Sometimes things get clearer, sometimes they get more muddy. Saturday’s two big upsets gave us one of each. Readers of the Triple Take might have suspected Willamette would lose — they were picked as one of the most likely Top 25 upsets — but nobody even bothered to raise the possibility Ohio Northern might beat North Central.

Is that what happens when a coach gets all offseason to game plan for one game? Or has the personnel and talent shifted so much between the programs in question?

Keith McMillan and Pat Coleman discuss that, and much, much more in this week’s first Around the Nation podcast.

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You can load the podcast page in iTunes or can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3football.com/dailydose/?feed=podcast

ATN podcast · Baldwin-Wallace · Buffalo State · Concordia-Moorhead · Franklin · Gallaudet · Keith McMillan · McMurry · Merchant Marine · Mount Union · North Central · Ohio Northern · Pat Coleman · St. John's · TCNJ · Trinity (Texas) · UW-River Falls · UW-Whitewater · Willamette

No, this isn’t a listing of the 238 teams in order — only Kickoff subscribers get that. But Keith McMillan and I thought it might be interesting to take you guys through the process of how we rank teams, discuss why we do so, and the like.

Why do some teams make big jumps from where they ended last year to where they start this year?
How do you rank a brand-new team anywhere but last?
Why do you guys like Panera Bread so much?

We answer those questions and more in the 2009 season’s first Around the Nation podcast.

For those of you who are new, Keith and I sit down, usually by phone, every week and wrap up the week that was, spotlighting the interesting trends and giving you our first analysis of the past week’s games. On Saturday and Sunday we report the news; on Monday we analyze it in the Around the Nation Podcast.

You can load the podcast page in iTunes or can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3football.com/dailydose/?feed=podcast

Or you can click the play button below to listen.

Around the Nation Podcast [ 18:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Around the Nation · Keith McMillan · kickoff · Panera Bread · Pat Coleman · podcast

There are plenty of teams we can point to in the early going this season who are playing poorly. Three of them got upset on Saturday. So while we talk about what happened in the West Region this weekend, there are also some teams who are looking good, even better than expected, through this past week’s games.

Keith McMillan and Pat Coleman take a look at those storylines and more in this week’s Around the Nation podcast.

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Around the Nation Podcast [ 24:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Around the Nation · Bethel · Central · Christopher Newport · Concordia-Moorhead · Keith McMillan · Pat Coleman · podcast · Salisbury · St. John Fisher · St. John's · Wartburg · Willamette

The Around the Nation podcast is back for a second season and this year, with Keith McMillan and I on opposite ends of the Division III landscape, it’s presented us some new challenges. Before, Keith and I always recorded together, in the same place, but now he’s in Washington, D.C., and I’m in Minneapolis.

So it takes some technological stitching together and timing and such we haven’t completely gotten down yet. But we’ll work on that more next week.

Hopefully the analysis of Week 1 is the important thing, since that’s what we do with our weekly podcast discussion on Monday mornign. Such as, what do you do if you’re a good team and you lost to a better team this week? Or lost to a bad team? Where does a team go from here after its first game?

What did we learn about St. John Fisher? What can we expect from UW-Whitewater? What’s it like getting a long losing streak off your back? All that and more in this week’s Around the Nation podcast.

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Around the Nation Podcast [ 28:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Around the Nation · Hardin-Simmons · Keith McMillan · Mount Union · podcast · St. John Fisher · UW-La Crosse · UW-Whitewater