ATN's Year in Review
| Tyler Burke and Wabash
generated one of the best comebacks in Division III this season,
and on a big stage. Wabash photo by Howard Hewitt |
The 2011 season ends with Friday’s matchup of UW-Whitewater and Mount Union, but the Stagg Bowl is not the end-all.
Two-hundred and thirty-nine teams strapped it up this season, and while we’ll always remember and respect the champion that emerges from the seventh meeting of the purple powers in Salem, the season provided a lot more worth remembering than a single champion.
This look back at the 2011 season isn’t comprehensive – it’d be quite the undertaking to highlight all the standout occurrences in 239 programs. We’ve also, through All-Region and All-American teams, coach of the year awards, and the playoffs themselves, already acknowledged the top players, best leaders and most successful squads this season. (All-Americans are announced in our Stagg Bowl pregame show.)
Beyond that, these are just a handful of things that happened between Weeks 1 and 14 that Around the Nation would like to acknowledge one last time:
Steps forward
• The moment the playoff brackets were revealed on Nov. 13 was perhaps the most exciting thing that happened this season away from a stadium on game day. Fans and the D3football.com staff had figured the committee out – we knew who was in and why, who the top seeds would be and where they would play. Or so we thought.
The selection committee bypassed two 9-1 teams in favor of an 8-2 team with a high strength of schedule figure, and mixed up the brackets from their usual geographic focus to more of a pod system, keeping in mind the focus on trips of less than 500 miles in the first round. The NCAA picked up the tab on more flights than it had to this season, and it paid off with some of the best games of the playoffs: Cal Lutheran at Linfield in the first round, when the Wildcats blocked a kick to preserve a 30-27 win, and Linfield at Wesley in the second round, where two powerhouse programs from opposite coasts that might only have been able to meet in Salem, played a second-round shootout for the ages. In the quarterfinals, Salisbury and St. John Fisher flew out West to take on UW-Whitewater and St. Thomas instead of having to play each other, and we got another epic matchup between Mary-Hardin Baylor and...
