D3football Daily Dose

I came out to the East Coast in August of 1990, 17 years old, about to start my freshman year in college.

And other than going home for the summer between that and my sophomore year at Catholic University, I’ve been out here ever since.

It’s been a long 18 years; it’s time to go home. We’re leaving Northern Virginia in August and moving to Minneapolis.

I’ll miss the vast number of Division III schools there are here on the East Coast, where I can basically stumble over a D-III school every 20 minutes on the highway. I’ve seen 98 Division III football teams play, as near as I can tell, and been in 58 teams’ stadiums. Now I’m looking forward to seeing a whole new group. I’ve seen only three WIAC teams and stadiums, and St. John’s is the only MIAC stadium I’ve ever been in.

There will be a lot of new things to experience.

Like flying to the Stagg Bowl.

So I apologize that it’s been a bit of a quiet offseason around here. We’ve spent a lot of time repairing, painting and packing. I’ll keep the same day job, as sports editor of the Verizon Central Newsroom, and simply work from there instead of Virginia.

Thanks to everyone who has been so hospitable over my years here on the East Coast. Hundreds of SIDs and coaches have made time to help us cover Division III in the past decade. Now I’ll get a different perspective, meet new people and spend a lot more time on I-94 and I-35 rather than I-95 and I-66.

Our friends at the Double-A Zone have asked the question, Who chooses Division III? It’s the NCAA’s official blog, so you have to take that into consideration, but unlike many ways in which the NCAA deals with Division III (can’t get its own playoff brackets right, doesn’t know how many Pool C bids there should be), the blog has a healthy knowledge of Division III, run by former Brandeis baseball player Josh Centor.

In light of the fact that Division II has spent a fair amount of time over the past few years trying to find its identity, there’s now apparently some sort of buzz. For me, I’m not sure what “I Chose Division II” actually means, while Division I’s identity is fairly clear and Division III has staked out the student-athlete high ground as the only purely amateur division (non-scholarship) in college athletics.

However, there seems to be some discussion from commenters, not much of it well-informed, as to what Division III’s identity is. Those people need a good dose of D3sports.com readers to fill them in. (I myself have a comment that is awaiting moderator approval.)

Meanwhile, the core question: Should Division III do more to brand itself? Speaking as someone who has done most of the branding of Division III over the past decade, absolutely. I look at what Division II has done in this area over the past few years, in terms of fancy promotional spots, games on CBS College Sports and football playoffs on ESPN, a full package of streaming video broadcasts of football and basketball, and I am definitely jealous. All Division III fans should be.

Division III should be branding itself. It should not be left to people like us here at D3sports.com or Steve Clay and D3Cast or Robb Modica and D3Scoreboard.

We just wasted a bunch of time and money figuring out Division IV was not the place we really wanted to be. So let’s spruce up our house a little bit while we’re here. Let’s show the rest of college fandom that this is not just glorified intramurals. Let’s get our games out there for people to see.

Why did you choose Division III? Go tell them.

And tell us below.

In a sports world plagued by stories of athletes using performance enhancing drugs, it’s natural to wonder whether this is a problem for Division III athletics, too. Rich Scarcella of the Reading (Pa.) Eagle looks at how Albright College is addressing this concern.

While the NCAA tests Division I and II football and baseball players for steroids and has year round tests to determine what other scholarship sports have a higher risk of steroid use, that level of testing hasn’t extended to Division III. There is random testing at NCAA playoff events and a pilot program from the NCAA to address the problem outside of the postseason.

The cost of testing and a conventional belief that non-scholarship athletes have less incentive to use performance enhancing drugs are two reasons given for less testing at this level. But 2006 events at UW-Stout and a 2005 NCAA survey in which Division III athletes reported the highest levels of amphetamine use (see page 12) have called that conventional wisdom into question.

As noted in the Reading Eagle article, the NCAA has a pilot program that tests athletes year-round for performance enhancing and recreational drugs, including marijuana. Alcohol is only tested for certain sports, like rifle shooting. Because it’s essentially a fact-finding study, there are no sanctions for testing positive.

But Albright has gone considerably farther. There are sanctions for testing positive with a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. A missed or refused test is considering a positive result. And alcohol is a tested substance. The Albright athletes interviewed had a divided opinion on the testing.

