McMurry athletic director Bill Libby announced this morning the resignation of football coach Donny Gray. Defensive coordinator Jimmy Edwards has been named interim head coach and McMurry men's basketball coach and soon-to-be athletic director Ron Holmes will be in charge of the search process for a new coach.

Gray went 2-18 in two years as head coach at McMurry. Before being hired as head coach in November 2006, Gray spent six years (2001-06) as an assistant coach at McMurry.

"Coach Gray has done a good job of recruiting and emphasizing academic performance," Libby said. "McMurry wishes the best for Coach Gray and his family as they make decisions about the future."

Edwards has 38 years of coaching experience on the high school and college levels. He has 22 years of head-coaching experience at the high school ranks where he tallied a 169-71-2 record. Edwards has been the McMurry defensive coordinator for the past two seasons, and he was the defensive line coach for McMurry during the 2005 and 2006 seasons.

For the 12th time in 16 seasons, St. John's led Division III in reported attendance. The Johnnies averaged 7,694 fans per game and attracted 46,161 spectators during six home games in 2008. SJU's average attendance of 7,694 per game outdistanced second-place UW-Whitewater at 5,387 fans per game.

Very few schools keep precise attendance figures, and most figures are round-number estimates, often inflated. St. John's home games had attendances of 11,907; 9,436; 9,069; 7,963; 4,169 and 3,617.

The Johnnies' gate helped the MIAC rank first among Division III conferences for the fourth consecutive year with an average of 3,563 spectators per game. In 45 games this season, the MIAC attracted a total of 160,335 spectators. Concordia-Moorhead also made Division III's top 10, with 3,956 fans per game, while St. Olaf was right behind with 3,837.

The American Southwest Conference ranked second with 2,615 fans per game. Mississippi College led the league with 4,978 fans per game, which ranked it third nationally. Mary Hardin-Baylor was in the top 20, averaging 3,354 fans per game, while Hardin-Simmons (2,870) and East Texas Baptist (2,566) placed in the top 50 out of 236 teams.

The Ohio Athletic Conference (2,564), Old Dominion Athletic Conference (2,516) and Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (2,497) rounded out the top five leagues. After Mississippi College, Wabash (4,715 average) finished fourth, while McDaniel (4,544) reported the fifth-most fans per game.

Zach Swirczynski, a sophomore at Austin College, died Monday night after a pickup basketball game on campus, a school spokesman confirmed to the Associated Press.

Swirczynski, who played fullback for the Kangaroos and got 30 carries last season, "was just playing basketball with a bunch of guys and he just tensed up, took one big breath and went down," teammate Scooter Means told the Sherman (Texas) Herald Democrat. "Then he started shaking like it was a seizure or something. Our trainer came right over and started doing CPR."

He was transported to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was 20.