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| Ithaca could have benefited from an expansion to 32 teams this past season. Photo by Pat Coleman, D3sports.com |
By Pat Coleman
Publisher, D3football.com
This piece originally appeared in the 2004 Stagg Bowl program and was written in October.
There’s been plenty of talk over the last few years that the current Division III football playoff selection process is unfair, that it favors champions of weaker conferences at the expense of runners-up in stronger leagues, and that expanding the field from its current 28 teams is long overdue.
Perhaps in some Division III sports it’s possible that a national championship contender could have been left out of the playoff field because of the selection process. However, in football, nobody need fear for the integrity of the playoffs -- not with Mount Union running off streaks of 100-plus consecutive regular-season wins and three championships in a row in the time since the playoffs were expanded from 16 teams in 1999.
The conventional wisdom is that letting these teams into the playoffs can only improve the programs and the conferences. A school that had little hope of making the postseason now can sell a prospective student-athlete on playing for the automatic bid.
"It’s heightened the experience of attending a Division III school," says Mike Maynard, the head coach at University of Redlands, in Southern California. "From a recruiting standpoint it’s been a benefit because kids want to have that postseason possibility, because in Division III there aren’t any bowl games."
Redlands got the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference’s first automatic bid in 2003, making its second appearance in the expanded playoffs. The previous year the Bulldogs had qualified as a Pool B team, meaning they got one of the handful of bids set aside for independents and conferences that didn’t have an automatic bid. Runners-up for automatic bids compete for an even smaller handful of bids referred to as Pool C bids.
When Redlands got that bid in 2002, it marked the first time a SCIAC team had gone to the playoffs since La Verne lost a first-round game to St. John’s in 1994 by the score of 51-12. Redlands lost 31-24 in the first round to St. John’s in 2002 and 31-23 at Linfield in the 2003 playoff opener. St. John’s and Linfield met in the national quarterfinals each of those seasons.
"I think just the opportunity to compete against the likes of St. John’s and Linfield gives us a better measuring stick, so we know what we need to do to compete," Maynard said. "I think it’s widened the perspective not only of our players but also the university administrators, to see what it takes to compete at this level."
Before 1999, many deserving teams were left out of the playoffs. Only four teams per region were awarded bids and if your region had more than four unbeaten teams, someone had to stay home. If you lost one game, even to a scholarship school, you could be sitting home.
"That’s a hard thing when guys work as hard as they do and you’re maybe one of the better teams and you get left out," says Jimmie Keeling, head coach at Hardin-Simmons. He knows first-hand about being left out of the playoffs after his team went 9-1 in 1998 but stayed home because there were five unbeaten teams for four slots. "I wish we’d had an automatic berth then because we won our conference, but lost to Midwestern State, which is a D-II school, and we played them close.
"That was one of our best years."
Hardin-Simmons went on to reach the national quarterfinals in 1999 and the semifinals in 2000, as one of the last eight teams standing in Division III, then one of the final four.
"We often talked about it to recruits," said Maynard, "that it’s a great reward but that you usually had to be undefeated to get that opportunity.
"Kids want to be rewarded with that postseason game and now that we have the automatic berth, it allows us to play the best schedule we want. It doesn’t count against us if we have a loss or two."
St. Norbert head coach Jim Purtill agrees. "When you can talk to a kid about having a chance at a conference title, and going to the playoffs, and playing the best teams in the country, that’s great for recruiting.
"The good kids want to be challenged, and that’s a carrot out there for them."
Schools like St. Norbert have taken full advantage of the new system and have improved their programs in the process. The Green Knights went to the playoffs four times in the first five years since the expansion and last year won a first-round game for the first time.
The championship access is key for St. Norbert. As more schools in the West Region (roughly from Wisconsin to California) joined Division III, it became impossible to get into the playoffs. "In the old 16-team bracket St. Norbert never would have gotten in," Purtill admits. "In a 16-team tournament there are too few slots and too many national powers."
St. Norbert could be positioning itself as a success story from a conference (the Midwest Conference) that doesn’t traditionally produce national title contenders. Although the Green Knights lost to Augustana, Central and St. John’s in their opening game their first three trips to the postseason, they only lost by an average of nine points. And in the process, Purtill says, his team learned what it was like to compete with traditional powers.
"I think the expectation that we belong in the playoffs, as opposed to it being a novel thing, the part of just competing in a high-pressure game, is huge. We can’t just show up and win just because we’re St. Norbert. Kids have to learn how to handle pressure: the pressure of the playoffs, seniors playing their last game, a do-or-die game. We have benefited from those experiences.
"We lost to teams we were supposed to lose to -- they were special football teams -- but we were competitive enough to make them work for it. And our kids know we can hang in there, and with a couple plays here or there we can sneak a win out."
That’s exactly what the Green Knights did in 2003. After getting edged out of the 2002 postseason by conference rival Lake Forest, St. Norbert drew Simpson in the first round last year and won a two-overtime thriller 26-20.
"The first couple of years, and rightfully so, we were never matched up against a first-time playoff team," Purtill notes. "Simpson was more like we were in 1999, a little wide-eyed. It was one of the more exciting games I’ve been around."
