D3football Daily Dose

I just spent an hour plugging games into the D3soccer.com scoreboard and am more than ready to turn my attention to football. The game I’m most interested in is conveniently provided to me by HDNet, so I’m at home watching the DePauw/Wabash game on the big screen, in HD.

I was at this game last year, at Wabash, but I think I might have a better view today.

Aside from that, of course, the five head-to-head championship games, Pool C teams trying to win out and Pool B teams basically secure and looking to preserve their seeding.

We’ll also track who’s in the field, with 11 bids left to hand out.

Have at it! Big day! We’ll have a final set of playoff projections tonight, hopefully pretty early.

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Playoff spots will be going out left, right and center today, as we lock up a few more of the 23 automatic bids to the Division III football playoffs.

Plenty of action going on, detailed on the front page. Our own Gordon Mann is calling the Delaware Valley-Albright game, and if I weren’t headed to St. Thomas-Bethel myself, that’s what I’d be listening to. Click here to listen.

We list other potential clinchers on the front page. Wesley doesn’t have an AQ to play for but is going to be interesting this week, as quarterback Shane McSweeney’s status is in doubt.

More? Chime in, plus follow us on Twitter.

You had to get here pretty early in the morning to follow what might well end up being the most exciting game of the week. In the Upper Midwest Athletic Conference’s annual Dome Day, MacMurray and Crown led off with a track meet. MacMurray defeated Crown 68-62 in overtime. The game came one score from tying the Division III record for most points in regulation, which was 131, set when Earlham defeated Manchester 69-62 on Sept. 10, 2005.

Once the game got to overtime, the overall scoring record was in danger as well, which was set two years ago, when Hartwick beat Utica 72-70 in quadruple overtime on Nov. 10, 2007.

In the end, though, MacMurray came up with one stop in overtime. I spoke with MacMurray coach Jake Box after the game and the recording is below:

 

 Podcast: MacMurray coach Jake Box [2:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The UMAC has four more games here today, and then we have a hundred more on Saturday, so we’re already set to go. There’s a big game in Washington, Pa., one in Dover, Del., one in Union, N.J., one in Bloomington, Ill., and others elsewhere. The PAC automatic bid could be wrapped up on Saturday, as can the HCAC, IIAC and the MWC, while others could be clinched with a combination of a win and a loss.

The ever-traveling Craig Burroughs is here at Dome Day, who writes for Don Hansen and travels to more games than the entire D3football.com braintrust put together. (Well, close anyway. Between me, Keith, Gordon and Ryan Tipps I think we do out-do Craig, but not by much. We don’t usually see JV games and we don’t go to non-Division III games either.)

I’ll put more MacMurray-Crown observations in the comments.

This is a great day for me to stay at home and channel surf. Finally have our house set up a little bit and if necessary, I can fire up two computers and a desktop side by side by side and really take up all of the available bandwidth.

So I get an extra hour to unpack boxes and such before Capital-Otterbein, since that’s at 2 p.m. ET. Then there’s also live video of Wheaton-North Central, which is a service I haven’t seen before, so hopefully it works. At 4:30, Willamette-Linfield.

And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other intriguing games. Follow us on Twitter, too, as we update you on games from across the country all day.

I mean, in your part of the country anyway, I’m sure it’s fall. But here in Minneapolis I woke up to snow on the ground. Not enough to last the day or affect any games around here, probably, but just a reminder that Oct. 10 is … yeah, way, way too early for snow.

I’ll be watching Concordia-Moorhead (Division III team No. 120 on my list of whom I’ve seen) at No. 15 St. Thomas, basically as prep for next week’s Game of the Week broadcast of the St. Thomas-St. John’s game. Ryan Tipps is at the Emory & Henry/Hampden-Sydney game, while Gordon Mann is at FDU-Florham at Delaware Valley. The short trip is my deal with the folks at home. New rule in the Coleman house: If I take a plane one weekend, I stay home or stay in the Twin Cities the next weekend. Keeps the peace.

I still have a few Minnesota schools I haven’t seen yet and will get to those eventually. Hamline will be the only MIAC team I haven’t seen, then throw in a bunch of stadiums I’ve never seen a game at: Hamline, Carleton, Concordia, Crown … pretty much you name it.

Looking at this week’s schedule on paper has me thinking not at all about last week, where there weren’t a lot of games where we could foresee upsets. We have two games between Top 25 teams (No. 1 Mount Union at No. 21 Capital, No. 22 Redlands at No. 24 Occidental), and then UW-Whitewater, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Wheaton, Linfield, Central, Case Western Reserve, Monmouth, Otterbein, St. Thomas, Cortland State and Ithaca are each playing teams where you could conceivably pick them to lose.

Stick around, watch, listen, follow live stats. The wireless connection at St. Thomas wasn’t great the last time I was there but we’ll see. I’ll be on Twitter at least from my phone, hopefully blogging.

That’s what I have today, anyway: homecoming at Allegheny and at Mount Union. I will throw it open now. What’s up today?

