D3football Daily Dose

Dear reader:

We’ve asked a few Division III players and coaches to join our blog and give us an inside look into life in Division III football. Introducing Linfield senior center Dwight Donaldson:

Today the ‘Cats went back to work after a short break over the weekend. Most had a really low key weekend after our morning scrimmage on Saturday with a couple different guys having bbq’s. Campus has become flooded with students again after the whole place was empty over the summer. It’s great to see familiar faces again but I might be willing to trade it back for open parking spaces. There’s nothing worse than having 30 seconds to get to meetings and you can’t find a spot to park. Some guys just resort to leaving their flashers on in a yellow, but then you run the risk of draining your battery and needing a jump to move it so a semi can get through.

Getting back out on the field after the time off was a little tougher than many of us were expecting. Warming up for our morning workout we felt like we’d just played a game the day before. Guys were groaning just doing a couple of functional exercizes. I guess that’s what happens when you go for 9 or 10 days straight.

Our afternoon practice was a little sluggish but the seniors will make sure it doesn’t happen 2 days in a row. We finished up the day with evening meetings which is par for the course. The team spent about 20 minutes talking with the freshman about tips for class schedules and then studied film on Saturday’s scrimmage and today’s practice.

Tomorrow will be a true double with full practices at 8:30 and 7 and meetings in the afternoon. The evening practice is sure to be spirited. There’s just something about being under the lights that gets guys fired up. It’s also our last practice of doubles since classes start on Wednesday. Which also means I will have finished the last doubles of my career, a truly bitter-sweet event.

Kickoff of the seventh season of Division III football coverage on D3football.com comes Friday night. In those seasons we’ve learned a few things about how to cover the sport. So, on a regular basis, here’s what you’ll see on our site this season.

On Friday afternoon we’ll start with our preview of the weekend’s games, a look at what the top games will be, a handy reminder of where to get scores during the games. We’ll link to any key Friday night games that are broadcast, etc., and there will of course be scores for those games.

Saturday is busy as all get-out. Track games in progress on the Scoreboard, where schools that choose to post scores during the game are highlighted. You can also watch those games scroll by on our news ticker at the top of the front page or any news page. As final scores come in and news happens, we’ll update the front page, perhaps as many as a dozen times during the course of the day. We almost never close up shop for the night before we’ve gotten all the day’s scores in.

On Sunday we compile and release the D3football.com Top 25 poll. Usually you can expect to see it update between 4 and 6 p.m.

Monday we greet the Division III fans returning to their office computers with the Statistical Spotlight, a look at a handful of top performances around Division III from the weekend that didn’t already get noted on the front page in the weekend coverage.

Tuesday we start posting our weekly Around the Region columns, which cover Division III on a regional basis. Those start coming in on Monday night and we post them over the next few days, as time permits. We also compile and post the Team of the Week, our weekly honor roll recognizing 22 starters and three special teamers from across Division III.

On Wednesday and Thursday we get Mark Simon’s Features column and Keith McMillan’s Around the Nation. They don’t always follow a specific schedule but this is the time of the week they usually run.

And that brings us back to Friday again. So now you know — you can’t skip a day.

Seven days from now we’ll be waist-deep in incoming scores, press releases and commentary. But for now, it’s a final Saturday of sanity.

The first full Saturday of football kicks off a stretch of craziness in the Coleman household that lasts until the end of March. Between D3football.com and D3hoops.com, the season lasts seven months (and never mind the overlap between seasons). That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it — the only thing worse than the seven-month season is that pesky five-month offseason.

Here’s hoping for a successful, exciting and competitive 2005-06 season.

Phew, that’s finally done. The Kickoff 2005, first conceived back in the first week of April, is posted.

If you have password issues, contact ryan@cwis.biz for help. There are also instructions available on the Kickoff login page regarding that. Hope you’re as thrilled as we are!

The San Antonio Express-News hasn’t exactly done the Trinity (Texas) football team too many favors in recent years. Game coverage is almost non-existent. Occasionally there’s a feature. Even, on occasion, the facts are right.

I was reading a story in the paper this evening when I thought my opinion was going to change. Here was a well-written, useful story about the Tigers’ consecutive first-round exits, when there was a glaring error.

“Leading by five going into the fourth quarter, Mary Hardin-Baylor used a punishing ground game to drive 80 and 71 yards for touchdowns, outscoring the Tigers 14-0 down the stretch.

“The Crusaders went on to play in the D-III title game, losing to Findlay, Ohio.”

Thanks for playing.

Still, it’s not as irresponsible as the way the paper blew up Roy Hampton’s run-in with the law after the national semifinal win against St. John’s in 2002. That story, which, let’s face it, pales in comparison to what Division I athletes in the state have been connected with, was a major story in their newspaper for days. Eventually the school suspended Hampton for the Stagg Bowl.

An Express-News columnist after the fact wrote, “I just hope that our sensational headlines on the subject didn’t play even a small role in the decision to oust the star player.”

