Monthly Archives: July 2008

Wabash always ranks

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Every year Princeton Review releases a set of rankings that colleges trumpet (“One of the Top Schools in the Country!”) or down play (“Rankings, schmankings”). Here is a quick look at which Division III schools cracked the lists related to sports. I wouldn’t take them too seriously after seeing who made the list of places where intercollegiate sports is supposedly unpopular. But they might help people pass the time through a slow offseason.

    Students pack the stadiums

1. University of Florida
14. Wabash College

    Best athletic facilities

1. University of Maryland
3. Wabash College
20. St. Lawrence University

    Intercollegiate sports unpopular or nonexistent

1. Eugene Lang College (NY)
14. University of Chicago
15. NYU
16. SUNY-Purchase
17. Harvey Mudd College (part of Claremont-Mudd-Scripps athletics)
20. Emerson College

Note: Originally I had shown St. John’s (MN) on this list. The website now says St. John’s (NM). I’m not sure if I read it wrong or the site had the letters of the state transposed and fixed it. I’ll assume its the former and apologize for my mistake. I still question the credence of this list given the inclusion of NYU.

    Jock Schools

1. Clemson University
3. Wabash College

Incidentally Wabash was also ranked #3 in best career/job placement services behind Northeastern (MA) and Claremont McKenna (CA). You can look at the all the rankings, including those not related to sports here.

Opening weekend, who’s with me?

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I keep going back and forth as to whether I can manage it but I’m tempted to try this Week 1 tripleheader, taking advantage of my new Minneapolis home base.

Friday night, it would be NAIA quarterfinalist St. Xavier at defending Division III champion UW-Whitewater, a 7 p.m. CT start. Then Saturday morning (yes, morning), East Texas Baptist is at St. John’s, 11 a.m. CT kickoff and Saturday night, Hardin-Simmons vs. UW-La Crosse (at Winona State in Minnesota, shaving some travel time) at 7 p.m. CT.

Doable? Sure. Sane? Not without a second driver. So we’ll see.

Of course, with a lot of drive time (or money) you could make it a quadrupleheader and pick up Thursday night games between Springfield and Fitchburg State or Mass Maritime and SUNY-Maritime. East Coasters could take the former, add Nichols at Westfield State or Curry at Worcester State on Friday night, Rowan at Bridgewater State at noon on Saturday and one of a handful of games that night, say, WPI at Mass-Dartmouth and never leave the state of Massachusetts.

If I were still working at NBCSports.com and living in Connecticut, I guess that would be my itinerary.

What we’re reading

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We at D3football.com know we are not the only ones writing interesting stories about Division III football, and even if we had a full-time staff of writers we couldn’t corner the market on everything interesting.

I and Keith McMillan and Gordon Mann especially come across many stories we could never hope to write or do justice, since we all have “real” jobs and such. But we haven’t had an easy way to bring all of those stories to you. Aside from the occasional blog post about a story, which takes more time than we usually have to devote, most just get filed away in the cobwebs of our brains.

However, we’re about to change all that, thanks to a new Web site for journalists called Publish2. One of the features of the site is a tool I’m using to create a feed of stories that I’ve tagged as being of interest. You can always find it on the right-hand rail here in the Daily Dose, and we’ll work on getting it incorporated into our already cluttered front page as well.

The feed is labeled “What we’re reading” and contains stories we’ve tagged that are of interest to us, along with a quick summary of why they might be of interest to you. Currently that box contains stories about what a couple of prominent D-III players are doing after graduation, a feature on incoming College Football Hall of Famer Jim Ballard, a trend story and a player profile. You can see what else is in there beyond the five most recent by clicking on the link at the bottom of the box.

Enjoy!