June 9, 2011
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. - The NCAA Division II Championships committee has approved changes to the method by which teams will be selected to the Division II Men's Basketball tournament. The changes were approved at their recent summer meeting.
The Committee also approved changes in volleyball and football that will impact Great Northwest Athletic Conference teams. Those changes will become effective in 2012.
The volleyball season was extended one week by moving the date of selections a week later. Selections will now take place the Sunday before Thanksgiving with the regional tournament being held the week after Thanksgiving.
The impact of this change will be to allow GNAC teams two full weeks of non-conference competition in September prior to the start of the 10-week GNAC schedule. In the current format, teams have only one week to play non-conference contests before the GNAC season begins.
The Committee also approved a predetermined site for the volleyball national tournament. Currently, one of the eight regional winners is selected to host the tournament after the regional tournaments.
The Committee revised the regional lineup for football. Beginning in 2012, GNAC teams will compete in Super Regional Three along with teams from the Mid-American Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference and the Great American Conference.
Currently GNAC teams compete in Super Regional Four along with the MIAA and the Lone Star Conference. The purpose of the change is to make the number of teams competing within each of the four regions more equal with the advent of the new Great American Conference.
With the new lineup, Super Regional Three will have 44 teams competing for six playoff berths, while Super Regional Four will have 41 teams. Last year, Super Regional IV had only 28 schools with football teams eligible for the playoffs.
Both the primary and tiebreaker criteria's for men's basketball regional selections were modified.
The primary criteria in rank order will include Division II won-loss records, opponent winning percentage, opponent opponent winning percentage, head-to-head competition, results versus common opponents and results versus Division II ranked teams.
Eliminated from the criteria was in-region Division II won-loss results. Since so few out-of-region games are played, the in-region records is often just a repeat of the overall Division II record.
The in-region information will be factored into the Rating Percentage Index (RPI), which will be used for the first time and will be regarded as the No. 1 tiebreaker. A team's record in its last 10 games will also be used as a tiebreaker.
An additional primary criteria - Performance Indicator - will also now be used. The Performance Indicator will award points - from 0 to 23 - based on three factors: whether a team wins or losses the game, the site of the game (home, neutral or away) and the record of the opponent (below .250 winning percentage, .250 to .499 winning percentage, .500 to .749 winning percentage and above .750 winning percentage).
Another change in the system will involve a team's won-loss record against Division II ranked opponents. Previously only teams that were ranked the previous week were counted in that category. Now, once a team is ranked, they will be included in the category even if they fall out of the rankings in subsequent weeks.
An additional proposal to adjust the seedings in the regional tournament to prevent conference teams who had played three times previously (twice in the regular-season and once in their conference tournament) from playing each other for a fourth time in the opening round of the regional tournament was defeated.
