The NCAA announced that they have corrected an error in the allocation of the bids in the 2007 Division III Baseball Handbook. D3baseball.com broke the story earlier today. My role in this story was to review the much-anticipated 2007 Handbook upon its release on April 20. (After carefully following Division III sports for the past seven years, I have learned that there is much to learn about the process in the Handbook for the respective sports.)

The errors in the 2007 Handbook seemed especially egregious in the original download. The list of teams seemed to be lifted from the 2005 Handbook in “cut and paste” fashion as the top line of page 32 states. Hartwick was still playing baseball. Mt. St. Vincent and Rockford were listed in two places and New Jersey City University was still an independent in the New York Region. The lists of schools did not match the tabulations. It just looked sloppy. I pointed these out to Pat Coleman and Jim Dixon. Cooler heads prevailed. The most knowledgeable D-III authority in the country and the D3baseball.com guru were able to get the information where it needed to go.

This might not be much of a story were the context of this next error not understood in the recent history of NCAA’s administering the Division III playoffs. We learned of a change in the Pool B allocations in men’s basketball in the last week of the 2006-07 regular season. When the 2007 men’s basketball brackets were released, the NCAA did not even know that Mary Hardin-Baylor and Mississippi College were in the same conference, the American Southwest Conference.

The NCAA announced that the official standard for the 2006-07 season for distance would be msn.mappoint.com “shortest distance”. There was even an administrative ruling placed in a special bulletin to university officials that “in-region” games that were contracted and scheduled under the previous standard would be honored as in-region. The new “msn.mappoint” standard allowed the ferry ride across Lake Michigan to qualify as the “shortest distance” for the men’s basketball game between Hope and Carthage to be a “200-mile” radius “in-region” game!

When the 2007 men’s basketball brackets were released, the NCAA did not even know that Mary Hardin-Baylor and Mississippi College were in the same conference, the American Southwest Conference.

However, the biggest impact of the mileage standard switch occurred in the seedings of the football playoffs. Pat Coleman noticed that the change in the official distance standard made it possible for South Region No. 7 Millsaps to be bused to No. 2 UMHB, keeping the seedings intact. Several other fans tried that same software and got the same answer. You could bus Millsaps to UMHB and send No. 5 Washington and Jefferson 20 miles into Pittsburgh to play No. 4 Carnegie Mellon in a first round game. Wow! What a bracket! The change in the standard was not considered by the football selection committee.

As a result, South Region ranked No. 3 Hardin-Simmons did not get the anticipated first round playoff game, but instead was sent to its conference rival for a first-round game. One could write a Master’s thesis on the impact of such scheduling permutations; the ASC has seen many of them.

The nature of this “rant” has changed to a sincere plea for Indianapolis to improve the quality of the support that we Division III fans get. To the NCAA: You hail “best practices” for your member institutions, yet you cannot administer a playoffs without glaring deficiencies in the processes you use. Your Handbooks have numerous mathematical and tabulation errors. You don’t even use the same format for all of the Handbooks. The 2007 Men’s Basketball Handbook 2/22/2007 revision is quite explicit in the calculation of the bids. That clarity was not present in the 2007 Baseball Handbook. The 2007 Women’s Basketball Handbook presents the conferences alphabetically, so you have to search for the other conferences in the region. In fact, the 2006 Men’s Soccer Handbook seems to be the most complete and most informative.

In the “real” world, there are major consequences for that failure to execute, yet we continually see these errors in Division III.

Your errors in Pool B for baseball were because someone responsible for the Championship in that sport did not verify the minute details. In the “real” world, there are major consequences for that failure to execute, yet we continually see these errors in Division III.

I hope that the next “self-study” that the NCAA implements will consider the poor quality of support that we are getting in Division III. I do not expect the Committee Chairs of the various committees from our respective universities to double-check these processes in the administration of the championships. You, the NCAA, have numerous customers: your member institutions, their governing boards, your student-athletes, the parents who have decided that the NCAA Division III model of “pure” amateur collegiate athletics is the correct one for the sons and daughters, and the very loyal D3 fans who contribute the campus environment. We need the NCAA to give us a better value for the services that we seek.

Why don’t you “open-source” your public data, such as the game scores, schedules, opponents’ opponents’ records, etc, to permit registered users and fans to proofread and update your data?

We sometimes wonder if the quality of support that we Division III fans receive is part of the diversity of the NCAA, i.e., all of the quality goes to Division I and Division III gets what is left. Supposedly, you “pursue excellence” and ostensibly a job with the NCAA is supposedly prestigious opportunity to work in this field.

The home page says — “The “national office” — Approximately 350 paid professionals that implement the rules and programs established by the membership. The national office staff is located primarily at the headquarters office in Indianapolis, Indiana.”

From the examples that we have seen this year, a bunch of “amateurs” have beaten the “pros.”