It’s official, the regions expand

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We’ve gotten official word that the addition to the definition of regional games first talked about in February went through all the hurdles of the NCAA process and is in place for this fall.

As a reminder, this is in addition to every other existing definition of a regional game (200 miles shortest possible driving distance, teams within the same Division III football region, teams in the same conference but different regions).

These are the NCAA’s administrative regions. They now also count for regional games as well:

The NCAA’s four regions, from the bylaws:

Region 1 – Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont

Region 2 – New York, Pennsylvania

Region 3 – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia

Region 4 – Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

We will apply this definition to schedules as quickly as possible. But it’s worth noting that the Linfield/Hardin-Simmons game is now in-region, as is the Mary Hardin-Baylor/UW-Whitewater game.

This can only make the selection process better reflect the strength of actual teams. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step forward.

We’re on the move

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After nearly 16 years in the Washington, D.C., metro area, I’m moving to Connecticut.

This move has been a long time coming. I’ve worked at USA Today for a dozen years now, mostly with Baseball Weekly/Sports Weekly, but starting later this month I’ll be taking a job at NBCSports.com.

Although I don’t fully yet know what days and nights of the week I’ll be working, you can assume that I’ll be showing up at games in and around the area.

What else does this mean for D3football.com? The site is not going away — shoot, D3football.com/D3hoops.com experience helped me get this job. But we’ll be relying on other people within the organization to do a little more on game nights, when I’m at work, in terms of doing the first updates on the front page, stuff like that. Our recently announced partnership with D3Scoreboard.com will help out as well, since it will improve our collection of scores as well as server performance.

The transition period might be a little rough, and there will be entire days where I am away from the computer, most likely. The job search also has contributed to the somewhat quiet nature of the blog this summer. We ask your patience. But yes, I do have a full-time job, and D3sports.com is not it. We have to pay the bills and feed the three kids, after all.

Everyone CAN be in the Top 234

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Now, unlike the D3football.com Top 25, everyone in Division III can and will be in the Top 234. That’s the exclusive top-to-bottom ranking of every team D3football.com tracks, from . . . let’s just guess No. 1 will be Mount Union . . . down to the worst team. The ranking is available only to Kickoff subscribers.

Keith McMillan and I started working on this ranking last night. Last year it probably took us about eight hours of deliberations to rank the 231 teams. This time we spent about two hours on it and got the bottom 55 teams ranked, and believe me, the bottom teams are easier to rank than the teams in the middle. We’ll tackle the rest in the coming days.

Even the brand-new teams get into this ranking. We spent a fair amount of time debating the various merits of LaGrange, Morrisville State and SUNY-Maritime. And when teams aren’t connected by head-to-head action or common opponents, it’s certainly a matter of projection. Would Heidelberg beat Juniata? Great question.

Those are the kind of questions we need to answer.