valley

[ronk]

LeMoyne-Owen only played two games against D3 opponents that season -- interestingly enough, they were the last two games of the season. The Magicians lost to Transylvania, 112-92, and beat Sewanee, 87-86. (Transylvania was a D3 program into the mid-'80s, switched over to NAIA, and then came back into the D3 fold about a decade and a half ago.)

Almost all of the rest of LeMoyne-Owen's schedule was played against NAIA opponents, although I think that a couple of those opponents may have been NCAA D2 already at that point. Most of them belonged to the Volunteer State Athletic Conference, of which LeMoyne-Owen was the only member that held NCAA D3 affiliation; all of the rest of the VSAC schools were NAIA at the time.

Alright, so here we go, LeMoyne-Owen had the belt through most of 1976, then lost it to Transy in the NCAA Tournament.  They lost it the next game to Miles, who lost it to Wittenberg, who lost it to Scranton in the NCAA Final.

1975 - LeMoyne-Owen
1976 - LeMoyne-Owen
          Transylvania
          Miles
          Wittenberg
          Scranton
1977 - Scranton


Greg's got to redo his magic here - Scranton lost to St. Francis (NY), Bucknell, Army, and Philadelphia Textile, before dropping a game to Kings - from cross checking, I discovered this is, in fact, King's NY and not the current d3 Kings's (in PA).  Not confident any of those schools were d3.  What do you have for us, Sager? - http://web1.ncaa.org/app_data/statsPDFArchive/MBB2/E/Men's%20Basketball_Men's_Division%20III_1977_633_University%20of%20Scranton.pdf

No, it was Kings of PA; the archive for both teams has Kings over Scranton 61-58 on 1/29/77, so we just have to find out whom Kings lost to after that date.
Phil Textile was D2 and the others, D1. Incidentally, that '77 Army team was coached by Coach K and he won only in OT after losing the year before. So, Coach K was only 1-1 against Scranton and we're probably the only team that he doesn't have a winning record against in his career.

The NCAA has the whole season categorized under the wrong name, then - which, as well know, is not too surprising.

I double checked, it is filed under the wrong school.  It's definitely King's PA.  They lost, the rest of the year, to E Stroudsburg, St. Joe's, Niagra, Textile, and Trenton.  Trenton is now TCNJ and d3, but I want to double check that none of the others were back then. thoughts?

Niagara and St. Joe's were, and are, D1. Philadelphia Textile (now Thomas Jefferson University) was and is D2, and, as you pointed out, Trenton State College is now TCNJ and is a charter member of D3.

But this is where I lost the thread the first time that I tried this exercise, lo, all those seasons ago, because of East Stroudsburg State College (now East Stroudsburg University). The problem here is that the PSAC (Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference) didn't mandate a specific NCAA divisional membership for its members until 1980, when the league voted to classify the entire membership as D2. I know for a fact that at least five PSAC schools (Lock Haven, Slippery Rock, Millersville, Kutztown, and Mansfield) were D3 in at least some sports until 1980, and possibly more of them were as well -- including, for all I know, East Stroudsburg. And I was unable to track down any info on East Stroudsburg's late-'70s affiliation anywhere on the Internet. Ronk, you say that East Stroudsburg was D2 in the late '70s. Do you know that for certain? That would clear a lot of things up, but neither the school nor the PSAC (nor anyone else online) has anything definitive about the Warriors' affiliation during the Carter Administration.

If East Stroudsburg was a D3 member in 1976-77, then it lost to Mansfield immediately after beating King's (PA), which would've shifted The Belt^TM over to Mansfield. The Mounties would've given it back to East Stroudsburg the next season, which in turn would've turned it back over to King's (PA) in the middle of the 1977-78 season. In other words, that puts us on a completely different Belt^TM track than the track that has TCNJ possessing Thee Most Exalted Bespangled Cincture^TM the previous season after taking it from King's (PA).

No, I don't know for certain that they were D2 then. Scranton used to play them in the regular season for convenience(only 40 mins away), so that doesn't definitively say D2 or D3. Scranton did play Mansfield('75) and Slippery Rock('78)(the same conference as East Stroudsburg) in the NCAA tourney, so that part of your statement about being D3 at that time is true. 

[lmitzel]

1990
UW-Whitewater (non-champion)

1991
UW-Whitewater
UW-Oshkosh
UW-Whitewater (non-champion)

I guess the part that confuses me is looking at Whitewater's record from those years and seeing them still hold The Belt^TM. The '89-'90 Warhawks went 8-8 in their own conference that year, so was the rest of the Division all non-D3? The '91 records don't make a ton of sense either, since according to both Whitewater and the WIAC, they lost both of their games to Oshkosh that season.

