D3football Daily Dose

Doug Dougherty’s College Notebook in The Roanoke (Va.) Times lists one of many position battles we’re monitoring as Kickoff 2005 approaches.

Bridgewater (Va) Eagles Head Coach Mike Clark will have to choose a new quarterback to replace graduated Brandon Wakefield. Will he choose senior Jacob Lewis or sophomore Jeff Highhill? Both are pictured in the tremendous picture (Lewis at left, Highill at right) courtesy of Eagles’ fansite Bridgewaterfootball.com.

Either way Clark is confident the Eagles have enough returning pieces on offense. “We’re in a position where the quarterback doesn’t have to be a magic man,” he told the Times.

Bridgewater isn’t the only team with a key position battle taking place in training camp. Each of the other 226 teams will have similar subplots unfold on their quiet, hot campuses.

And D3football.com will bring you the story from each and every one in our upcoming Season Preview. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting product shortly.

I just found out that Johns Hopkins has started publishing an athletics blog, and from there discovered links to McDaniel and Centennial Conference blogs as well. As relative veterans of blogging ourselves (I refuse to use the media-created term blogosphere), D3football.com and D3hoops.com would like to welcome them aboard. We’ll add them to the links on both Daily Dose blogs when we get the chance.

The lower levels of college football aren’t necessarily blessed with great officiating. But sometimes top-notch men in stripes pass through on their way to bigger stadiums and bigger paychecks.

One such person is a Division III grad and former Division III official, Bernie Kukar. The full story, from the Cook County (Minn.) News-Herald.

Division III basketball fans made their opinions known last year on an ESPN.com poll regarding basketball rivalries, making Hope/Calvin the best rivalry by an overwhelming margin.

Now it’s your turn, football fans. As part of ESPN’s current promotional vehicle, where they are visiting all 50 states in 50 days, they have posted a fan poll for each of the 50 states.

It’s the Indiana poll we’re concerned with. The fifth question on the survey asks what the state’s best rivalry is, and DePauw vs. Wabash football is the last choice on the list (typical lack of respect), but is holding onto first place in the survey. As of this writing, the rivalry has 32.6% of the 15,767 votes, slightly ahead of some schools called Purdue and Indiana, who apparently play basketball.

Vote early. Vote often, or at least on any computer you can get to. Remind ESPN that there are other schools besides those in Division I.

If you’ve looked at our ongoing list of announced recruits, you may wonder why so few East region players are mentioned.

No team has more than two recruits listed and most teams aren’t represented at all. One North region school (Augustana) has nearly as many recruits listed as the Empire 8, Liberty League, NEFC and NESCAC combined.

While this paucity (SAT word!) is generally due to a lack of information, we’ve finally got some East region stories to share.

NJAC Backs

Kean football fans haven’t had much to cheer about recently, finishing no better than fifth since we started keeping track in 1999.

But an upset win over Montclair State and a close game with Rowan in 2004 might have lit a spark of optimism in Union, New Jersey. That spark was fanned a little by a North-South High School All-Star Football game featuring a handful of Cougars-to-be.

The Asbury Park (N.J.) Press reports that Linden High defensive end Jimmy Moreno was instrumental in the North team’s two-point victory. The North sealed the game by thwarting a late drive led by Asbury Park HS quarterback Keith Gladden. Both Moreno and Gladden will attend Kean this fall.

The game also featured Butler (N.J.) HS running back Jared Greenburg, a 5-foot-10, 185-pound dynamo who gained more than 1,900 yards and 29 touchdowns last year. You can read more about Greenburg, another Cougar newcomer, in this NorthJersey.com article.

Cortland State will receive some young backfield talent according to the (Oneonta, N.Y.) Daily Star. Cooperstown (N.Y.) HS back Brendan Hill will play for the Red Dragons this fall and, while coaches normally say nice things about incoming players, Cortland Coach Dan MacNeill seemed particularly high on Hill. “”Immediately after reviewing his tape, Brendan was a top prospect for us,” MacNeill told the paper. “We know one thing, Brendan is a pretty terrific running back.”

