What a week of conference championships! I apologize to everyone for the lack of posts on my end here. I dove head first into helping prep my team for our post season so that meant landscape articles had to take a step back for a bit.
This week was all about conference championships, and many of them were electric. The NPI numbers have been published daily this week, and given the numbers released this evening, we can conclusively tell which teams have made the tournament and what the field will look like in the pre-selection show.
The following are the automatic qualifiers we’ll see in the NCAA tournament as Conference Champions.
AMCC: Buffalo State
CCIW: Carthage
CUNYAC: NJCU
CVC: Juniata
GNAC: Wentworth
MAC: Stevens
MCVL: Wittenberg
NACC: Dominican
NEVC: Endicott
ODAC: Randolph-Macon
PAC: Thiel
Skyline: St. Joseph’s – Long Island
United East: Lancaster Bible
UVC: MIT
Of the remaining schools, the following 7 teams will receive At-Large selections given their NPI scores.
- Springfield
- Cal Lutheran
- Southern Virginia
- Messiah
- New Paltz
- NYU
- Loras
The next mysteries everyone is wondering are a) who is hosting and b) what will the regional Pods look like.
In my view, I’m projecting these schools will be selected as hosts for the regional tournaments.
- Springfield
- Juniata
- Carthage
- Stevens
The regional pods are going to be very tricky to project given how the NCAA values travel constraints and NPI seeding. Honestly, the only people who could accurately predict the pods at this moment are the people on the NCAA committee in charge of the bracket. My predicted pods (based on nothing but my limited understanding of the process) are below.
Springfield Pod
- Springfield
- NYU
- MIT
- Endicott
- Buffalo State
- St. Joseph – Long Island
Juniata Pod
- Juniata
- Messiah
- Randolph-Macon
- Thiel
- NJCU
Carthage Pod
- Carthage
- Cal Lutheran
- Loras
- Dominican
- Wittenberg
Stevens Pod
- Stevens
- Southern Virginia
- New Paltz
- Wentworth
- Lancaster Bible
Above is honestly just a guess and very likely not the final pods but looking forward to the reveal tomorrow on the NCAA selection show.
Given the field of teams this year, this is very likely going to be the hardest National Championship to win in the history of the DIII tournament. In my time covering DIII men’s volleyball I’ve yet to see a tournament as deep as this one, and several of these teams are capable of getting hot and making a shocking final four run this year. Get your scouts ready everyone.