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About the 2008 Division III
men's basketball tournament
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Our projected Field of 59
As is traditional, we have attempted to project the field of 59 based on the same criteria the NCAA national committee will be using on Sunday night. They give us 38 gimmes in the automatic bids and we have to figure out the 4 Pool B and 17 Pool C bids. (Pool B and C explained)
Primary
criteria Secondary criteria |
It took a little longer than expected, but we got through our selection process.
The idea is to emulate the NCAA's process, and that means starting at the regional level with new regional rankings. These are important because they determine the pecking order in which teams come up for consideration as Pool C teams. Then, the top at-large candidate from each region gets compared side by side, eight at a time. So the board always consists of eight teams, one from each region.
Our Pool B selections were as follows: Maryville (Tenn.), Aurora, Scranton and Chapman.
Our Pool C picks:
Amherst
Mass-Dartmouth
Centre
Gettysburg
Brandeis
Washington U.
Rochester
Bowdoin
Virginia Wesleyan
Occidental
UW-Stevens Point
Capital
Wooster
Worcester Polytech
Buena Vista
Middlebury
Cal Lutheran
So we've got our 59 — how they shake down:
| BRACKET 1 1 Amherst 2 Mass-Dartmouth 3 Brandeis 4 Bowdoin 5 Rhode Island College 6 Salem State 7 Curry (bye) |
BRACKET 2 1 Plattsburgh State 2 Trinity (Conn.) 3 Middlebury 4 Coast Guard 5 Elms 6 Lasell 7 Immaculata 8 John Jay |
| BRACKET 3 1 Rochester 2 Richard Stockton 3 Nazareth 4 Farmingdale State 5 Scranton 6 Penn State-Behrend 7 Baptist Bible (bye) |
BRACKET 4 1 Ursinus 2 Virginia Wesleyan 3 Gettysburg 4 Widener 5 Worcester Polytech 6 St. Mary's (Md.) 7 King's 8 Clarkson |
| BRACKET 5 1 Mary Hardin-Baylor 2 Centre 3 Ohio Wesleyan 4 Millsaps 5 Maryville (Tenn.) 6 Whitworth 7 Averett (bye) |
BRACKET 6 1 Guilford 2 Hope 3 Heidelberg 4 Capital 5 Wooster 6 Franklin 7 Bethany (bye) |
| BRACKET 7 1 Augustana 2 Lawrence 3 Washington U. 4 UW-Stevens Point 5 Chicago 6 Aurora 7 Loras 8 Fontbonne |
BRACKET 8 1 UW-Whitewater 2 Occidental 3 Cal Lutheran 4 St. Thomas 5 Buena Vista 6 Pomona-Pitzer 7 Chapman (bye) |
What, three SCIAC teams? Four California teams? Whitworth on a plane to somewhere other than California or Wisconsin.
Frankly, we'd have liked to have taken Whitworth further. As long as we had to fly them, we pondered landing them in the middle of the Middle Atlantic, or East.
It seems like the tournament is a lot more top-heavy this year.
Remember in a "normal" bracket, 1, 4, 5 and 8 would play at the top seed, with 2, 3, 6 and 7 at the No. 2 seed.
Notes: Bracket 1 has Salem State at Rhode Island College with the winner to Amherst. Plattsburgh didn't get a bye but got a sub-.500 opponent. Bracket 5 has the usual South Region first-round bye construction, with Maryville going to Millsaps, then the winner to Mary Hardin-Baylor. Yes, in Bracket 6, Wooster goes to Capital, with the winner going to Guilford. In Bracket 7 we attempted to balance things out by bringing Heidelberg to Augustana, but putting UW-Stevens Point at Hope in the second round wasn't all that much different than putting the Pointers at Augustana. And then, in Bracket 8, the four California schools are together.
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