NCAA Division III utilizes the NCAA Power Index (NPI) to produce national rankings for all team sports. The final NPI rankings will determine who is awarded at-large bids and how teams are seeded for the 2026 NCAA Division III football championship.
This is a replication of the NCAA’s NPI calculations for Division III football. These numbers are unofficial but should be very very close to the official data used to select and seed teams for the NCAA Division III playoff in football. D3 Datacast provides NPI updates before and between official releases, which will be posted at stats.ncaa.org when available.
For simplicity’s sake, this view generally designates AQ (automatic qualifiers, formerly called Pool A) as the the team with the highest conference winning percentage (using NPI as a tiebreaker). At-Large (formerly Pool C) then ranks the remaining teams by NPI. Officially, all automatic qualifiers will eventually be awarded by each conference according to league rules.
Read about the NCAA’s football NPI dials here: FB NCAA Power Index.
Interested in how NPI could look at the end of the season? The Hansen Ratings can help set your expectations to help see the range of outcomes and their likelihood based on 10,000 simulations.
Links to NPI for other Division III team sports and resources to learn more about NPI can be found at D3Datacast.com/NPI.
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