We’ve got Keith McMillan at Frostburg State-Wesley, Gordon Mann at Del Val-Leb Val and Jason Bowen at East Texas Baptist-McMurry and Mary Hardin-Baylor/Hardin-Simmons.

Meanwhile, an overcast day here at Allegheny, temperature in the low- to mid-60’s, a little wind. No swamp here anymore, just artificial turf.

Color guy for Allegheny just proclaimed this game against Wabash as “clearly the two best teams in the conference here today.” Not sure I agree but eventually we’ll find out.

There’s nothing I love more about this job than calling play-by-play of a Division III football game. I grew up loving sports on the radio, and living in Ypsilanti, Mich., as an impressionable youngster, I got to listen to Detroit Tigers legend Ernie Harwell call baseball games on WJR.

If I’m not broadcasting, I like being on the sidelines taking pictures, as it gets me right up close to the action. Not taking pictures? In the press box watching the game. But when I’m doing that, I’m distracted by the other 100 games going on the same day.

This week, none of that — I’m at home. I’ve seen five games through the first three weeks of the season and this is how I keep the peace with my family. It’s time to sit back and watch things unfold from the D3sports.com newsdesk here in Minneapolis. So I’ll have multiple live stats windows open, as many video streams as our crappy Comcast bandwidth will allow, and will follow live audio, Twitter and any other updates that are available.

In short, I’m like you are, today, if your team is on the road and you’re not there. Expect lots of updates. Ryan Tipps is at Gettysburg-Muhlenberg and we have photographers out in the field as well.

By the way, you’d hear a little of Ernie Harwell in every football or basketball broadcast I do. When you hear me rattle through that copyright/disclaimer at the end of the game, that’s verbatim what I heard him say at the end of every broadcast from about 1979 to 1983. Harwell is 91 now, recently revealed he has cancer and is on a bit of a farewell tour. Bless him.

At least I assume it will be sunny, since it was after midnight Pacific Time by the time I left the airport. Looking forward to a great day, watching four halves of football and six teams, five of which I’ve never seen, in three stadiums I’ve never been to.

Meanwhile, Keith is going to be knocking some teams and stadiums off his list, too, so perhaps it will be a good time for us to meet up and compare notes again in the future. Sure, my goal is still to somehow, someday see all 245 teams play, or however many teams it is by then. Still got a ways to go.

I’ll leave the intro short, since I haven’t been to sleep yet and games are starting soon. Would like to be awake again by the time Mount Union and Ohio Northern take the field.

As always, comment on what you see!

After today the only teams that won’t have played are in the NESCAC, so the Division III football season will be in full swing.

I’ll be at St. John’s, where the No. 11 Johnnies host UW-Eau Claire. Keith McMillan is in Massachusetts, where Curry will play host to Widener. And you’ll be wherever you are, of course, so keep us up to date, even if it’s in front of your computer surfing through games. (That’s also one of my favorite places from which to track Division III football.)

We went through the other big games yesterday in the Triple Take, so I won’t repeat. But there are intriguing games in the Liberty League, especially, with Hobart traveling to Dickinson, Union hosting No. 8 Ithaca, and RPI opening its brand-new Division III football palace.

Elsewhere, I’ll be interested to see the results of “Air Raid vs. Wishbone” as McMurry hosts Austin College. DePauw’s tumultuous offseason finally comes to an end when the Tigers travel to Anderson. Could this year’s Augsburg/Wartburg game live up to the last two years? That seems hard to imagine, but it’s one of a handful of intriguing night games, along with McMurry/Austin, East Texas Baptist/Redlands, UW-Platteville/Dubuque, Buffalo State/St. John Fisher and even Carroll/Beloit.

Chime in with what you know, plus follow us on Twitter, since we’ll be following everyone else and passing along the most interesting tidbits that way.

Our coverage of football has changed just a little bit from last September to this September, and how the schools themselves cover football has made a bit of a shift as well.

If you follow D3football on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/d3football) you’ll get a good number of instant updates from us on game day, assuming we have a good connection to the Net wherever we are. You could follow every school’s Twitter feed, like we do, but we’ll make sure the most important stuff gets tweeted back out in your direction.

Today there are nearly two dozen games featuring live video streams, almost all of them free, including the Mount Union-St. John Fisher game at 4 p.m. Eastern — a perfect bridge between the early kickoffs and the night games. And in the preseason, a lot of schools put together recaps of practices and training camp, including videos.

The times are changing, no doubt.

I’ll be at the Luther-St. Olaf game this afternoon, Keith McMillan will be at Buff State-TCNJ, Gordon Mann will be at Johns Hopkins-Delaware Valley and Ryan Tipps will be at Franklin and Marshall-Washington and Lee. We’ll have photographers out and about as well, with Ryan Coleman at Maranatha Baptist-Martin Luther. That’s notable to me to find out how many players dress for Maranatha today. Last year, readers of Kickoff know, they dressed just 22 players for one of their games.

Here on the Game Day blog post we set the scene and then turn it loose. What games are you watching? What’s the big moments we should be paying attention to? Hit us in the comments.

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