The challenges now hosted at d3challenge.com go back more than two decades. They began in 2003 as part of D3football.com, expanded to D3hoops.com the following winter, went on hiatus beginning in 2014, and returned in 2018 in the format that evolved into today’s d3challenge.com.
The first challenges began on D3football.com in 2003.
The premise was simple and remains recognizable today: select the outcomes of games, follow the results and find out how your predictions compared with everyone else’s.
It added a participatory element to following Division III football and established the foundation for the challenge formats that would eventually have their own dedicated platform.
The following winter, challenges expanded to D3hoops.com.
Basketball provided another natural setting for prediction contests, particularly as the season moved toward conference races and postseason play.
With challenges now appearing across both D3football.com and D3hoops.com, they became another way for the Division III sports community to participate in the seasons it was already following.
For the next decade, the challenges continued as part of D3football.com and D3hoops.com.
These contests lived directly within the individual sports sites rather than on a separate challenge platform. The technology and specific formats evolved, but the central idea remained the same: make your picks before the games, follow the results and see how well you did.
Beginning in 2014, the challenges went on hiatus.
For several years, the prediction contests that had been part of D3football.com and D3hoops.com since 2003 were no longer being run.
The idea, however, wasn’t finished.
In 2018, after a four-year hiatus, the challenges returned in a new format.
Rather than simply recreating the old contests within D3football.com and D3hoops.com, the revived project provided a dedicated platform for entries, scoring and standings.
d3challenge.com became the new home for a tradition that had begun on D3football.com 15 years earlier. Tournament brackets, particularly for NCAA Division III basketball, became an important part of the revived challenges.
A substantial round of development in 2026 expanded both the capabilities of d3challenge and the ways participants could use it.
Improvements included a more mobile-friendly interface, dark mode, support for multiple brackets under one account, names for individual brackets, downloadable bracket PDFs, expanded account controls and additional authentication options.
The work also began moving d3challenge beyond a platform focused primarily on tournament brackets.
During the 2026 Division III baseball season, d3challenge added support for confidence pools.
A confidence pool asks participants to do more than select a winner. Each selection is also assigned a confidence value, making the result depend on both picking games correctly and deciding which predictions deserve the most weight.
The new format broadened the kinds of competitions that could be run through d3challenge.
In fall 2026, d3challenge began beta testing weekly football pick’em challenges.
Instead of predicting an entire tournament in advance, participants make selections from a new group of games each week and return as those games are completed to see how their picks performed.
The format also brings the history of the challenges full circle: weekly football predictions are once again part of the project that began on D3football.com in 2003.
The challenges have changed substantially since their first appearance in 2003.
They began as features of D3football.com and D3hoops.com, ran for more than a decade, went on hiatus in 2014 and returned in 2018 on the platform that became d3challenge.com.
Since then, the site has grown to support tournament brackets, pick’em competitions, confidence pools and new formats as they are developed.
The software has changed. The websites have changed. The contests have changed.
The basic idea has lasted more than two decades: make your picks, follow the games and see how much you really knew before they were played.
Make your next pick