At the January convention, the intriguing proposal to designate any D-III games played on an institutional break of seven or more days (winter break basketball and spring break baseball/softball/lacrosse come to mind) count as regional games was tabled.

At the recent Division III championships committee meeting, it was killed. Says The NCAA News:

Two specific concerns — about how teams would notify opponents about designation of a game as an in-region contest and the probable difficulty of obtaining both teams’ consent for that designation — prompted the committee to abandon the proposal, which it first recommended to the Division III Management Council last year.

“When discussing the specifics of implementing the proposal, it became apparent there were some logistical hurdles that were going to be difficult to clear,” (Iowa Conference commissioner and championships committee chair John) Cochrane said.

They’re looking at something different, expanding the definition of a regional game to include teams in the NCAA’s overall defined regions. There are four of those, which means more schools would be in a particular region. That goes into the NCAA pipeline and requires more approval.

Finally, too, the opponents’ opponents winning percentage is headed back into play for selection criteria.

“A goal of the committee over the past year has been to develop and implement a true strength-of-schedule component in our criteria,” Cochrane told the News. “The component we have now, the ‘quality of wins index,’ is not a very accurate measure of an institution’s strength of schedule. (Emphasis added.)

“For years, we’ve talked about the importance of encouraging our institutions to play the best teams within their region that they possibly can, but our criteria haven’t rewarded institutions for doing so in near as strong a way as we would like. We’re hoping this gets us closer to that objective.”

Well hallelujah! It’s about time! They call it opponents’ opponents’ average winning percentage, so one would think that is pretty self-explanatory. If that gets through the pipeline, the strong teams will actually benefit and be measured more accurately.