UMHB athletics photo by David Morris

One of the biggest complaints about the way the Division III football playoffs are run is that the bracket is set up to favor geographic proximity ahead of competitive balance, meaning that teams are matched up not always according to seed, but to minimize costs and teams flying in the first round of the playoffs.

As often as not, this has meant that the NCAA has mandated that teams from the same conference in the first round. This happened 10 times in the first 20 years of the five-round playoff era. It only stopped when in 2019, a two-year pilot program was approved to prevent first-round conference matchups across the board in NCAA Division III postseason championship tournaments. 

That two years expired during the COVID-19 pandemic. The committee avoided it in 2021, when no American Southwest Conference teams were selected as at-large teams in the playoffs. But now, this improvement to the NCAA playoffs is back, and without an expiration date. The NCAA Division III Presidents Council, in a meeting earlier in August, approved this change.

• All-time playoff results
• Conference-by-conference playoff performance
• More playoff basics

That's a welcome relief to the American Southwest Conference, Northwest Conference and Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the conferences most likely to be affected by a geographical rematch. Such rematches happened four times in the first 10 years of the five-round playoff system, but accelerated from 2012-2018, with six first-round rematches taking place in that seven-playoff span.

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 XLIX on Friday, Dec. 16, in Annapolis, Maryland. The five at-large teams are selected using the NCAA’s selection criteria, and do not include any national Top 25 polls.