“What about me?”

A song that has stuck with me through my youth until now is by Moving Pictures. The chorus goes,

… What about me? It isn’t fair I’ve had enough, now I want my share Can’t you see, I wanna live But you just take more than you give

I was thinking about the Northwest Conference (NWC) and how the NCAA Power Index (NPI) really doesn’t provide for them in any way and starting singing those lyrics. With NPI, we were told that bad wins, especially in conference, were no longer going to hurt a team. What was missed in that explanation was that this was true as long as you had better wins to replace those “bad” conference wins. With the NWC, they have a conference that is overall pretty poor according to NPI and really no method of replacing those conference wins.

Some background on the NWC is that they were the last conference to go to a conference tournament. They would play two weeks out-of-conference and then huddle in the northwest playing their matches. Those first two weeks were typically spent trying to attract teams to a local tournament and then one flight, typically, to Southern California. This was needed for regional rankings in the past. It’s just hard to be regionally ranked when you don’t play anyone in your region other than your conference mates. With the season elongated, the tournament was added to fill one of those extra weeks. Of course, this year, with the season starting so early there were actually three weeks prior to conference and that’s even with the conference tournament. The NWC has 9 teams and they play a home and away schedule for a total of 16 conference matches. The final point to make is that most of the NWC schools have a limited travel budget and they can’t play any other DIII program without flying.

Back to NPI and how it impacts the NWC teams with respect to an at-large. Forgive me Puget Sound (co-champions in 2022) but the NWC champion is typically Pacific Lutheran or Whitworth. These are also the two teams that tend to travel more than the others. If we look at the current NPIs for the NWC teams we get (no longer current since I procrastinated with this article):

If we assume that Whitworth is going to win their tournament and get the Automatic Qualifier, what would the second-place team (in this case PLU) have to do to get their NPI up to 60 and in the at-large window? If we assume three losses to Whitworth (one in the conference tournament) then the conference, at best, really only gives you one opponent that can push you over 60 for a match and that’s Puget Sound. George Fox will net you right at 60 so that’s fine but not a big help. Looking at the numbers, that means PLU will have 5 wins (including GFU for now) and 3 losses. Their NPI would be around 57.36. That’s not horrible and gives us room to work with.

PLU normally co-hosts the Puget Sound Tournament week one but it didn’t make this year. Instead, they drove over to Whitman for their tournament. They went 2-2 but let’s give them 4 wins here. One of the wins would have been considered a bad win but we’re keeping the other three for now: Clarkson, UC Santa Cruz and Redlands. Their NPI is now 58.81 with 8 wins.

PLU then used their flight and headed to Southwestern. Yay! They again went 2-2 but, again, we’re going to give them 4 wins here. (Yes, even a win against my Pirates. Who loves you, Lutes!?!) That puts PLU at 60.21 after 2 good wins and 2 bad wins. It also brings them to 10 good wins.

Fine, you say. They made it. Well, look at that fine margin for a team that only lost 3 matches on the year (all to Whitworth in our scenario). They were not allowed to stumble at any other time or they would drop below the line. There is still that 3^rd week of matches but, because of a restrictive travel budget, they stayed local and didn’t play any DIII teams.

If we look at Whitworth for a second, they are actually well within the at-large window. They did this by only dropping 2 matches (both against at-large window teams). They also took two flights maximizing their first 3 weeks. (I believe they were the only NWC team to take 2 flights.) Wins over both North Central and UW-Stevens Point are why they are sitting where they are. They recently played a 5-set match to George Fox where they won. If they had lost that match, their NPI would have dropped to 59.92 and below that 60 NPI margin.

How much sympathy do we have for the NWC? Is it up to the NCAA to find a solution that works for the compact regions with quality depth along with the sparse regions when their quality depth wanes? I think they (if the NCAA could talk as one) would say they provide the Automatic Qualifier for cases like this. Still, it isn’t fair. (“I’ve had enough, now I want my share.”)

I’ve actually had a few coaches from the NWC and conferences like it reach out about scheduling. Bottom line, you need to maximize your 3 out-of-conference weekends while also hoping the conference gets better as a whole. With respect to the NWC, with only one school having the budget for two flights, I’m thinking scheduling for an at-large is pointless for this conference at this time.

This brings me to a bonus topic that may become a future article. What do we do about NPI and ensuring that low Strength of Schedule teams do not get an at-large bid? One solution I’ve heard kicked around is raising the number of good wins from 10 to something closer to 50% of all matches played. That means something around 15 for most teams. It makes for a good topic, right? I think it would push the at-large bids towards the depth conferences. We sort of are already there but I think it would push these teams higher in the at-large window. I think it also would be more favorable to the regions with more teams in drivable distances. For the others, it would be about only losing 3 or 4 matches for the year to have a shot at an at-large. In the case of NWC it would probably be another nail in their at-large coffin. (“Can’t you see, I wanna live. But you just take more than you give.”)

Correction – I was reminded that both Puget Sound and Lewis & Clark took two flights this season in addition to Whitworth.