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MAY 16, 2025 | composed by STEVE ULRICH

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FEATURE
Examining the Relative Competitive Strength of Women’s Conferences Through NPI

by Steve Dittmore, D3Lacrosse.net

The new DIII NCAA Power Index (NPI) rankings this year provide an opportunity to not only rank individual teams, but also consider relative strengths of conferences. We shared a primer on the NPI and what it means in January. Last week we examined men’s conferences in 2025. This week, we explore women’s conferences.

Using the 2025 season’s final NPI rankings, it is possible to assess how conferences performed in the new metric. Recognizing a team’s performance from year-to-year is dependent on a number of variables (quality of competition, team injuries, etc.), this snapshot does not necessarily reflect how teams improved or underperformed relative to last year. I created an average NPI for each conference by adding the overall NPIs of member institutions and dividing by the number of schools in the conference. 

Studying the data below allows us to assess top-to-bottom strength for a conference. Here is what we can glean for DIII women’s conferences in the 2025 season. 

Only the NESCAC placed all members in the women’s Top 100 NPI, although eight others (Centennial, C2C, NJAC, NCAC, Liberty, SAA, Little East, and WIAC) placed at least half of its member institutions in the Top 100. Of those eight conferences, three (C2C, SAA, and WIAC) only received one NCAA bid. 

The DIII women’s game features more teams (282 v. 236) than the DIII men’s game and more conference AQs (31 v. 26) than the men’s game. However, because the men’s game receives more at-large bids (11 v. 9) than the women’s game, the higher overall percentage of men’s teams to qualify for the NCAA tournament (15.7% v. 14.2%) leads to higher concentrations of post-season teams in power conferences in the men’s game.

As the women headed into their Sweet Sixteen round, here are some facts: the 16 schools were all in the Top 22 in NPI; each of the top 6 conferences below each has at least one team left; a total of 10 the remaining 16 teams hail from one of the top 6 conferences. 

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