Incidentally Hill’s high school wrestling foe, Matt Mazgaj, is headed to Washington & Jefferson.

MAC Daddies

Last time we mentioned that Delaware Valley sent us a report on their recruits. Now we can add Lycoming to the short list of schools that have shared their 2005 recruiting class with us. You can read the Warriors’ official release here.

A trio of Red Rovers will come over to the MAC as Easton (Pa.) HS graduates John Navone, Jarrid Myers and Todd Kresge will attend King’s, Susquehanna and Wilkes respectively.

FDU-Florham will be the college home for Sam Trotta of Delran (N.J.) HS while Tyler Williams of Whitehall (Pa.) HS joins MAC-mate Moravian.

Good Deal for the Cards

The Gloucester (N.J.) County Times reports that the Wesleyan (Conn.) Cardinals will feather their football nest with Gateway Regional (N.J.) HS graduate Kevin Leamy. Reminiscent of versatile D3football.com All-American and Williams grad Scott Farley, Leamy played running back, quarterback, place kicker, linebacker and defensive back in high school.

NOTE: Thanks to our East region ATR columnist Tom Wilson who fed us most of these stories. You can check out his NJAC blog here.

In non-East region recruiting news…

- National Trail (Ohio) HS quarterback Randy Kerns will play football and baseball at Earlham

- Tolar (Texas) HS teammates J.W. Pendleton and Dustin Waldrep will attend Hardin-Simmons and Sul Ross State respectively

- Bethel Park (Pa.) HS quarterback L.J. Michalski will enroll at Johns Hopkins

- Burlington Township (N.J.) HS quarterback Jim Jeffers is headed to Muhlenberg

- Norwin (Pa.) HS graduate Rick Stevey will play football and run track at Thiel

- Jefferson-Morgan (Pa.) HS alum Eric Cox will attend Waynesburg

As always, if you have recruiting news, feel free to share using the comments feature. Please provide the URL so we can verify the story or we’ll erase the post, even if you’re reporting your own college decision.

NOTE: Thanks to NJAC Poster JPS93 who spotted this (East Brunswick, N.J.) Hometown News Tribune article citing two more incoming East region quarterbacks.

Piscataway (N.J.) HS Quarterback Robert Rose, meet East Brunswick (N.J.) HS Quarterback Matt Mariano. They could be the future leaders of the 2004 East Region finalists as Rose heads to Rowan and Mariano to Delaware Valley. Both will have to wait, though, as the Profs and Aggies have talented incumbents already under center in Mike Orihel and Adam Knoblauch respectively.

I wonder if Rose will mention the final score of the Rowan-Del Val playoff game to Mariano when they see each other on Thursday…

Stefan Cooper of the Maryville (Tenn.) Daily Times reports that the hometown Scots are hoping for continued improvement – both on the field and in the Athletic Center – after a 5-4 season in 2004.

The Scots join the USA South Athletic Conference for football this season after playing a slew of close games as an independent in 2004. Maryville had three overtime games and four more decided by a field goal or less last season.

This is a nice turnaround for a program that, not too long ago, was celebrating its first home win in a couple years.

Last year we ran a series of front-page reader polls asking you who would win each bracket in 2004. Obviously, this type of thing is a popularity contest in a sense, as well as a measure of how many fans each team has that visit the site on a regular basis, but we’re going to look back on reader picks from 2004 anyway.
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The NCAA championships committee has affirmed that the Presidents’ Athletic Conference must wait two years for an automatic bid, just like everyone else, according to a report in the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter.

In April 2005 the league announced it was adding Thomas More as a member, effective the fall of 2005. The conference hoped that the NCAA would waive the two-year waiting period. “It seems the waiting period is designed to monitor newly formed conferences to ensure stability, which we feel is not a concern with the PAC,” said Tori Haring-Smith, president of Washington & Jefferson, at the time.

On a related note, I came across this in the Presidents’ Athletic Conference agreement last night.

