On Second Thought, Regional Realignment Likely Won’t Help Calvin (and the MIAA) Find Regional Games

Tuesday, in my post about the Elmhurst Bluejay Classic tournament pairings, I linked to the latest Hoopsville Podcast in which Dave McHugh alludes to impending regional alignment (which could go into effect as soon as 2013-14) (25:45 mark of the video/podcast). The apparent goals of the realignment process (as far as basketball goes) are (1) to even up the number of teams across the regions and (2) to have consistent regions between the Men’s and Women’s game.

I’m not overly concerned with goal number two (although I find it funny and mildly annoying that the ‘Midwest’ region is called ‘Central’ region in the Women’s game), but the first goal really piqued my interest: evening out the number of teams in each region.

The geography of the MIAA Schools (particularly Hope and Calvin) and the Division III regions make it difficult for to find close in-region games during the non-conference season (I’ve grumbled about this before). For Calvin, only six of the closest 12 non-conference schools would be considered in-region. The big reasons being that Michigan (and West Michigan in particular) is on the far western edge of both the Great Lakes geographic region and the NCAA Administrative region, and Lake Michigan makes it nearly impossible to travel any sort of distance to the West while staying within 200 (road) miles.

So when I first heard word of the (potential) upcoming realignment I got very excited. Maybe the NCAA’s new grouping of schools would allow Calvin to play in-region games against some nearby leagues such as the CCIW (of which annual Calvin opponents Wheaton and Carthage are members). If this were the case, it would be fairly easy for Calvin to meet the upcoming 75% in-region requirement without making any drastic changes to their typical schedule.

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Big Changes Coming For Division III Selection Criteria

The NCAA announced this week that the Division III Championships Committee has recommended changes to the regional criteria/selection process that would take effect for the 2013-2014 academic year (that’s the year after next, if you’re keeping score at home). These changes are technically still subject to the approval of the NCAA Management Council, but I’d be willing to bet that’s pretty much a formality, at this point.

Check out the NCAA.org article, and I’ll hit the highlights below.

Clipped from: www.ncaa.org (share this clip)

Increase in number of mandated in-region games

committee members voted to include as part of the primary selection criteria for team sports the requirement that institutions play at least 70 percent of their competition against Division III in-region opponents

From www.ncaa.org (share this quote)

The current rule is that teams must play 50 percent of their games versus in-region competition, so this is a sizeable boost. This would mean that teams would be required to play about 18 regional games (in a 26 game schedule) to be eligible for NCAA Tournament consideration. I’m not sure of the nuances – if the “countable games” include conference tournaments or not, but it will indeed force Calvin to schedule more regional games. The Knights played only 17 regional games this season.

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Bracketology 2/21/2012

About My Bracketology System
The basis for my picks is the regional ranking projections that I do every week. Usually there are one or two regions that are really hard for me to fit (that is to say, match the committee’s ranking) using my data. The difficulty for me probably comes down assessing common opponents. I don’t adjust the regional rankings to reflect head-to-head and common opponent games (I haven’t found a good way to automate that, and it’s too much work to look through by hand each week), but I’ll try to do some of those adjustments (while still spending a minimal amount of time) for the bracketology updates. I’m guessing that we’ll see a sharp change in both the regional rankings and the bracketology once the NCAA starts ranking the regions (and I can add in results versus regionally ranked opponents).

The main goal of this post isn’t so much to determine exactly who’s in and who’s out, but to give a good general idea of who’s in and who’s on the bubble. It’s also worth noting that the last two years (the only years in which I’ve done bracketology like this) I’ve had the exact same accuracy rates as the “(un)official” d3hoops.com projection put out by Pat Coleman (I think we both hit 16 of 19 Pool C teams two years ago and 16 of 18 last year).

I’ll list the Pool A teams (autobids) first. I’ll award the bid to the team with the best conference record. In the case of a tie, I’ll award it to the team with the best RPI in Division III games.

Pool B gets one bid. These are the teams that don’t have a Pool A bid to compete for (independents and teams from non-AQ conferences). I’ll also list the “next two” possible picks. A few Pool B teams will run into an interesting situation whereby we won’t be 100% certain if they’re eligible for tournament selection. The championship manual stipulates that team must play a minimum of 50% of their games against in-region Div. III competition to be eligible, but there is a waiver that schools can submit to bypass this rule. I’ll mark schools who may fall into this category with an asterisk (*).

Pool C is where the real fun lies. We get 19 bids this year. I’ll list my top 15 in alphabetical order, and then list the “last four in” as well as the “last four out” and “next four out”. This should represent the bubble pretty well.

Through games of 2/19/2012

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The NCAA Earns Some Points Back With Adjustment Of Home/Away SOS Multiplier

Last year I got on the NCAA a little bit for what I thought was a poorly conceived addition to the men's basketball strength-of-schedule calculation. Last year, the raw strength-of-schedule value for home games was multiplied by 0.6. The raw SOS value for away games was multiplied by 1.4 (neutral site games receive no multiplier). The reasoning for this was sound, it's more difficult to win on the road than at home, so road games are 'tougher', but 1.4/0.6 was far too drastic.

For example, a game against an otherwise undefeated team (winning percentage of 1.000) at home would have only provide a SOS of .500 (for ease of calculation, I'm assuming a .500 OOWP contribution). This would have been equivalent to a game on the road against a team with a 0.286 winning percentage (again, assuming a .500 OOWP).

Here's the math (opponent's winning percentage and resulting SOS in bold):

HOME: 2/3 x 0.6 x 1.000 + 1/3 x 0.6 x 0.500 = 0.500
NEUTRAL: 2/3 x 1.0 x 0.500 + 1/3 x 1.0 x 0.500 = 0.500
ROAD: 2/3 x 1.4 x 0.286 + 1/3 x 1.4 x 0.500 = 0.500

So, the NCAA was saying that a game against a team that's 20-0 (at home) is slightly less difficult than a game against a team that's 6-14 (on the road). That's obviously ridiculous.

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The NCAA Really Needs to Reconsider Division III Basketball’s Regional Criteria

I get angry at the NCAA’s regional criteria approximately 17 times per calendar year. They just don’t make complete sense as they relate to the Calvin Knights. Coach Vande Streek previously alluded to the NCAA applying pressure on Calvin to schedule more in-region Division III games (there’s also strong speculation out there that a portion of the reason that Calvin didn’t get selected to a Pool C bid to the NCAA tournament in 2009 and 2010 was because the NCAA wanted to “send a message” to get Calvin to schedule more of these games).

The problem is, however, that the NCAA isn’t doing the Knights any favors when it comes to the scheduling of said games.

There are three ways that a non-conference basketball game can be considered to be “in-region” (all conference games are always defined to be in-region):

• Games played against teams in the same defined geographic region (the Great Lakes for Calvin)
• Games played against teams in the same administrative region (Calvin is in Region 3: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia)
• Games played against schools located within 200 miles of your school (driving, not as the crow flies)

This is probably all well and good for over 90% of the country, but it’s definitely a problem for Calvin. These criteria push the Knights to the south and east to find regional games, but this direction isn’t necessarily where the closest schools are.

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