If we had had a 40-team playoff this past season, not only does 9-1 Berry get it, it likely would host a first-round game. Berry athletics photo

By Patrick Coleman
D3sports.com

Expansion of the Division III football playoffs is sounding more and more like an eventuality, rather than a dream.

After nearly two decades of being locked in place with 32 teams and no hopes of expansion, there began to be hope for an extra handful of teams to be added to the Division III football playoffs around a year ago. Fans of the D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast who downloaded and listened to Podcast 327 heard former NCAA Division III football committee chair Brad Bankston, the commissioner of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, say that a sixth week was possible.

Having 40 teams in the playoffs -- a full eight additional teams -- was possible. And it could happen as soon as this upcoming season, NCAA Division III leadership told a meeting of conference commissioners this week.

But what would that bracket look like?

Eight additional at-large teams don't get added at the very bottom of the bracket -- not at the 9 and 10 seeds in this new format. Often these new teams will be more like the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-best teams in their bracket.

Using the existing final regional rankings, we went through and selected eight more at-large teams, and what we ended up with, in order, was:

UW-Whitewater
Union
Wheaton
Coe
Muhlenberg
St. John's
Linfield
Hope
Berry
Carnegie Mellon
Salve Regina
John Carroll

Carnegie Mellon wasn't even in the final Region 2 rankings, but the regional committee always has a pecking order for more teams even if all the at-large candidates from a region are selected.

Placing these teams into the existing bracket looks something like this. Remember, this is adding eight more teams as of this past Selection Sunday, and no, we can't fix the things the committee got wrong -- we are only adding to the existing bracket.

Linfield gets in the bracket and is now the obvious first-round opponent for Chapman, and Linfield was ranked ahead of Chapman in the final regional rankings.

Minnesota-Morris goes from playing UW-La Crosse in the first round to instead playing St. John's. That isn't significantly better for the Cougars, but Belhaven has a much better chance when it is bracketed at Berry in an 8-vs.-9 game. Elsewhere, we see Mount St. Joseph and Grove City hosting games they would not have gotten to otherwise.

Ideally, we would pair up Western Connecticut at Muhlenberg and Christopher Newport at Salve Regina, but CNU-Salve is more than 500 miles. If we get additional flights in the football playoff bracket -- which is a possibility -- this is probably not where we would choose to use one.

John Carroll vs. Carnegie Mellon is the toughest 8-9 game decision, and because John Carroll is in the same conference as Mount Union -- at least for now -- we have the winner of that game playing at Susquehanna instead. Perhaps the committee would choose to fix that instead by playing the winner of the Western Connecticut-Muhlenberg game at Mount Union instead, but either way, someone is in for a tough second-round matchup.

Heck, if Grove City got past Alfred State and went to Mount Union, perhaps they are the ones to knock off the Purple Raiders.

OK, but wait -- there's another possibility. When we get to 40 teams, we might well see the New England Small College Athletic Conference choose to finally let its football teams do what every other NESCAC champion can do: play in the NCAA Tournament.

So let's put Middlebury in this field instead. We're going to rank Middlebury, which is 8-1 with a .500 SOS and no games against regionally ranked opponents, fifth in Region 1.

Now Salve is in as the 29th automatic bid, and John Carroll is out. Middlebury slots in quite nicely as the ninth team of 10 in our Johns Hopkins bracket, and it looks like this.

Although there has been some debate on this, it sounds quite clear that expanding the Division III football bracket does not have to go to a vote of the entire Division III membership. This is good, because the membership is unkind to the needs of football -- since only slightly more than half of Division III even sponsors football, proposals that benefit football tend to get shot down.

If that happens, then the six-round playoff bracket would go into effect this year. The national semifinals would be played the week that traditionally has hosted the Stagg Bowl, four Saturdays after Thanksgiving. And the championship game would be played after the holidays, in early January. The upcoming hosts of the Stagg Bowl were alerted more than a year ago to please hold the January date in their venues.

This would be the first expansion of the football playoffs since 2005, and the first time a new round was added since 1999.

Here's hoping we get it, because otherwise, we would have another season with just four at-large teams.