Article III. MEMBERSHIP
Section C. Contracts Held By New Members
Contracts held by members at the time of joining the conference are obligations not to be abrogated.

For those of you who aren’t dictionary junkies (I did not know what this word meant either), abrogate means “to abolish, do away with, or annul, especially by authority.” Yet five schools willingly did away with one of their football game contracts for this season anyway.

So the PAC broke its own rules to rush Thomas More into the league, in vain hopes of receiving an automatic bid expressly contrary to Division III rules. And Huntingdon and Montclair State are still paying the price, having been unable to find replacement games.

I’m personally glad this behavior was not rewarded. Breaking 10 contracts in April is not the way to get things done, not in Division III. With St. Vincent headed for the PAC, Seton Hill sounding more likely to move to Division III and even Geneva making noise about coming over from the NAIA, coaches should be wary about scheduling PAC teams for the next few years. Your contract could be next.

Today is the sixth birthday of D3football.com, a site we launched with some trepidation on July 7, 1999.

I had been running Division III Basketball Online, as it was then called, for about a year and a half when I and the others involved in the site at the time, primarily Jim Stout and Ray Martel, decided to do a football site.

I had acquired Division III Basketball Online from the Centennial Conference and commissioner Steve Ulrich for free shortly after the beginning of the 1997-98 season after it had been only rarely updated the final months of the season before and we had started to make headway with it. Early in the 1999 offseason, I approached Ulrich to see if we could purchase Division III Football Online from him, offering to run his ads on the front page instead of ours for the first full season as payment, but he wasn’t interested. (Turns out this would have probably netted about $1,200.) I didn’t really want much of the content on Division III Football Online — I wanted the name, to match our other site, and I wanted the established links to that site to follow to ours.

So we forged ahead with building our own site, but we were worried there would be backlash. Our basketball site was very popular, but here we were encroaching on someone else’s already-established territory. Even though we were about to take Division III football coverage to a new level, we were concerned.

Our plans were grandiose for the time — a page of schedule and results for each of the more than 220 Division III football teams, extensive scoreboard updates on game day, printing every game story that we received, publishing columns from every part of the country. And it was difficult to do because we were trying to keep things quiet — it’s hard enough now to collect all of the Division III football schedules, but think back to the Web sites of six years ago and what was available when.

Also, we couldn’t use the Division III Football Online name, so we decided to name the new site for its URL, D3football.com. And we changed the name of the basketball site to D3hoops.com. Division III Football Online closed up shop after a couple of years, and Ulrich sold his last remaining site, College Lacrosse USA, for what I understand is an obnoxious sum of money before the tech bubble burst. (Kudos.)

Thanks for allowing me to reminisce and for us to have such fun covering Division III football and basketball. It would be nothing without the 25 million front-page visitors we’ve had over that time.

We’ve celebrated the AIFL in this space before. (Well, OK, we haven’t celebrated it as much as listed the D-III alumni in the league.) But these players, the Canton (Ohio) Legends team specifically, are getting a crash course in life in the low minor leagues.

Early in the season, offensive coordinator Jim Ballard, an All-America quarterback at Mount Union and 1993 winner of the Gagliardi Trophy, resigned along with other coaches because they weren’t getting paid. (And of course, the owner told the local paper that he fired them.)

Now, the team might not play its upcoming playoff game because the checks from a game two weeks ago have not arrived. Randell Knapp, an All-America wide receiver at Mount Union in 2003, told the Canton Repository (registration required) that they hadn’t gotten a paycheck they were expecting eight days earlier and they did not practice Tuesday. He, along with Baldwin-Wallace standout quarterback Dan Larlham and Malone wide receiver Eric Rector, said they would not play Saturday without a check.

“It’s not about the money,” Knapp told the paper. “Most of these guys would pay to play. I talked with Danny and we both agreed we’d pay to play flag football. But the fact is, we made a deal to be paid $300 a game, and checks are bouncing, and checks are late. We have to draw a line at some point.”

Lines in the sand are legendary — sounds like the Legends have drawn one here.