It’s Monday at the NCAA convention, the day in which Division III member schools vote on the various legislative proposals.

It’s not a day in which they will vote on whether to split into two divisions. We have at least another year before that happens, and perhaps more, since we’ve heard discussion that it may be delayed from its planned 2009 convention date. But there are other proposals on the docket as well that will have an impact on Division III.

The basketball season will start on Nov. 15 in 2008 and in the future after a vote that passed 248-185 with two abstentions. Currently Oct. 15 is the first date of practice but the date of the first game is subject to the calendar (the Friday before Thanksgiving). This would make it more consistent, though Opening Night would float during the week as Nov. 15 does.

This means the 2008 season will open a whole six nights earlier than usual, 12 days before Thanksgiving … and the night before Division III football’s Selection Sunday!

The usage of male practice players was restricted in women’s sports, in another key vote. It passed narrowly, 223-206 with 17 abstentions (presumably from single-gender schools). It allows use only one day a week, among other cutbacks. Practice players must be declared eligible and use a season of intercollegiate eligibility in order to participate. Only three men can be used in a basketball practice, six in soccer, three in volleyball, or half of the typical starting lineup, rounded up.

Division III members voted overwhelmingly to ban text messaging to prospective recruits. Or, more specifically, they voted to limit electronic transmission of correspondence with recruits to e-mail and faxes. So, no text messages, no Facebook/MySpace, no IMs, etc. It passed by a vote of 362-72 with two abstentions, with good turnout from Division III schools.

A proposal to allow student-athletes to work at schools’ camps passed overwhelmingly as well, 425-13 with two abstentions.

Further proposals of note got voted down, then withdrawn. A proposal to allow provisional Division III members to be counted toward meeting a league’s seven-member automatic bid requirements failed 252-185-7. This was a proposed amendment to another proposal that was then withdrawn. Another proposal, to lift the ban on new single-sport conferences, was pulled from the agenda. This primarily affects women’s ice hockey but could have a football impact as well.

It’s important to note that, while many people assume that rules in Division III come down from the NCAA national office as if engraved on stone tablets, in fact Division III schools vote on all legislation and the membership shapes the rules.

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.”

Many already know this, but there will be live video coverage from both Salem and Springfield. We are honored to have been asked to provide the play-by-play and analysis for the NCAA’s official video broadcast of the national semifinals and third-place game.

We recommend visiting CSTV’s Web site, which will be streaming those games, and registering and testing your system now — don’t wait until game time.

CSTV’s streaming requires, unfortunately, a Windows PC. They are not Mac friendly. They also require Internet Explorer (no Firefox, Opera, etc.).

You need to be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0 on the following systems in order to enjoy All-Access:

Microsoft Windows XP Home / Professional SP2, Windows XP Media Center 2005, Windows 2000 SP4; Windows Media Player 9 or 10.

We will provide our traditional audio stream of each national championship game, as always. That is accessible to Macs and PCs.

All links will also be available on our Live Audio page.

Hoopsville will be airing Thursday night from Roanoke, Va., in a live show from the Wyndham Hotel starting at 8 p.m. ET. We’ll talk about the tournament so far, the Final Four games, and talk with each team as they return from the championship banquet. Come sit and listen, ask questions, point and laugh at Dave, etc.

The Wyndham is just off Exit 3 on I-581 and is the teams’ official hotel. Meet fans of other teams and just celebrate Division III basketball in general. We’ll go from 8 until at least 10, if not later, to get all four teams in.

And on Friday, whether you’re at the games or not, check out our scouting reports, which will be on the Web site during the day. We’ll also have live audio pregame coverage from Salem starting at 4 p.m. ET Friday, and Saturday’s broadcasts will start with the coaches’ roundtable in Salem and take you all the way through the postgame news conferences at both sites, including our annual audio highlight reel of the NCAA Tournament.

So fire up your browsers! It’s a long weekend of Division III on the air! And I love exclamation points, apparently!