Best Graduating Classes in DIII

A lot of Division III student-athletes got their degrees the last few weeks. Some of them won a lot of games. This post was inspired by a tweet I saw by a Johns Hopkins touting the 40-0 regular season record by this year's graduating class, which is absolutely incredible. I decided to make a simple little heuristic to show the success of every graduating class in Division III over the last fifteen years.

To account for the fact that this year's class doesn't have as much of an impact on their record from their freshman season as they did for their senior season. I weighted each season as follows:

Senior Season = 1.00

Junior Season = 0.75

Sophomore Season = 0.50

Freshman Season = 0.25

This means that a class' weighted winning percentage is 40% due to their senior year, 30% junior year, 20% sophomore year, and 10% freshman year. I have no empirical evidence for this, because it's Memorial Day weekend, and I wanted to do something really quick while everyone else in my family was napping.

This first table shows the weighted winning percentages of this years graduating classes for every D3 team. Congrats UMHB, you guys had a helluva career (and the motivation for this piece comes up as the 4th most successful graduating class of 2017):

This next chart is for every graduating class of the last fifteen years (sorry PLU, Trinity, Augustana, et al, but you need to tell D3Football.com to get records going back further if you want more credit in these posts). Much to my chagrin, the Wartburg class of 2012 wasn't very close to the best in school history. A 6-4 and 8-2 season sprinkled in between a couple 10-win seasons isn't gonna cut it. Feel free to search for your alma mater, and see if you have bragging rights at next year's homecoming.

As a final note, congrats to everyone earning their diplomas this spring. You're all winning at 1.000 in the classroom (sorry, lame ending, but everyone else has woken up by now, and I'm ready to enjoy the holiday weekend, cheers!).