2025 men's and women's Division III Tournament odds

For the Norlanders of the world (and the Parrishes?)

I was going to put this up on X The Everything App, but I realized as I started it’s just easier to centralize it here. Plus I’m trying to do less on there even though parts of my business depend on it, alas.

The Division III Tournaments, both men’s and women’s, begin later today. On the men’s side, it begins with Tufts playing Yeshiva at 1:15 PM ET; on the women’s, we start with Washington & Lee playing Merchant Marine (yes, Gary, they’re real schools) at 4 PM. I did not go to a D3 school nor am I a real fan of one, but I find the D3 Tournament(s) fascinating for a few reasons:

1. The first four rounds are at campus sites - the first two at one host on the basis of “team strength and geography”, the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight equivalents at the top remaining ‘seeds’. But!

2. The tournament is actually unseeded. Pretty weird! Dave Klatsky, HC at NYU, did provide his own bracket with seeds thanks to the use of ‘NPI’, which is like D3’s NET.

   

3. Because of that, you get some true oddities, such as #7 NPI Randolph-Macon not hosting but #21 Franklin and Marshall hosting. Or, for whatever reason, the #2 team in the metric (NYU) having to travel to York, PA. (The reason is that the men’s team is hosting games at the same time.)

4. Or, on the women’s side, #5 NPI Whitman (located in Washington) not hosting and having to travel to #23 NPI Wisconsin-Stout (not located in Washington).

5. The teams also all play back-to-backs each weekend: the Round of 64 and 32 games take place within 24 hours of each other, as do the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

6. Also, the finals are playing Fort Wayne, Indiana (men’s) and Salem, Virginia (women’s). That’s not that weird, but it deserved a mention somewhere.

Thanks to the data from the team at D3 Datacast, the single best Division III metrics resource on the internet, I have built out odds for the 2025 Division III men’s and women’s tournaments. Are they perfect? Probably not; I almost certainly missed a host somewhere. But I think these are as good as you’ll find on the Internet, and to celebrate the first major tournament of March, it seems like a good day to post these.

Also, this will be free; it’s an experiment that has no real research behind it. No sense in charging for that.

Men’s odds

Open note here: in an attempt to appropriately adjust for home-court advantage, I did add a basic HCA of +3 points, which is what D3 Datacast themselves suggest in their game predictions. Beyond that, however, I didn’t bother with working that into the second weekend. The NCAA is technically supposed to select the venues of the best teams remaining in each quadrant, but it depends just as much on availability and capability to host, based on what I know.

On this side of the fence, your most likely champion is Trinity (Conn.), which would be the first championship in school history. They’ve only made the Final Four once, way back in 1995. Your secondary contenders here are Wesleyan (Conn.), much more known for football (the school of Bill Belichick!) and lacrosse (2018 champions), along with NYU, coached by the aforementioned Klatsky.

The structure of this tournament makes it super-watchable and super-hectic, especially early on. For instance, note the St. John’s (MN) and UChicago game today. Combined, those two teams would have the ninth-best odds at a championship, and in the Datacast numbers, they’re the 10th and 18th-best teams in the sport, respectively. Yet one of them will go home by tonight, season over and an outside chance at a Final Four appearance gone. Consider that in D1, top-20 vs. top-20 matchups in the Round of 64 are really rare; the last one to happen was 6-seed #17 Arizona vs. 11-seed #20 Wichita State in 2016. (It’s one of just five in the last 23 years.)

While I’ll be surprised if we do see someone other than the top three take the title, the outside contender of note here is Wisconsin-Platteville, who enjoys the riches of a region with just one other top-15 team (Washington U. of St. Louis) on its roster.

Women’s odds

Same note here: +3 for HCA, no adjustment made after the first two rounds because of NCAA wonkiness.

This one has an unusually expected ending: if NYU does not win the women’s tournament, something has gone seriously wrong. They went 25-0 this year in games against fellow D3 competition. Not a single game finished with a margin inside of 19 points. NINETEEN POINTS. The Violets outscored their competition by 53 points per 100 possessions and trailed for a total of 4 minutes, 36 seconds across four games. In the game they trailed the longest - 2:21 against Case Western Reserve - they went on to win 107-31. They’re a powerhouse.

The next-best shots, I guess, belong to Scranton and Smith. They went a combined 52-3, have the second and third-best defenses in D3, and do have the benefit of hosting their first and second-round games. The problem is that NYU is simply so far ahead of them, and everyone else, that it will be quite the surprise if anyone other than the Violets takes the title home for 2025.

And yes, Russell Steinberg, I know you specifically were wondering: the odds of the New York Double™, as I’m calling it, are 11.9%. Not that bad.