[ronk]

Assuming TCNJ was the one to take it, here's the updated path:

Belt Path

1975 - LeMoyne-Owen
1976 - LeMoyne-Owen
          Transylvania
          Miles
          Wittenberg
          Scranton
1977 - Scranton
          King's
          TCNJ (non-champion)
1978 - TCNJ
          Upsala


This is where we might be in trouble (unless Rider of Sacred Heart were d3 then).  The NCAA doesn't have Upsala's schedule for 1977-78 and Upsala doesn't exist anymore.  I know they were definitely d3 shortly after this, so I assume they were d3 that year.

Rider was never D3. Upsala was a charter member of D3, and remained a D3 school until the institution folded in '95.

However, it appears that Augustana, in Rock Island, Il, retains all physical records of Upsala College (unless it's an entirely different Upsala, which is also possible). So if someone nearby wants to go to the Upsala "college history records," Box 1a, folder 3, there may be schedules there (according to the online table of contents).

It's the same Upsala. As augie77 noted, both Augustana and Upsala were affiliate institutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (Augie is still affiliated with ELCA to this day) and were among the five colleges founded by Swedish immigrants that were still in existence in the late 20th century (the others being North Park, Gustavus Adolphus, and Bethany (KS)).

Upsala was definitely D3; they were in Scranton's conference, the MAC and we played them 2 weeks after that loss to Kings..

Upsala had a very good men's basketball program; the Vikings went 13-10 in eight D3 tourney appearances between 1978 and 1986. The Vikings were the national runner-up to North Park in 1980, the last year of North Park's threepeat national championship dynasty. I saw that championship game, and Upsala had a couple of really outstanding players in forward Steve Keenan and diminutive PG Elonya "Tiny" Green. (Dick Vitale was the color commentator on ESPN for that game, and he spent about 90% of his airtime talking about Upsala, to the chagrin of North Park fans, because Vitale's a Jersey guy and he knew pretty much each and every high-school coach who had an alumnus that played for Upsala.) Upsala got back to the Final Four again in 1984, finishing fourth in the nation.

Upsala was sanctioned by the NCAA in 1990 for having men's basketball players who didn't pay tuition; the program was put on probation for five years, and the school closed just before the Vikings would've been restored to postseason eligibility.

With blue and gold colors?  Like both Augustana Vikings (Illinois and South Dakota), and the North Park Vikings--all patterned after the Swedish flag?

Only two of the Swedish-immigrant colleges, North Park and Bethany (KS), actually use the colors of the Swedish flag (royal blue and gold) as their school colors. Augustana is navy blue and gold, Gustavus Adolphus is black and gold, and if I recall correctly, Upsala was royal blue and white.

The D2 school in South Dakota called Augustana University is Norwegian in heritage, not Swedish, in spite of the fact that the school's colors are Swedish (royal blue and gold). It was formed when the Swedish and Norwegian Lutheran immigrants who founded the original Augustana College decided that they couldn't get along and split the school, with the Swedes staying in Rock Island and the Norwegians moving first to Marshall, WI and then to Minneapolis and to Canton, SD before finally planting the campus in Sioux Falls, where it remains to this day.

Tiny Green is currently a basketball skills trainer in the Jersey Shore area of NJ and very knowledgeable of the high school girls talent there, having worked with a lot of the D1 players from there.
  The father of one of my current prospects from that area was wearing an Upsala shirt 2 summers ago at a high school tourney. Talked with him about the old days(he played in the '80s, I think); could probably contact him indirectly about Upsala info. His daughter just announced for Muhlenberg a week ago.

[ronk]

Earlham jumped back into the NCAA in 1983-84.

I found the RHIT site that had the 1982-83 schedule.

After beating Wabash, their next loss was to Southwestern (TN) - which is now Rhodes. They were NAIA then.

Then they lost to DePauw, which was D3

So the next branch is DePauw in 1983.

DePauw did not lose again in 1983.

In 1983-84 - DePauw lost to Butler (NO), Valpo (NO), IUPUI (NO), then Wabash. So it went back to the Little Giants.

In 1984-85 (my freshman year, hooray!) - We lost to Taylor (NO), Mesa (NO), Abilene Christian (NO), Regis (NO), then DePauw again.

Back to DePauw - their next loss was to Washington U, but their 1984-85 records are missing from the  NCAA site. So...that's where I end.

Depauw must not have made it to the tourney in '83 because Scranton won it again in '83.