As Jason Zimmerman, head men’s basketball coach at Emory, said on a recent episode of the Q-cast, “good basketball is good basketball.” Fans of Division III know just how good the basketball can be at this level but questions and misconceptions can linger about where the basketball played at the Division III level stacks up compared to Division I and Division II.
One such misconception is that Division I is better than Division II which is better than Division III. There are multiple examples of that kind of thinking in an absolute sense falling apart.
Already this season we have seen Division I Louisville fall in exhibition to Division II Kentucky Wesleyan. Emory has a win over Augusta, the preseason number ten in Division II, who was coming off a win over Division I Georgia Southern.
Even more dramatically, last December we saw Mary Hardin-Baylor take down Division I Texas State. While the pecking order of the divisions might be true in a general sense, the actual lines between divisions are not only blurry, they overlap.
To get a sense of how the three divisions of NCAA basketball stack up compared to one another I exported the complete Massey Ratings NCAA dataset for the 2022-2023 men’s basketball season. This gives us a ranking of all NCAA men’s basketball teams regardless of division.
The table below shows the overall Massey ranking for the highest and lowest ranked team in each division as well as the overall ranking for each quartile within a division.
| Massey Rank | Division 1 | Division 2 | Division 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Highest | 1 | 64 | 403 |
| Top 25% | 92 | 425 | 742 |
| Top 50% | 185 | 519 | 865 |
| Top 75% | 288 | 613 | 974 |
| Lowest | 553 | 953 | 1078 |
The overlapping of the divisions jumps out right at the top where the Massey Ratings’ top ranked teams in both Division II and Division III rank ahead of the lowest-ranked team in Division I. In fact, at 64 overall the the top Division II team fits inside the top quartile of Division I overall. Similarly, the highest-ranked Division III team ranks in the top quartile of Division II.
A handful of data points for each division in a table is a nice start the actual overlap between the divisions is better displayed by plotting every NCAA men’s basketball team’s division by their overall Massey Rating ranking. That can be seen below.
My guess is that the larger spreads between teams that we see at the bottom of Division I, top and bottom of Division II and top of Division III are a lack of confidence from the Massey Ratings model on where exactly these teams stack up in relation to the division above or below. This makes sense given the limited number of games played between divisions.
However, we do see clear overlaps between the divisions in the areas where teams are more closely bunched together. A really good Division III team might be a favorite over half of Division II and could have 50-50 matchups against a handful of Division I teams.
None of this is likely to come as a shock to followers of Division III basketball. Good basketball is good basketball, and the basketball in Division III can be just as good as the basketball in the higher divisions.
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