North Central and the NCAA Regional Rankings: Week 1 Edition

With February upon us, we're getting down to the nitty gritty part of the regular season. In the CCIW, just four more nights of play remain on the docket, beginning tonight. And the stakes are raised, because today the first set of NCAA regional rankings were released.

This is a feature I've done for a few years now, basically since the legendary 2014-15 season for the women. But it wasn't until last year that I really took a deep dive into what the regional rankings mean and how they work. For sake of everything in one place though, I'll go into it here before looking at where North Central ranks in this first set.

Every season, the NCAA releases four sets of regional rankings, beginning the first Wednesday in February. Ultimately, the last two are the only ones that matter, but the first few sets are still important. The NCAA has a national selection committee with representation from eight different regions. Those regions each have their own advisory committee with one representative from each conference. Those advisory committees put together these rankings based on a number of factors: winning percentage against D-III opponents, strength of schedule (a combination of opponents' win percentage and opponents' opponents' win percentage), head to head results, common opponent results, and in future rankings, results against regionally ranked opponents.

The relevance comes on selection day. Every conference gets an automatic bid, most of which are decided via conference tournament. Once those bids, plus any "Pool B" bids allocated to teams playing in conferences without an auto bid, everyone enters "Pool C," which are basically the at large bids of the D-I tournament we all know and love. The way these bids are determined is based on regional rankings: take all teams already in the tournament out of the rankings, and take the highest team from each region to give a seat at "the table." The national committee picks the best team out of those eight to put in the tournament, and the next team up from that region gets a seat. The process repeats until all bids have been allocated.

So with that explained, here's where North Central sits in the first set of rankings. I'm also including current CCIW standings.

Women's Basketball

6-15 Overall, 4-8 CCIW (T-5th)
Central Region: Unranked (out of 9 teams)

Like in prior years, a team with double digit losses isn't going to be regionally ranked, period. North Central's strength of schedule is decent at .527 (155th in the country), but without the results to back that up they're not in the picture. What hurts is that the CCIW itself is kind of a cluster. It's extremely top heavy, with much of the rest of the conference being pretty mediocre. There's still a pretty wide open race for the final two or three spots in the conference tournament thanks to the expansion announced last year.

As for other CCIW teams in the regional rankings, Illinois Wesleyan and Wheaton both find themselves in pretty good shape this time around. Wheaton sits third in the Central region, with Illinois Wesleyan right behind them in 4th. Carthage rounds out the region in 9th. The Lady Reds are probably a long shot for an NCAA Tournament berth with their record despite a top-100 strength of schedule. When your four conference losses are to the top two teams in your league... you're not in the best of shape. As for the other two, however, things bode pretty well for both the Titans and Thunder at least in the early going. Both rank in the top 31 nationally in strength of schedule, have strong records, and at least for Wheaton, will have good RRO results next week. I wouldn't be surprised to see two CCIW teams in the tourney this year.

Men's Basketball

18-3 Overall, 10-2 CCIW (2nd)
Central: 3rd (Out of 8 teams)

I read through what a number of prognosticators had to say about North Central, and this is actually a hair higher than I thought they'd be. Despite the high spot in this week's rankings, North Central's problems, really for the rest of the season, are twofold. First, the Central region is absolutely loaded. WIAC schools abound in this first go-around, and while attrition will take care of some of these teams, that doesn't solve the second, and arguably bigger problem. North Central's strength of schedule is, to put it bluntly, bad. The NCAA puts the Cardinals' SOS at .518. As a point of reference, .530 is probably the benchmark at which SOS becomes "okay." This isn't really North Central's fault; the series of home-and-homes with schools like Alma, Albion, and even Benedictine and Aurora leave a lot to be desired for this year, at least. The WIAC schools and even Augie and Wheaton have much better non-conference slates from earlier in the year.

If anything is going to be North Central's kryptonite, it's strength of schedule. A gaudy win percentage is great on paper, but without a boost to SOS, the committee won't take a team as seriously. This was a concern back in 2016 for Lancaster Bible, who ended up making the tournament at 27-0, but was a threat to miss the Dance if they ended up losing their conference tournament because their strength of schedule was an abysmal .422 going into their conference tournament. Now, this is an extreme example, but it shows the way the committees think.

The advantage North Central will have next week is when regionally ranked results come into play. The Cardinals will be looking at either a 2-2 or 3-1 mark against regionally ranked opponents pending the results of Saturday's game against Wheaton, with one win over the Thunder plus last week's upset of Augustana in the bank.

As for the rest of the conference, Augie is no surprise at the top of the region, with Wheaton's presence just behind the Cardinals also being fitting. The Cardinals have, for all intents and purposes, locked up no worse than third place in the conference and are in the driver's seat to at least get a bye. Winning at least three of their final four should be enough to keep North Central in good position for the NCAA Tournament. But there are still spots up for grabs, and as we've already seen in this league this year, you can't sleep on anyone.