Patrick Abegg was a Division III guy, through and through. From his days as a student manager at Wash U to his last basketball season, when he was our featured bracketologist, the Division III equivalent of Joe Lunardi, Patrick loved Division III.

That’s why it’s so disappointing to have to tell you that Patrick died this past week of a staph infection. He was just 44.

I don’t know more details than that. Patrick’s brother sings in our church choir and he was not there this morning. When our director told us why he was absent, my heart sank.

I know Patrick left a lasting impression at Wash U. Mark Edwards, the men’s basketball coach, has talked more than once about Patrick as his student manager in the 1980s. Patrick was in Salem last year when the Bears brought home their first Division III men’s basketball national title.

But his lasting legacy to Division III basketball fans was his data, and his analysis over the past decade. Years before D3hoops.com was doing the same, Patrick was collecting schedules and results for every Division III basketball team, and calculating his own ranking out of this. Over the past year or so, it became clear his projections were pretty darn good, and worthy of whatever credence and prominence we could give them. His 2002-03 data got us started with publishing schedules and results for all team, a jump-start without which we might not have gotten started for several more years.

I still have his 2001-02 data on my hard drive, and one of my long list of items for this summer was to incorporate that into the site, then try to get more data from him for previous years.

Here’s some of the last data he analyzed for Division III fans:

Final regular-season Pool C rankings for men
Final regular-season Pool C rankings for women

And here’s an interesting post, in which Patrick discusses the effect one game can have on a team’s playoff chances.

We’ll miss you, Patrick, and Division III will miss you.