Playoff crunch narrows as FCS regular season hits home stretch

Ro Elliott (1) and his Southern Illinois teammates have two games left to add to their playoff resume. (Photo by SEMORedhawks.com)

By Dan Verdun

With just two games left in the regular season there is little margin for error as teams fight for wins and jockey for possible berths in the FCS playoffs.

“Our focus is to win every week,” Southern Illinois head coach Nick Hill said Monday. “There’s not been a game that we’ve went into that says we can afford to lose. . . . You get down to this time of year, you’ve got to win.”

Hill’s Salukis are 6-3 overall and 3-3 in the Missouri Valley Football Conference. SIU plays at North Dakota State (6-3, 3-3) Saturday and hosts Indiana State (0-9, 0-6) Nov. 18 to close out the regular season.

“We’re not thinking you can lose one and win another,” Hill said. “We’ve got to put our best foot forward and focus on the one-game season this Saturday.”

With SIU ranked No. 11 and NDSU ranked No. 12 in this week’s Stats Perform FCS poll, national attention and playoff selection committee members’ eyes will be on the Fargodome.

Two other Illinois FCS teams also have playoff aspirations: Illinois State of the Missouri Valley Football Conference and Eastern Illinois of the Big South-OVC Alliance.

ISU (5-4, 3-3) hosts Murray State (2-7, 1-5) Saturday and visits North Dakota (6-3, 4-2) Nov. 18.

EIU (6-3, 2-2) hosts Tennessee State (6-3, 2-2) Saturday and travels to Robert Morris (3-6, 1-3) Nov. 18.

While Southern Illinois and Illinois State did not play each other this season, Eastern Illinois defeated ISU, 14-13, Sept. 16 in Charleston.

The Twitter/X-based @RedHerringBets began posting “analytics-based FCS coverage” last fall.

Each week, it publishes an “FCS playoff predictor,” which uses a model simulation to determine “the odds of an at-large bid based on the (selection) committee’s past behavior” adding that “records, conference, strength of schedule and head-to-head results” are used as factors.

Following this past weekend’s game results, @RedHerringBets tweeted its updated playoff projections. SIU was given a 79 percent chance of making the 24-team playoff bracket. The Salukis were given a 22 percent chance of receiving a seed and the first-round bye that accompanies it.

According to @RedHerringBets, seven MVFC teams have a 64 percent or better chance of making the playoffs. Illinois State, however, was listed at nine percent.

EIU was given a 23 percent chance of making the playoff field.

There are 10 automatic bids awarded for winning a conference championship. The remaining 14 teams are at-large bids.

The chair shares on the air

FCS playoff committee chairman Kent Haslam was recently interviewed on HERO Sports senior FCS analyst Sam Herder’s podcast.

With the official playoff bracket being revealed Nov. 19, Haslem said that the 10-member committee — which includes Eastern Illinois athletic director Tom Michael — is now meeting twice a week.

Haslem, who is the athletic director at the University of Montana, is wrapping up his sixth and final year on the playoff committee.

Committee members are removed from the room when the schools they represent are being discussed, he said.

“The NCAA protocols have a lot of things in place that protect members when their institutions are being discussed. I could never vote for Montana,” Haslam said. “I’ve been in the room when other committee members are kicked out of the room, so I know that discussion is robust.”

Haslam said that in order to make it into the playoff field via an at-large bid a team must receive “70 percent of the committee’s vote.”

Haslam shared the process by which the teams are selected and placed into the bracket.

“The first thing we do as a committee is vote on every team that should be under consideration,” he said. “We all can nominate teams, and they need to get 30 percent to just be on the board.”

Once the board is filled, the schools receiving automatic bids are removed.

“When the SWAC and the MEAC decide their champions, we take those champions out,” he said. “The Ivy League is not in (since they choose to not participate in postseason football).”

The process for picking the at-large team then begins.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re all from the same conference,” Haslam told Herder. “There is not criteria on the number that can be in. If every Missouri Valley school was good enough to be one of the top 14, again they don’t have that many (members), they would all make the tournament.”

The early voting sees four or five teams “immediately go in because everybody knows they’re going in, but as you work through and you get down to two slots left, it is a grind,” Haslam said. “There’s times you can’t get to 70 percent, so you argue about it. You debate it, and you vote again.”

Once the field is set, the seeding selection takes place. This year, the top eight teams will be seeded.

During the voting process, a number of factors serve as criteria for who gets in and who gets left out.

“As humans we’re always looking for computers to tell us that we’re right, so we’ve got to be careful there,” Haslam said in regard to the various analytical data available.

The criteria includes determining factors such as strength of schedule, head-to-head results and FBS wins as well as victories over ranked FCS teams.

“One of the things that hurts FCS football is that we do not do a lot of out-of-region games,” Haslam said. “We do not do a lot of cross-overs. You’ve got some schools who will play two FBS (opponents) to make their budget and then they’ll play a non-D1. That really gives the committee nothing to compare.

“So then you can only compare when you get into that conference schedule. So, you’re stuck with whatever your conference strength is and then you’re just eating each other up. So it’s really hard to compare.”

Haslam summarized the committee’s task.

“This isn’t an invitational. This isn’t everybody gets in. This isn’t equal representation. Our job is to get the 14 best at-large teams into the tournament regardless of where they come from,” he said. “It goes back to that point I made earlier, it’s really hard to cross over.

“How good is that OVC team compared to a So Con (Southern Conference team), or how does a Missouri Valley team stack up against a Patriot (League) team? You just don’t know because there’s not crossovers.”

In the end, Haslam fell back on the process.

“You’ve just got to go by another great cliche, the whole body of work and then look for those points where you can separate people out,” he said.

That separation will take place 12 days from now.

Dan Verdun is a co-founder of Prairie State Pigskin. He has written four books: NIU Huskies Football, EIU Panthers Football, ISU Redbirds Football and SIU Salukis Football.

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