I’m afraid those hopes were unfounded. Trinity deserves better, and so does Division III.

I’ll be honest — I was borderline disgusted when I received my first Gagliardi Trophy publicity package last winter, one promoting Wesley safety Rocky Myers for the award. I was sure this wasn’t within the spirit of the award, wasn’t in keeping with what Division III is all about. And since I’d heard of everyone on the ballot and was familiar with who they played for and against, I voted without looking at the highlight DVD.

But eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and I popped it in the computer and watched it. It was a highlight video, set to the theme from Rocky.

Myers has moved into the real cinema world this month, however, playing New York Giants fullback Larry Csonka in an upcoming movie called Invincible, about Vince Papale, who went from substitute teacher to Eagles special teamer in 1976. The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., talked to Myers and reports.

Football might not be the game of stats that baseball is, but it’s a time of year when numbers are plentiful — numbers of recruits and numbers of kids in camp.

When you see published numbers, pass them along with a link. Don’t pass second-hand information, what you heard from your buddies, etc. Give us a link.

To start things off, Maryville (Tenn.) has 129 in camp and 76 freshmen.
St. John’s has 190 at practice, down from 197 last year.
Louisiana College had 102 players report to camp.
Linfield expects 170 when camp opens.

Retired Pacific Lutheran coach Frosty Westering, who led the Lutes to the 1999 Division III national championship, is one of two former Division III coaches being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame this weekend. And he’s still having a profound impact on those who are getting to know of him for the first time. Witness this piece on Westering from the South Bend Tribune.

It reminds us that we had first impressions as well, or at least second impressions in Mark Simon’s post-Stagg Bowl feature from six years ago.

Longtime UW-La Crosse coach Roger Harring, who led the Eagles to the 1992 and 1995 Division III national titles, is in this year’s induction class as well.

As you might have observed, over the past year D3football.com (and to a lesser extent, D3hoops.com) has suffered occasional slowdowns, times at which one site or the other would move at a crawl because of high traffic.

We attempted to alleviate that in February by moving D3hoops.com’s message board, Posting Up, onto a separate server within the same host. While that worked, it was only a temporary measure — we have more planned.

Unfortunately, our message board software itself, which we have been using since Posting Up opened in November 1998, is part of the problem. Although we love Discus because it was written by programmers associated with Hope College, we have outgrown it and it can not support a site of our size.

To this end, we’re changing message board software. We’re also combining Post Patterns with Posting Up and we’re putting the combined message board on a separate server. We believe this will make both D3hoops.com and D3football.com run more smoothly all year.

The new board will also have more modern features, the types of things you’re used to if you use forums on other sites. Your username and password will carry over to the new site and we’ll transfer the posts. To this end, we will temporarily shut down new user registration later in the week, and will shut down the entire board sometime on Saturday evening before the transfer. When all is complete we’ll put up the new link.

If you are registered for both Posting Up and Post Patterns, we are attempting to determine that now so we can combine them into one account, with one post total. We’ll attempt to use your password from Post Patterns, since this sport is more active at the moment.

Conference coaches’ polls almost always throw out at least a few puzzlers a year, usually at the bottom of the standings. For the most part, top picks are defensible, and certainly the coaches have a good idea of what to expect from teams in their conference. But sometimes things don’t add up.

Take the last-place pick in the USA South. I would be very surprised if USAC newcomer Maryville follows up on the near-unanimous eighth-place pick it was voted. This is Tony Ierulli’s third season with the Scots after taking over a program that had a 12-game losing streak. They were 2-8 in his first season and 5-4 last year. Even though the USAC looks like a conference on the rise, Maryville will be more than competitive. Even if they don’t win a single road game because of the travel distances, the road to Tennessee goes both ways, and I can see Averett, Greensboro, Ferrum and Methodist each having trouble. The Scots could also pick off a win at North Carolina Wesleyan.

Paying your dues? Maybe. But then again, the PAC slotted Thomas More fifth in the league’s first year with seven teams. That seems reasonable, although I might have put them fourth considering the coaches changes at Waynesburg and Westminster (Pa.).

I don’t see Lycoming finishing seventh in the MAC. Last year was an aberration. I really think you have to throw out the year immediately following the death of a player or an assistant coach, and we’ve seen it happen more than once. Last year was not indicative of where the Lycoming program is and I wouldn’t pick them any lower than fourth.

I also have to think Catholic will do better than last place in the ODAC, with Tom Clark able to get a full recruiting class in and the anticipated return of wide receiver Nick Bublavi. I’ll be honest — I saw them play once last year and they were truly awful. But history won’t repeat itself.

On the other hand, the NCAC, OAC and PAC had Hiram, Heidelberg and Bethany coming in last, and it’s hard to argue with any of those picks.

Then again, no poll is perfect. Even our own preseason Top 25 saw Wooster slide in at No. 25. I think the No. 4 pick they got in the NCAC preseason poll is more reasonable.