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The Other Divisions

I've got to quit grabbing those tar babies. I got the bright idea a while back to try to do after-the-fact ratings for Division II, Division III, and the NAIA, which would cover 99+% of the four-year college baseball teams in the country (it leaves some of the NCCAA and the four-year portion of the USCAA, that I know of). I caught something of a break on the data gathering, since Jeremy Mills over at ncaa-baseball.com had already taken a shot at it, but it still turned into an absolutely immense chore just to try to gather the scores. The fact that I waited too late and quite a few schools had already pulled 2004 results from their Web site (none too subtle note to SID's and Webmasters: Don't do that; it's stupid) didn't help any, but it was going to be a bear anyway. The results I was able to come up with are incomplete, and I'm going to have to pass on the NAIA for now, but what I have for Division II and Division III is close enough to complete that most of the ratings are unlikely to change significantly, so I'm releasing the results and trying to do some thinking about what they mean, both in and of themselves and in the contrast to Division I.

Here are the top 25 for Division II, excerpted from the full list:

           Division II  Overall
Rank Rating   W   L      W   L    SoS  Team      

  1   123.6   47  10     54  11    23  Delta State
  2   122.0   55   8     57   8    54  Central Missouri State
  3   121.2   36  10     48  12    25  Rollins
  4   121.0   32  11     37  15    15  UC Davis
  5   119.4   35  14     41  18    17  North Florida
  6   119.2   40  15     41  16    20  Tampa
  7   118.9   26  12     36  17     5  Alabama-Huntsville
  8   117.7   37  18     42  21    11  Cal State Chico
  9   117.3   37  20     40  21     3  Columbus State
 10   115.9   34  14     45  15    32  Southern Arkansas
 11   114.8   39  24     39  28    14  Sonoma State
 12   114.1   29  21     32  22     2  Georgia College and State University
 13   114.0   37  17     38  18    38  Augusta State
 14   113.8   34  21     35  22    19  Florida Southern
 15   113.5   42  14     46  16    93  Grand Valley State
 16   113.4   39  14     41  14    82  Pfeiffer
 17   112.7   43  12     43  12   128  Shippensburg
 18   112.5   26  20     35  24     9  UC San Diego
 19   112.2   28  21     30  26    18  Cal State San Bernardino
 20   112.0   29  25     33  26     1  Valdosta State
 21   111.8   37  15     37  15    88  Mount Olive
 22   111.8   29  21     29  21    21  West Florida
 23   111.7   40  10     44  10   152  Colorado State-Pueblo
 24   111.6   39  17     42  17    79  Catawba
 25   110.8   47  15     47  15   137  Ashland

Delta State won the national championship and may have actually been the best D2 team in the country last year, so there's some nice confirmation there. They were at #4 at the end of the regular season, which is a progression that wouldn't be particularly unusual in Division I through the postseason. My original thinking was that the even smaller amount of interregional play in D2 might have made the postseason more significant, but it appears that that's not the case -- the percentage change from D1 is small, and most of the interregional comparisons are still based on folks playing their neighbors from the next region over and carrying that web across the nation.

Conference ratings are much harder to do for the lower divisions because so much of the non-conference schedule is played outside the division, so my traditional conference ISR's are pretty obviously wrong. The odds are pretty good that the two best conferences are the Gulf South Conference and the California Collegiate Athletic Association, in no particular order.

A look at the postseason field shows some interesting notions about what some of the calls for changes to D1 might bring. The field consists of eight four-team regionals, and they're true regionals -- conferences are assigned to a region, and members can only be invited to that region. The result is that the Western regional consisted of four top 30 teams (Cal State Chico, Sonoma State, Colorado State-Pueblo, and #29 Mesa State), a situation that's frankly not that foreign to Stanford fans. Further aggravating the problem is that UC Davis, who was at #1 at the end of the regular season, was ineligible because of their pending move to D1; including them would increase the imbalance even greater. Likewise, the South regional ended up with both #3 Rollins and #6 Tampa. In contrast, the North regional was headed up by #58 Bryant. On the other hand, six of the eight regionals did manage to include a top 8 team, so it's hard to write the whole thing off as hopeless.

Other than UC Davis, the best team left out of the field was #7 Alabama-Huntsville, who was a casualty of the regionalization policy. They finished third in the GSC behind Delta State and Southern Arkansas, and it's hard for a conference to get three of the four spots in a regional, especially when paired with another strong conference as they are. This, I think, is the biggest risk of regionalization; it's essentially a mandate to leave Arkansas out to benefit Indiana.

Here are the top 25 for Division III, excerpted from the full list:

          Division III Overall
Rank Rating   W   L      W   L    SoS  Team      

  1   134.4   34   7     40  10     4  George Fox
  2   131.0   23   7     32  11     5  Linfield
  3   126.1   24  11     29  13    10  Cal State Hayward
  4   126.0   39   8     41   8    23  Rowan
  5   123.1   27  13     29  13    12  Chapman
  6   122.2   17  13     20  18     2  Puget Sound
  7   122.1   41  11     43  11    33  Eastern Connecticut State
  8   121.3   40   4     40   4   142  Johns Hopkins
  9   121.0   35   4     43   7   133  Emory
 10   120.9   24   6     33  11    44  Marietta
 11   120.8   25  10     29  13    21  La Verne
 12   120.5   19  13     23  16    11  Pacific Lutheran
 13   119.7   32   6     38   8   100  St. Thomas, MN
 14   119.6   34   9     37  10    55  Trinity, TX
 15   119.3   39   9     39   9    75  Wisconsin-Whitewater
 16   118.8   35   9     37  10    72  Wooster
 17   118.5   30   7     31   7    90  Denison
 18   118.0   37  13     37  13    40  Salisbury
 19   117.9   23  10     26  11    32  Ferrum
 20   117.5   28   6     33   8   124  Texas-Dallas
 21   117.2   27   8     33   9    76  Millsaps
 22   116.0   27  13     32  14    36  Heidelberg
 23   116.0   31  12     31  12    57  Virginia Wesleyan
 24   115.8   24  13     26  14    30  William Paterson
 25   115.7   32   9     34   9   116  Ithaca

Bear in mind that there are over 350 teams in Division III, making it the largest grouping the country. It's also the most widespread; national champion George Fox's 134.4 rating would be a record for Division I. The most interesting thing to me about Division III is that the nation's strongest conference is the Northwest Conference, located in Oregon and Washington. The schedule starts in January and runs more or less the same as D1, ending a bit sooner, so it's not really a calendar matter. It may just be a matter of more even resources available to the teams; I can't explain it, but it might bear investigation.

Next time, I'll try to look at how these teams fit into the context of Division I and the overall picture, which should help both in understanding the teams and in evaluating their players according to the level of difficulty they're facing.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> The Other Divisions

About the author, Boyd Nation