Sophomore running back Nate Romig says, “At the Division III level a college can’t give money to someone to play football…At Division I and II, colleges are paying you to play by giving out scholarships. They can do what they want to do to those athletes. They can test. I’m paying my way here. I do feel that my privacy is being invaded to a point. It is an infringement. I have teammates who feel the same way.” Despite the reservations, Romig also feels the testing should be adopted at other schools.

Athletic Director Steve George points out that the divided opinion isn’t confined to the athletes. “I’m not sure we had the support from the other side of the street (administration). On a college campus, there’s a liberal point of view that students should be allowed to experiment and to be able to find their way. When I came over to the athletic department, we had some issues.”

Personally I like randomly testing athletes for performance enhancing drugs throughout the year. If you’re trying to police this kind of drug use, you should cover off season workouts. And I like testing for recreational drugs during the sports season.

I’m less clear on testing for recreational drugs in the off season. Though morally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, does a basketball player or football player represent a college any more than any other student? If you’re going to test the athletes, why not other groups, too?

I’m no NFL expert and I steadfastly do not claim to be. All I know is that it seems from sheer numbers that Division III has had a banner draft and free agent season.

Rob Rodriguez, the Christopher Newport defensive back who was a senior in 2006, got his name added to the list and will be in the Kansas City Chiefs’ minicamp this weekend. That means nearly a dozen new D-III players will be in camps along with the two draftees. And we had two draftees for the second year in a row.

The D-III/NFL connection was looking a little light in recent years, after Ethan Brooks, R.J. Bowers, R-Kal Truluck and Bill Schroeder left the game. But Fred Jackson was a nice addition to the NFL contingent last season and Rodriguez is another alumnus who has stuck with the game. Former UW-Whitewater tight end Pete Schmitt is working out with the Washington Redskins during their offseason period and is in their minicamp this weekend after entering training camp with the team last year. John Carroll’s London Fletcher continues to carry the flag for Division III players in the league and Trinity (Texas) grad Jerheme Urban got some notice as an Arizona Cardinal last season.

Won’t argue with it and won’t try to explain it. Just hope Division III fans can enjoy the ride.

Whoa … so it’s been a while since we wrote a blog post on football, I know, but wanted to let people know we haven’t given up on it.

There’s been a bunch of little initiatives in the works here and I wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to.

We’ve been building out the D3sports.com Network a little bit at a time. A year ago, Jim Dixon brought his existing baseball site into the network and D3baseball.com was born. This year we’re going to have a similar situation as Jim Matson (known as Hiker Jim on our message boards) is bringing his love of soccer to the network and will be running D3soccer.com. (Contact me if you are interested in joining the D3soccer news team, by the way.)

We’ve added a jobs site, replacing the job boards that we had before. Our goal is to eventually have listings for all sports, as well as administrative jobs such as AD and SID positions. If you have a job to post, click here. We won’t be listing just Division III jobs, but any job that a D-III coach or player could reasonably aspire too, so we welcome high school jobs and college jobs from other divisions.

And we’ve made some interim upgrades to D3sports.com, which encompasses the top news stories from all of our sites. We’ve also added RSS feeds for all of our sites, which you can access from D3sports.com. That will deliver the latest Division III stories straight to your RSS reader. Here’s the link to the D3football.com RSS feed. In order to make room for this D3sports move, we moved the message boards to their own domain: D3boards.com.

Plus, we’ve been slowly but surely putting the football schedules into the system and we’re about two-thirds of the way there.

So while we haven’t been blogging, we’ve still been working. Sorry for the silence.

Alright, well, Keith McMillan filed more than 12,000 words just for this part of the Around the Nation 2007 Year in Review. I’d be scared to count how many words he wrote this season, or just in the Year in Review. Or even to copy and paste them all back into Word and let Bill Gates do the work.

Yes, I know those of you who still write checks have been writing ‘2008′ without fail for some time now, but it takes a while to write 20,000 words.

So there were many, many memories included. (My former copy desk chief would ding me for repeating the adjective, but shoot, it’s 1 a.m. and I don’t work there anymore.) There were memories that I was glad to read about, and others I’d rather forget. (Hello? ’80s music anyone?) And it’s always good to get the retrospective/reality check on the preseason poll, our Kickoff predictions, and the like.

