Five of the past 13 Division III playoff brackets have featured a first-round rematch between Hardin-Simmons and Mary Hardin-Baylor.

Photo by Joe Fusco, d3photography.com



By Pat Coleman

D3sports.com

The 2019 Division III football playoff bracket will have a new rule this season, and it will be welcomed in Texas, Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. Starting this season, the conferences will no longer have to play a fellow conference member in the first round of the playoffs.

In the past, this rule has applied to everywhere else in the country, but was often put aside in the name of containing the cost of running the NCAA Division III football playoffs. Going forward, it is written in less uncertain terms: “Teams from the same conference may not play each other in the first round of competition.”

Island teams no longer

out to sea in first round Pacific Lutheran has been the lower seed in four of the 10 first-round conference rematches in the 20 years of the current Division III football playoff system, followed by Hardin-Simmons, which has been impacted three times. 1999 Willamette vs. Pacific Lutheran

2001 Whitworth vs. Pacific Lutheran

2006 Hardin-Simmons vs. Mary Hardin-Baylor

2008 Mary Hardin-Baylor vs. Hardin-Simmons

2012 Linfield vs. Pacific Lutheran

2012 Mary Hardin-Baylor vs. Louisiana College

2013 Linfield vs. Pacific Lutheran

2015 Linfield vs. Whitworth

2015 Mary Hardin-Baylor vs. Hardin-Simmons

2018 Mary Hardin-Baylor vs. Hardin-Simmons

Since 1999, when the football playoffs expanded and included automatic bids for the first time, conference opponents have been forced into first-round rematches 10 times, most recently last year when Hardin-Simmons was sent to Mary Hardin-Baylor. Teams from the American Southwest Conference have had first-round rematches five times, while teams from the Northwest Conference have had five first-round rematches as well. The Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, which would also be subject to such restrictions, has only had two teams in the playoffs one time in 20 years, and they did not face each other.

Now these sorts of matchups will not be permitted in 2019-20 and 2020-21, as part of a Division III championships pilot program.

“The Division III Management Council took the request from all sports championships committees who were unified in strong support of this initiative,” said James Catanzaro, head coach of Lake Forest College and chair of the NCAA Division III football championships committee. “The football committee has been asking for this for a number of years and the approval of this provision allows us to put together a bracket that insures that a first round matchup is not a league rematch.”

The provision does not last past the first round, as brackets will still be created with the 500-mile radius in mind, to keep airplane flights to a minimum. “Though these teams may face each other in the second round as geography continues to play a major factor in the bracketing, we at least protect our ‘island’ teams from mandated first-round matchups," Catanzaro said. "This should be exciting for teams, fans, and all of D-III.”

In the 20 years of the current NCAA Division III playoff selection and bracketing system, the ASC and NWC have the fourth- and fifth-best playoff winning percentage of any Division III football conference, even despite taking 10 guaranteed first-round losses in that time, six of them in the past eight years.

The NCAA Division III football playoffs consist of a 32-team bracket, with 27 automatic bids and five true at-large teams competing for a berth in Stagg Bowl XLVII on Friday, Dec. 20, in Shenandoah, Texas. The five at-large teams are selected using the NCAA’s selection criteria, and do not include any national Top 25 polls.

The five primary criteria are as follows:

● Won-lost percentage against Division III opponents;.

● Division III head-to-head competition;

● Results vs. common Division III opponents;

● Results vs. ranked Division III teams as established by the regional rankings at the time of selection. Conference postseason contests are included;

● Division III strength of schedule

-- Opponents’ average winning percentage (OWP), weighted 2/3.

-- Opponents’ opponents’ average winning percentage (OOWP), weighted 1/3.

● Should a committee find that evaluation of a team’s won-lost percentage during the last 25 percent of the season is applicable (i.e., end-of-season performance), it may adopt such criteria with approval of the Championships Committee.

There are secondary criteria as well, although in football, there are not many games against non-Division III opponents to consider. If the evaluation of the primary criteria does not result in a decision by the committee, the following secondary criteria (for ranking and selections) will be evaluated:

● Non-Division III win-loss percentage

● Results versus common non-Division III opponents

● Non-Division III Strength of Schedule

The NCAA is scheduled to release its first regional ranking on Wednesday, Nov. 6.