One week ago, our No. 8 Tigers were taking on No. 4 Hope College (rankings from D3hoops.com) on their home court. The Flying Dutch held a 76-home-game winning streak coming into that game and beat the Tigers 65-77.
At the same time, Div. III defending national champion Washington University in St. Louis took on Denison University, ranked No. 12 and No. 10 respectively.
The next day, Hope played Wash U. Wash U beat Hope 52-56, and today they will face No. 1 Thomas More College.
On the other side of the bracket, No. 6 Chicago University will take on No. 15 Greensboro College.
That's a lot of high-ranked teams meeting in one bracket.
The first round loss for the Tigers reminds us we are in Div. III where the NCAA chooses brackets and matchups by region, not by national ranking like the familiar March Madness scenario.
In Div. I men's basketball, the NCAA selects brackets by looking at teams' national rankings and spreads the highest ranked teams out in separate brackets in hopes that those teams (which are supposed to be the best teams) meet in the late rounds.
In this way, lower-ranked teams and unranked teams match up with the higher-ranked teams in the early rounds to give advantage to higher ranked teams and good chances for them to advance. The goal for the NCAA is to translate regular season success to fairness in the tournament.
The goals in Div. III are completely different. Only a fraction of fans follow Div. III sports compared to Div. I. So the potential for gaining revenue and paying for all those teams to travel just isn't there. Instead, the selection process incorporates a maximum travel distance of 500 miles to get to their games in the early rounds. This caused DePauw's bracket to have four of the top ten teams and 10 of the top 25 including No. 1 Thomas More.
The only reason that Div. III is not organized like March Madness is that the NCAA just hopes to come close to breaking even in terms of paying for teams to be transported to the games, lodge them and pay other travel expenses. The selection committee chooses places like Hope's court in Holland, Mich. because of their 3,400 seat field house and central location along with their dedicated fan base's ability to fill the seats.
Let's be honest here, the NCAA makes a lot of money with their Div. I sports. I am sure they can afford to spread out their top ranked Div. III teams similarly to March Madness.
The NCAA needs to do their selection differently. If there are so many strong teams in the Midwest like this year, it's not fair that good teams, like DePauw get extremely tough draws, like Hope, in the first round.
The lack of money and fans in Div. III compared to Div. I is not a good enough reason to treat the two differently. There is a lot of good competition in Div. III where athletes put a lot of effort into their sports without any sort of athletic scholarship. The NCAA needs to recognize that to have their best teams in the best moments: the elite 8 or final 4, they need to organize brackets according to rankings, not location.
If the Div. III brackets were organized like Div. I, our No. 8 Tigers would have possibly been a No. 2 seed and faced a low-ranked or unranked team in the first round.
With the way our team played all season, I'm willing to bet we could have been playing today.
— Appelgate is a sophomore from Kent, Wash., majoring in communications.
sports@thedepauw.com