But no simple (hah!) column can fully wrap up the 2007 season. I mean, we didn’t even get to read about how Keith didn’t make it to Catholic in time to see his alma mater finish beating my alma mater back in September — a game which ended up being between teams that combined for 13 wins instead of what we thought might be more like five.

So certainly you have memories that we haven’t considered. Or ones we’ve forgotten. Or perhaps you just have a good story to make up and try to slip past us.

Whatever your reason, we throw the floor open for the final Around the Nation of the 2007 season. But nope of the 2008 year. There’s that copy editor again.

D3football.com started hearing rumblings about Pacific starting football more than three years ago, saw an action plan shortly thereafter and a start date of 2007 was suggested.

But 2007, not to mention 2005, has come and gone, and the Boxers are still on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the Northwest Conference has found itself an affiliate member and will get an automatic bid in 2008, though Pacific, in Forest Grove, Ore., would have given it an automatic bid the moment it took the field.

As you recall, the NWC was not invited to the 2007 playoffs.

So where is Pacific? Catdomealumni.com, the Linfield fan site run by Ryan Carlson, decided to find out. Read their interview with Pacific athletic director Ken Schumann.

And who will be starting football? St. Scholastica, in Duluth, Minn., takes the field this fall, with Castleton State, in Castleton, Vt., in 2009. Lake Erie and Lincoln are also starting football but are leaving Division III for Division II.

It’s Monday at the NCAA convention, the day in which Division III member schools vote on the various legislative proposals.

It’s not a day in which they will vote on whether to split into two divisions. We have at least another year before that happens, and perhaps more, since we’ve heard discussion that it may be delayed from its planned 2009 convention date. But there are other proposals on the docket as well that will have an impact on Division III.

Division III members voted overwhelmingly to ban text messaging to prospective recruits. Or, more specifically, they voted to limit electronic transmission of correspondence with recruits to e-mail and faxes. So, no text messages, no Facebook/MySpace, no IMs, etc. It passed by a vote of 362-72 with two abstentions, with good turnout from Division III schools.

A proposal to allow student-athletes to work at schools’ camps passed overwhelmingly as well, 425-13 with two abstentions.

Further proposals of note got voted down, then withdrawn. A proposal to allow provisional Division III members to be counted toward meeting a league’s seven-member automatic bid requirements failed 252-185-7. This was a proposed amendment to another proposal that was then withdrawn. Another proposal, to lift the ban on new single-sport conferences, was pulled from the agenda. This primarily affects women’s ice hockey but could have a football impact as well.

There’s more news that primarily affects basketball, which we’ve covered in the D3hoops.com Daily Dose.

It’s important to note that, while many people assume that rules in Division III come down from the NCAA national office as if engraved on stone tablets, in fact Division III schools vote on all legislation and the membership shapes the rules.

Here’s something impossible to do. Let’s compare the experience I had between the Stagg Bowl and Orange Bowl.

I’ll stick to the tailgating and fan experience. You can read about the game on ESPN.com I just read the Andrew Reed column naming Stone Station as the runner up for best tailgate. I must agree. Although my comparisons were limited to CNU tailgates, which were unique since I was fortunate enough to tailgate with families of two players, a Virginia Tech game in a monsoon on a Thursday night against Boston College (the other BC), and finally the Orange Bowl.

The intensity in the parking lot at the Orange Bowl was more evident. I think this was due to the sheer number of fans in attendance. I was in a predominately VT parking lot. However there were a few token Kansas fans. Tailgates consisted mostly of a few tents and grills. Impressive, since fans had to travel more than 1,000 miles to get there. Many rental cars were adorned with turkey heads and VT magnets.

A large black Denali pulled up next to us with many accessories. The parking lot at Dolphin Stadium was very tailgate friendly. The VT fans in the Denali were not. At first, when they pulled about and started unloading, I had memories of Stone Station at the Stagg Bowl as they unloaded food, grills and tables. The memories faded quickly. The Denali owner was more into status, such as a Tracvision on his truck and a wide screen TV that ran on generator power and retracted into his vehicle somewhere.

Apparently, this guy flies to the games and has an employee drive the truck to the games. I wasn’t impressed. They were a little snobbish and not very friendly. The Stone Station guys were more into sharing fun with everyone around. It didn’t matter who you were, just stop by, say hello and have some good food with new friends.

