Grove City is the last at-large team in the field, and is the 35th overall seed out of 40 teams. Berry athletics photo by Doug Nashtock

By Pat Coleman and Greg Thomas
D3sports.com

The process of creating a Division III bracket under NPI is easier, and yet also harder. 

This mock bracket process always required mock regional rankings, and mock selection of at-large teams, but now there's a computer formula (NPI, the NCAA Power Index) to do it all. It takes all the drama out of knowing who is going to make the playoffs.

People swear that this lack of drama is a feature. It's not a bug.

• The selection show streams online (we will have a link on D3football.com) at 5 p.m. ET Sunday.
• Final NPI numbers (D3Datacast)

So when we sit down to put these 40 teams in a bracket, we get to skip like five steps. We go straight to the 40 teams as they are here, ordered by their NPI and then listed with their overall seed. At-large teams are in bold.

There are 24 teams who get first-round byes. The top eight seeds go in as the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in each bracket, and it's been stated that they will get matched up in the quarterfinals as 1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, etc., regardless of geography. In addition, eight bottom seeds play in first-round games. 

So yes, geography is still an issue for most of this bracket, and we group our 40 teams into four groups of 10, or somewhat into eight groups of five, around the eight top seeds. In our bracket, we were able to give the top 24 seeds a first-round bye, but last year, the NCAA committee only did that for 22 of the top 24 seeds.

The track record for football brackets under this new system is short. This is our estimation based on the way things were done previously and interpreting how those things may be carried over into the new system.

Click to enlarge or tap to download if on mobile. 

Flights in this bracket: Chapman at Whitworth, Hope at Endicott. And then the Muhlenberg-Grove City winner to UW-River Falls, Whitworth-Chapman winner to Christopher Newport, Cortland-Susquehanna winner to North Central.

Some notes as you look at this. Only one of our brackets, the top-right bracket, conforms to the normal 1-10 seeding. This is not the bracket we want, but it seems to be the closest to the bracket we might get. If the budget-minders get their way too strongly, we might see the committee forced to move some of those top 24 seeds into the first round to play into second round games with our No. 1 and No. 2 seeds. That would be a gross miscarriage of seeding, but there are not enough 7-through-10 seeds within 500 miles of our No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the western half of the bracket.

It gets interesting out west, but the benefit of having so many of our top 8 seeds in the western half of the bracket is we also have multiple places for our four WIAC teams. 

We would prefer: Split Trinity and Hardin-Simmons to separate brackets, give them both a 3 seed and the second-round home game they deserve, and bring in DePauw and UW-La Crosse to play them. We would prefer not to have to match No. 29 overall seed Wheaton and No. 31 overall Coe in the first round -- they both deserve first-round home games. The 3 seed shouldn't play the 4 seed and the 5 seed shouldn't play the 6 seed. The 3 and 4 should both have home games and both have a chance to advance to the round of 16.

Remember to keep an eye out for the official bracket announcement show. We'll have it for you at 5 p.m. ET.