Tag Archives: NCAA

Pool B increased to three

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The NCAA released an update to the original playoff breakdown and has come up with math that makes a little more sense: There will be three Pool B bids for 27 schools and six Pool C bids for everyone remaining, including the runners-up in the 23 conferences with automatic bids.

Teams eligible for Pool B bids: Becker, Blackburn, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Chapman, Chicago, Crown, Eureka, Frostburg State, Gallaudet, Greenville, Huntingdon, Husson, LaGrange, Macalester, MacMurray, Martin Luther, Minnesota-Morris, Mount Ida, Northwestern, Principia, Salisbury, St. Scholastica, SUNY-Maritime, Washington U., Wesley, Westminster (Mo.).

I won’t get too far into the details of how this happened but basically the formula was miscalculated because the football committee wasn’t told of two teams that were newly eligible for the NCAA playoffs this season.

Division III fans knew, and as usual, it was Ralph Turner who was among those trying to figure out the math and leading the way. We raised it with the NCAA a week ago and when we showed our work, we found we didn’t have the same number of eligible Pool B teams. (We also got the schools and conference involved, to press the issue.)

It’s not the first time a D3sports.com-covered sport has had a change in the Pool B/Pool C bid allocation. In fact, it happened in football in 2000.

At least this was caught in early October and not early November.

Playoff roster won’t change

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Because of concerns regarding the increasing cost of travel, the NCAA Division III championships committee pushed back a recommendation to increase the playoff roster size from 52 to 56 players.

“The rationale for adding another baseball player to the roster, and four more players to the football roster, is valid,” Redlands athletic director Jeff Martinez, the chairman of the committee, said in a story in the NCAA News. “The games have changed — in baseball, the need is relief pitching; and football is a vertical game with more receivers, more personnel packages.

“But, you have to weigh, is it more important to put more people on every sideline, or to be able to afford an additional charter flight or two when air-travel conditions make doing so unavoidable? We cannot control the air situation, and we have every indication that it’s going to get more challenging before it gets less challenging.”

It will have to wait until the next budget cycle, in 2010-11.

Most overtimes

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As you may know from reading our site, Mass-Dartmouth and WPI played to five overtimes last Friday night. Unfortunately, it’s not yet known if this is an NCAA record, because the NCAA does not track such a record at the Division III level.

What we know for sure is that there have been no five-overtime games in the 10-year history of D3football.com — there have been 18 games recorded as going to four overtimes but none longer. That leaves only the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons as possible years in which games could have gone to five overtimes. (Overtime was instituted for college football after the 1995 season.)

Anyone knowing of a five-overtime game involving a Division III school in those seasons, let us know, and we’ll check it out.