The VT guys just don’t get it. The Stone Station food was probably much better. I can’t tell for sure since I wasn’t invited to taste the VT food. Some Kansas fans parked behind us and fired up a classic Webber grill. I was thinking they had the right idea. But then, they tossed whatever meat they had on the grill while the flames were still shooting 3 feet into the air less than foot from the gas tank on the rental car. I guess in Kansas they don’t wait for the charcoal to glow before cooking. Maybe they like their medium rare meat crunchy on the outside. I began to chuckle at all the tailgate novices. Stone Station is in a much higher division!

The intensity inside the stadium was great. The flyover was loud and caught many by surprise. I was wondering if they would have one since it was raining and 57 degrees. I remember CNU’s very first game in 2001 was to have a flyover; but the weather had other ideas. Yep, that’s right 57 degrees in Miami. It was damp cold and very windy. I was actually colder there than at the Stagg Bowl and I was equally prepped, if you know what I mean.

The one thing that I kept thinking while watching the crowds and fans and bands was, “this doesn’t mean anything.” It’s not a championship game. It’s not a game leading to a championship. In this game even the winner goes home without a championship. I was trying to imagine the atmosphere in this game if it were a regional championship, or if the winner went to play for the D-I title. Just put the 11 conference champs and 5 at large teams together and let them duke it out on the field. The computer formula geeks will find something else to do. The sponsors and TV contracts and alum wallets will follow. But that’s a different story.

One final note on my very random thought process on this blog. I was looking around the parking lot and at the game. I saw a lot of VT orange and maroon and a lot of Kansas blue. I didn’t see much else. At the Stagg Bowl I saw colors from Wesley, UMHB, UWW, MUC, CNU, Bridgewater, and even a Wabash flash. I saw dance teams walk by to chat and take pictures (thanks girls, my wife loved it!!), a marching band eating Stone Station “fixins”, and purple fans handing out purple liquid in syringes. I saw Wesley and Bridgewater QBs tossing the ball in the parking lot, competing as usual. The D3football.com guys came by to chat.

At the Orange Bowl I saw fans cook for themselves and a few friends and family, walk into the game, cheer, and walk out to get back to the hotel. The fan camaraderie wasn’t there like it is in D-III.

Through it all I enjoyed myself. I was with family – nieces, nephews, in-laws. My son was with me. I wore a VT hat and a Kansas shirt (my nephew is a Jayhawk). I’m sitting in the Hilton in West Palm Beach writing this, while my son snores during his nap, cellphone vibrating away. We spent the afternoon today driving away from an angry Rhino! No, I don’t have any purple liquid syringes from the Stagg Bowl in my room. We went to a Safari park and got between two females and the Alpha male. I laughed so hard, hearing my son taking pictures in the back seat and yelling, “Dad! Dad! Dad!”

And now the trip must end tomorrow. A final and painful plane ride waits. On the way down, I had a head cold. My left ear hasn’t unclogged yet. I had a fever during the game (that’s why I felt colder in Miami than I did in the rain in Salem), and as I write this tears are streaming from my left eye. I’m thinking I have a bad infection going on.

Or maybe I just miss my buddies Llamaguy, Skoaltrain and the rest of the gang!

Although there were 5,099 in paid attendance at the Stagg Bowl this past weekend, and many who traveled a long way despite not having their team there to root for, it’s highly unlikely anyone drove further in pursuit of college football in 2007 than Andrew Reed.

Reed, who writes for SI On Campus, put more than 20,000 miles on his odometer this season in pursuit of the ultimate road trip. Reed had 17 games on his itinerary, 15 of them between Division I teams (including Princeton/Harvard).

The focus? Fans and tailgating. That’s why it’s not overly surprising that the other two games involved Bridgewater, in a sense. He was at the Bridgewater/Guilford game on Oct. 13 and, of course, the Stagg Bowl. He’ll be writing a book about his odyssey.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time on the road in pursuit of football (though not Ohioo State/Michigan or Florida/Georgia), I know it can make for a long season. But I didn’t drive nearly 20,000 miles this season. Racked up some frequent flyer miles, but Mount Union was my longest drive.

I look forward to the book.

Gordon Mann interviewed Reed on our pregame show on Saturday about his journey, see the player below. It’s a good listen. And be sure to visit his blog, too.

 

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