With every playoff win comes a little more respect for the program, more respect for the conference. Maynard understands how it works from Redlands" perspective. "The only way to really get any respect on the part of the SCIAC is to get into the playoffs and win. Nobody in the SCIAC has. You can’t talk your way into respect."
"The nice thing, at least in our situation, is we’ve won the league, five years in a row," says Purtill. "Four of the last five we’ve had a chance to go to the playoffs and we’ve had a chance to play five games, and in four of them we’ve been highly competitive."
The fifth was a 38-13 loss at St. John’s last year in the second round. But St. John’s beat RPI and even Mount Union pretty handily last season as well.
Mount Union, St. John’s, Linfield and the other national powers still dominate Division III, as the top two conferences in each of the four regions have 86 of the 135 wins in the five-year history of the expanded playoffs. There are seven conferences that currently have automatic bids which have won one game or less in the postseason since expansion. And that’s why some people feel the playoffs have swung too far towards allowing everyone a chance to get into the postseason and away from getting the strongest teams into the postseason in the first place.
So if 1999-2004 was about championship access for conferences, then the expansion next season will be about letting more runners-up into the field. Usually there are six or seven strong candidates for at-large bids, each of whom has lost only one game to a Division III opponent. But in recent years only three bids have been available. When the playoffs expand to 32 in the fall of 2005, that will open up four more bids and eliminate the first-round bye for the top team in each bracket.
This will help conferences get two teams in, rather than just the champion. The change is welcomed by coaches in those conferences.
"We know everyone thinks they’re good," Keeling says, "but at the same time we think our conference is good and we have really good teams. We hope that we would be one of those conferences that would get an extra team in."
Hardin-Simmons’ conference, the American Southwest Conference, was one of the leagues with a team left on the proverbial bubble last season, as tri-champion Mary Hardin-Baylor went 9-1 but did not hear its name called on Selection Sunday. East Texas Baptist won the ASC’s automatic bid via the conference’s tiebreaker system and won a first-round game, while Hardin-Simmons, with two overall losses, was the third tri-champion but was out of the running.
"There’s no perfect way to do it (the playoff bracket) and never will be," Keeling says. "We’ve made tremendous progress in adding more teams over the years and we’re going to continue to do it."
The four extra teams won’t help everyone -- conferences like the Midwest Conference and the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference would be unlikely to get a second team in and neither conference is likely to send teams to Salem anytime soon.
"We’re an average league, admittedly," Purtill says of the MWC. "It’s better than when I got here, but if we went head to head against the WIAC we wouldn’t be very successful.
"But 32 teams is a fair number, a great number for those of us who remember 16."
The safety net of an automatic bid has led some teams to schedule tougher non-conference games, to get that test earlier in the year.
"Now we can play a higher schedule, having the automatic berth lets us do that," Maynard says. "Whereas before if you lost to Willamette or lost to Linfield in a non-conference game that was the kiss of death."
Keeling has just one non-conference game to schedule, with 10 football-playing teams in the ASC. "We’ve tried to play outside of our area with our one game we have. It’s important for us to know as well if we can compete with those teams. We only have that one non-conference game, but I think it’s important to play quality teams.
"From my standpoint, having the automatic berth is a very positive thing, without a doubt, but I personally like to schedule a really good opponent that first game, because it lets you point out what you need to work on. We played Wisconsin-Whitewater and Wisconsin-Stout, we’ve played some California teams. I think it helps point out what you need to improve on. But it’s good to know that you can still do your automatic bid (if you lose that game)."
But if you win your non-conference games and don’t get the automatic bid, there’s been very little safety net. Just ask Hampden-Sydney, which lost to just one Division III opponent in 2002 and 2003, losing to in-state Bridgewater (Va.) in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference each of those years and in 2004.
"It’s hard on the kids," says H-SC coach Marty Favret. "I think we were a little more naive last year. There was more optimism last year than this year. I polled our kids after practice (in late October) and one-third of them thought we wouldn’t get in at 9-1."
The 32-team tournament can’t come fast enough for the Tigers.
"Looking at our situation, we might be looking at our third straight trip to the playoffs this season if we had 32 teams. When you’re in a conference with a team that is as dominant as Bridgewater is, that has been to the national quarterfinals, the semifinals, the title game in recent years, it’s tough to climb that mountain."
Regardless of the shortcomings of the 28-team tournament, you won’t find too many people who were following Division III in 1998 advocating a return to a 16-team playoff bracket. The playoffs are just too darn fun, that’s all there is to it. While the Division III membership has not committed funding to expanding the tournament in football over the six seasons the 28-team bracket has been in place, it has concentrated on improving some of the extras associated with the playoffs, including increasing the roster from 48 to 52 players per team.
"It is just a tremendous experience," Maynard says. "I think it’s a great reward for having done something well."
"The programs are for the kids," Purtill says, "they’re not for the coaches, not for the fans. The first priority are for those kids and I think it’s great we can have more of those kids across the country experience the national playoff, that chance to reach out and get more teams and communities excited. It’s really a neat thing for sportsmanship and team camaraderie."