Frequently asked questions about the Division III football playoffs. If you have a question that isn't answered here, contact us via email or comment at the bottom of the page.
1. How are the Division III football playoffs set up?
2. Which conferences get automatic bids?
3. How are the at-large bids determined?
4. How is a three-way tie broken for first place in a conference?
5. How are the playoffs structured?
6. Which regions will be paired up in the national semifinals?
7. What dates are playoff games?
9. How has each conference performed in the playoffs?
10. How many players can be on a playoff roster?
11. How many automatic bids were there in (your year here)?
Answers
1. How are the Division III football playoffs set up?
For 2024: Automatic bids to go the champions of 28 conferences.
There will be zero bids set aside solely for Pool B teams, that is, teams who are independents or in conferences without automatic bids. (There are no eligible teams in 2024.)
Forty teams will qualify for the NCAA Division III playoffs, starting in 2024. The remaining 12 bids are at-large bids, commonly referred to as Pool C.
Scroll down for the year-by-year history of automatic bids, Pool B bids and Pool C bids.
2. Which conferences get automatic bids?
For 2024: American Rivers Conference; American Southwest Conference; Centennial Conference; College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin; Commonwealth Coast Conference; Eastern Collegiate Football Conference; Empire 8; Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference; Landmark Conference; Liberty League; Massachusetts State College Athletic Conference; Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association; Middle Atlantic Conference; Midwest Conference; Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference; New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference; New Jersey Athletic Conference; North Coast Athletic Conference; Northern Athletics Collegiate Conference; Northwest Conference; Ohio Athletic Conference; Old Dominion Athletic Conference; Presidents' Athletic Conference; Southern Athletic Association; Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference; Upper Midwest Athletic Conference; USA South Athletic Conference; and the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
The New England Small College Athletic Conference chooses not to participate in the NCAA Division III playoffs in football.
3. How are the at-large bids determined?
At-large bids in 2024 and beyond are determined using the new NCAA Power Index, or NPI, and the football committee must weigh each of the criteria in the formula.
This entire section is drawn from an NCAA document and any editorializing or assessment of the effect of the various parts of the formula are the NCAA's, not D3sports.com's.
Winning Percentage/Strength of Schedule.
The committee set the Win%/SOS dial to 40/60 to balance the strength of win percentage and strength of schedule. With a significant number of undefeated teams annually, this weight balances strong scheduling with a high number of wins.
Home/Away – Win/Loss Weights.
The committee valued data that proves it is more difficult to win games played as the visiting team vs. games played at home and elected to use a 1.1 /0.9 to reward those wins.
Quality Win Base.
The committee set the QWB at 54.00 with the intent of the setting resulting near or equal to the number of ranked teams the committee evaluated during regional rankings, which is roughly 20% of sponsoring teams. This also gives the committee a manageable number of teams competitive teams in the membership (around 100).
Quality Win Base Multiplier.
The committee settled on a QWB multiplier of .250 to encourage teams to schedule the most competitive teams while also not penalizing teams that play a low number of non-conference games.
Overtime Weight.
The committee values an overtime win the same as a win in regulation time and did not place additional weight to the overtime metric.
Minimum Wins.
The committee set the dial to 5 wins. The committee experimented with multiple minimum wins numbers and noticed a majority of teams near the at-large cut line needed to keep 5 or more wins in order to have enough data to evaluate and count. Also, they discussed 5 was the appropriate number to allow some teams to drop a game based on the strength of the bottom of their conference.
Coaches’ polls and/or any other outside polls or rankings are not used as a selection criterion by the football committee for selection purposes.
4. How is a three-way tie broken for first place in a conference?
You'd have to ask the conference in question. Each conference sets its own tiebreakers.
5. How are the playoffs structured?
There are four brackets of 10 teams apiece. The brackets are set by the NCAA committee, grouping eight teams together in a roughly geographic manner.
The NCAA reserves the right to seed the bracket in the interest of avoiding having to pay for extra airplane flights in the first round. If two schools are within 500 miles' driving distance, then the road team travels by bus. If the distance is longer than 500 miles then the NCAA must fly one team to play the other.
Generally speaking, the No. 7 seed plays the No. 10 seed, the No. 8 seed plays the No. 9 seed, with the winners advancing to the second round. But the committee also reserves the right to juggle first-round pairings to satisfy their travel requirements as well as keep conference foes from facing each other in the first round.
In general, the higher seed hosts through to the national semifinals. If two equal seeds from different brackets meet in the national semifinals, the NCAA will determine who hosts. That is announced when the brackets are released.
In 2009, the NCAA announced that there were no seeds and never had been. However, this contradicted the facts from previous years, in which the NCAA liaison communicated seedings to D3football.com personally.
