Some Clarity on the tournament

D3 released its proposal for next years tournament format which needed to be altered to accommodate moving the Championship game to Atlanta for the NCAA's 75th anniversary celebration.

Selection Day   Monday, Feb. 25
First Round       Saturday, March 2---on campus
Second Round  Saturday, March 9---on campus
Sweet 16           Saturday, March 16---on campus
Elite 8               Friday, March 22---Salem, Va.
Semi-finals       Saturday, March 23--Salem, Va.
Final                 Sunday, April 7---Phillips Arena, Atlanta, Ga.

This is pending approval by another committee of Presidents in August.  I would expect this gets approval, unless the Presidents pull out their calculators and decide it costs more to do it this way than some other way.  Here's the NCAA's article on how they arrived at the above:  Tournament Format

There wasn't any way to do this that was going to make everyone happy. There are about a million details still to be worked out, but at least we have something.

As for how I feel about this:  Cripes this is a long tournament.  Six weeks and if your team isn't involved beyond Salem or maybe even earlier its going to be tough to stay interested into April.  We aren't helped by the fact next year's calender pushes the D1 tournament back a weekend.  It ended on April 2 this past season.  We were actually looking at conducting the entire D3 tournament before the D1 tournament even started in 2013 and I'm not sure that had ever happened.

I welcome the increase in on campus games.  I've always advocated for this as its an incredible experience for the host school and its fans.  This format doubles the number of host schools in round one vs the 'pod' format which keeps that number at 14 plus the 4 hosts of the brackets with byes.

The biggest change will be the eight teams in Salem, which I suppose is a good thing.  However my personal fear is the reality of having to fly what will probably be 4 or more teams to Salem will cause the tournament committee to have to be less creative in their pairings.  Like for instance this past season Virginia Wesleyan was paired in a group that sent them to UW-Whitewater for the sweet 16.  That might not happen next year.

Overall its about as good as could be expected, like I said there was no way to do this that would make everyone happy and ultimately this is probably the least disruptive to the most student athletes.

Checking in on the neighbors: CCIW

My final neighbor check takes us to the CCIW, one of the top four conferences in D3 year in and year out.  Last season the experts on the d3hoops.com boards moaned all season about how the conference was down.  All season long in the piles of data I like to pour over I could see the top 3 or 4 teams in the league were as good as anybody so it really wasn't all that surprising to see them do well in the big tournament.  All they did was send 3 teams to the Sweet 16 and their 3rd place team ended up in the Final Four.   The CCIW doesn't have down years like everyone else.

There's little doubt at the moment the league isn't quite as mouth watering competitive as it had been for most of the last decade.  Right now there's a couple pretty heavy anchors weighing things down at the bottom and the days of anyone can beat anyone have been replaced by any of the top 4 can beat anyone.  Never the less in my time of following D3, every CCIW team save for North Park has won the league and every CCIW team has participated in the big dance, even Millikin (to be honest though Millikin and North Park have done pretty much nothing since the first couple years I began following this division).  I would be hard pressed to find another conference like that in the same time frame of just about 25 years.

Four of the past five seasons the CCIW has had a team in the NCAA Quarterfinals and 8 of 12 NCAA qualifiers have advanced to the Sweet 16, no small feats coming out of the Midwest Region.  Four different CCIW programs have won at least a share of the last four league Championships.  North Central has won the last two in almost identical fashion by running through the CCIW in impressive fashion after an injury filled non-conference schedule. One last little nugget to drive the point home, 6 of the 8 league schools have participated in the NCAA tournament the last 4 seasons.  This is a great league to follow.

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