UW-Oshkosh beat all of the non-Whitewater D-III teams it played. Is that enough to get in? Photo by Steve Frommell, d3photography.com

By Pat Coleman
D3sports.com

We went on the air Saturday night with the most structured bracketology we've ever done: a mock committee, full mock regional rankings and the voting process the committee uses. And if you listened, you got to hear a lot about how the process works: or, how the sausage is made. 

• Selection show: 6 p.m. ET
• Full Week 11 scoreboard
• Mount, UWW survive
• Bracket projection show
• Even more game stories

It's a complicated process. It's a messy process, and it's not perfect. But if three heads are better than one, then having Frank Rossi and guest bracketologist Greg Thomas weigh in make this a more realistic process of bracketing.

First, we created mock final regional rankings. The committee needs to have these in order to get its work done and so do we. I won't run through all the numbers, but here was our result.

Step 1: New regional rankings

East: Widener, Hobart, Delaware Valley, Framingham State, St. John Fisher, MIT, St. Lawrence, Rowan, Ithaca, Husson.
North: Mount Union, Wheaton, John Carroll, Wittenberg, Wabash, North Central, Franklin, Heidelberg, Chicago, Adrian.
South: Wesley, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Johns Hopkins, Texas Lutheran, Washington and Jefferson, Centre, Muhlenberg, Thomas More, Rhodes, Louisiana College.
West: UW-Whitewater, Wartburg, Linfield, St. John's, Chapman, UW-Oshkosh, Bethel, St. Thomas, Redlands, UW-Platteville. 

I could spend pages just talking about these. Here's some of the highlights. The East committee likes to rank its lower automatic bids and Husson probably wouldn't otherwise be here because of its .421 strength of schedule. The North didn't change much but John Carroll shouldn't drop far from Mount Union after losing by seven yards and or a couple of seconds. South and West were a mess after all the carnage on Saturday. That's where the biggest changes could take place, and they would cascade through to the at-large picks if they are significantly different than how we envision them.

Step 2: Pool B teams

We started by selecting two Pool B teams, the ones that don't have automatic bids to play for. Wesley is an easy pick here and there was some discussion before we landed on Texas Lutheran as the second pick. It helps that TLU has a win against a regionally ranked opponent, although since Hardin-Simmons lost on Saturday, that opponent was Louisiana College instead of HSU. Also on the board at this point were the University of Chicago from the North Region and Framingham State from the East.

Everyone from then on is eligible for at-large (Pool C) bids, including members of the 24 automatic bid conferences. 

Step 3: At-large teams (Pool C)

John Carroll is our first Pool C team off the board. This is heavy on anecdotal evidence, but let's be honest, JCU is going to get in. They have the best loss of any of the teams on the board and a win vs. a regionally ranked opponent, even if that is vs. North's No. 8. Our panel votes for Centre next, eliminating drama the same way we hope the national committee does after creating it unnecessarily this week.

It gets a little more difficult after this. Our committee lands on Wabash next. We spend a lot of time here talking about UW-Oshkosh and if we only had to deal with primary criteria, then we might put them in. But at this point in the discussion, the secondary playoff selection criteria have to be considered as well. In fact, out committee actually had a tie in the voting at this point, really showing how much the primary committee did not result in a decision, a phrase the handbook uses to describe when secndary criteria are relevant. UW-Oshkosh was 0-3 in non-Division III games, and the handbook specifically cites "Non-Division III won-lost percentage" as one of the secondary criteria.

We're left with three teams. Delaware Valley presents a resume very similar to Wabash and we put them in. They don't have a win vs. a regionally ranked opponent anymore now that Montclair State is unranked. In reality, Lycoming should be the No. 10 team in the East -- the East committee ranking Husson unfairly penalizes Delaware Valley, in my opinion.

Coming down to the final two spots. Framingham State gets on the board and then won the vote in a split decision. They have a .532 strength of schedule, which is pretty high for a one-loss team at this stage of the game.

Left on the board at this point: Muhlenberg, UW-Oshkosh, North Central, with St. John Fisher joining them. And again showing how close the calls are at the end of the at-large bid discussion, North Central won out by just a couple of points.

Now, this is interesting. If this is how it comes down at the end of the night, the committee will have to decide whether it can ignore the common opponent, that UW-Stevens Point beat North Central but lost to UW-Oshkosh. They could solve this by instead picking St. John Fisher (which is how I voted). But it is a very close decision either way.

Bottom line: They aren't going to leave a 10-0 team home. And they aren't going to put a 6-4 team in as an at-large team.

Step 4: Bracketing

On to the bracketing. 

• The results: D3football's projected bracket

I went through this process pretty quickly on the show because it is pretty late at night but I also have a way that I think makes sense for bracketing. We picked four top seeds and then four teams to go underneath them, when possible. We also need to take care of the teams that live out on Division III's islands, because they often require airplane flights, which cost the NCAA money and which the NCAA doesn't want to pay for.

So we ended up with two of those groups in the same bracket: Mary Hardin-Baylor hosts Texas Lutheran, which is a bus drive. Chapman flies to Linfield. Husson, which is pretty far up in Maine, can drive to Framingham State. We lump all of those teams in one bracket to consolidate them. The NCAA could and should consider this as a way to save some money. 

One place we could flop a couple of teams to balance out the competitiveness of each bracket a little better is by moving Franklin into the UW-Whitewater bracket and bringing Macalester into the Mount Union bracket to play Wheaton. Franklin is very mobile, since it is within 500 miles of a lot of schools.

We'll see what the NCAA chooses to do.