6. Which regions will be paired up in the national semifinals?
This is not predetermined. We'll find out on Selection Sunday when the bracket is unveiled.
7. What dates are playoff games?
The Division III football playoffs are held on five consecutive Saturdays in November and December, starting with the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The championship game is in January. Games in the first round rounds kick off at noon local time.
Specifically, by year:
2024: Nov. 23, Nov. 30, Dec. 7, Dec. 14, Dec. 21, with the Stagg Bowl being held on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at 7 p.m. Central Time.
Semifinal game times were set by television starting in 2011. The Stagg Bowl was held in Salem, Virginia, from 1993 to 2017, and will be again in 2023 for Stagg Bowl L (50). The Stagg Bowl is in Houston, in 2024 (January 2025), in Canton, Ohio, in 2025 (January 10/11 2026) and Salem in 2026 (Jan. 9/10, 2027).
8. What is a regional game?
The following definition determines which games are in-region. However, as long as a team plays 70 percent of its schedule vs. in-region opponents, or receives a waiver from the NCAA, then all games vs. Division III opponents count in the primary criteria and we mark them as "regional" on our schedules.
A game can be classified as regional in any of three ways.
1) Both teams are full Division III members (or third- or fourth-year provisional members) and are in the same Division III member conference or same region as defined by the Division III football committee. That list of regions is linked on the Teams menu at the top of this page.
2) The teams are within 200 miles of each other via the NCAA's approved mapping software.
3) The teams are within the same NCAA administrative region. Those regions are defined below.
Region 1: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont.
Region 2: New York, Pennsylvania.
Region 3: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia.
Region 4: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
If the teams are in the same region by any one of these three definitions, it is a regional game.
Some examples: 1. Trinity (Texas) is scheduled to play the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in a regular season game in Ireland. Is this a regional game?
Answer: Yes. It doesn't matter where the game is played, only where the schools are from. Texas and Wisconsin are both in Administrative Region 4.
2. Merchant Marine plays Grove City. They are in different NCAA regions and are more than 200 miles apart.
Answer: This is a regional game. Merchant Marine is in New York, Grove City is in Pennsylvania. Both are in Administrative Region 2.
3. Albion (Mich.) plays Grand Valley State (Mich.).
Answer: This is not a regional game. Grand Valley State is not a Division III member. No game against a non-Division III member can ever be a regional game.
4. Johns Hopkins (Md.) plays Bridgewater (Va.) Answer: This is a regional game. Although Maryland and Virginia are in different administrative regions, both schools are in the South for football.
9. How has each conference performed in the playoffs?
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A look at each conference from playoff expansion in 1999 through 2023.
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The following list incudes results of the past 10 playoff brackets: 2013 through 2023.
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10. How many players can be on a playoff roster?
Starting in 2012, the limit was increased from 52 to 58 players. That list is final 10 minutes before kickoff but can be changed until then. A team can field a different roster in each round, if it desires. Both the home and road team are limited to suiting up 58 players. The team's remaining players cannot be in the team box on the sidelines during the game.
11. How many automatic bids were there in (your year here)?
From 1972, the first year of the Division III football championship, through 1998, there were no automatic bids and a range from four up to 16 teams were selected on an at-large basis.
Here's how the history has progressed since:
1972-98 no automatic bids
--------- 28-team fields ---------
1999 15 AQs, 9 B, 4 C
2000 17 AQs, 8 B, 3 C
2001 17 AQs, 7 B, 4 C
2002 18 AQs, 7 B, 3 C
2003 19 AQs, 6 B, 3 C
2004 21 AQs, 4 B, 3 C
--------- 32-team fields ---------
2005 21 AQs, 4 B, 8 C
2006 22 AQs, 4 B, 7 C
2007 22 AQs, 3 B, 7 C
2008 23 AQs, 3 B, 6 C
2009 24 AQs, 3 B, 5 C
2010 23 AQs, 3 B, 6 C
2011 25 AQs, 1 B, 6 C
2012 24 AQs, 1 B, 7 C
2013 24 AQs, 3 B, 5 C
2014 24 AQs, 2 B, 6 C
2015 25 AQs, 1 B, 6 C
2016 25 AQs, 1 B, 6 C
2017 25 AQs, 2 B, 5 C
2018 26 AQs, 1 B, 5 C
2019 27 AQs, 0 B, 5 C
2020 No playoffs, COVID-19
2021 27 AQs, 0 B, 5 C
2022 27 AQs, 0 B, 5 C
2023 28 AQs, 0 B, 4 C
--- 40-team fields, Pools abolished ---
2024 28 AQs, 12 at-large