Behind the All-American team

We posted our 2010 preseason All-America team this morning.

This is the 11th preseason team we’ve compiled and it’s hard to say the process ever gets easier, but I thought I would describe the philosophy and the process.

Four years ago I posted a fairly detailed blog entry about the fraudulence of some preseason All-American teams, which was a specific reaction to one annual All-America team. While that team isn’t selected anymore, our concept still exists: We do not water down our All-America teams.

Every year there are a couple of All-Americans from the previous fall who don’t make the preseason team the next year. That’s because we name four teams to the All-American team and cut it back to two for the next preseason. Sometimes there are more underclassmen returning than would fit in two teams.

This past December we went to an extra step in creating our All-American teams. For the first time, we had the ability to easily and quickly contact all Division III football coaches (thanks, Scoutware!) and solicit their opinions on offensive linemen. Like all All-America selection committees, we have struggled to rate offensive linemen, since they don’t generate easily measurable statistics. And while last year, we asked for coaches’ opinions too late in the game to make the best use of them, we were able to use them for the 2010 preseason team.

And so, the countdown to kickoff continues.

Going camping

Over the next week, thousands of Division III football players will be reporting for camp. There’s no one single reporting date for training camp in Division III football: it’s based on a formula that takes into account not only the date of the first game (Sept. 6, even for those who start on Thursday, Sept. 4) and the first day of classes.

So if your favorite team starts tomorrow and your opening week opponent starts two days later, you’re not supposed to have a leg up. Each school is supposed to have 21 practice opportunities, accounting for two-a-days when permitted before class starts.

As teams report, our reporters are doing their rounds of telephone calls to coaches in order to get the latest information for Kickoff. But I’m thinking about the freshmen coming into their first collegiate camp.

Certainly many of the hundreds of freshmen who will be putting on pads in the next week or so have some idea of what they are getting into, some knowledge that Division III football is like nothing they’ve ever experienced. Others may have been deluded into thinking that Division III is glorified intramurals, that it’s not serious football, that they can dominate just because they were good in high school.

News flash: Everyone here was good in high school. Pretty much everyone started (unless you were Terrelle Pryor’s backup), most were all-conference, many were all-city/region/district and some were all-state. And some have three years on you. So come in with high expectations, but stay grounded … or someone will ground you the moment you put on pads.

We don’t often get the freshman perspective, but there is an incoming player for Colorado College who is already blogging about “The D3 experience.” Recommend checking out Chris Jarmon’s blog to see what he has to say when he reports for camp on Friday.