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ATN 388: Upon further review …

You’ve gotten the stop, pounced on a fumble, you’re celebrating a key win to open up your conference slate. Only then do the officials huddle up, and without the benefit of replay, overturn the call originally made on the field and give the team which by all rights lost the game another chance.

You’d be forgiven, perhaps, if it took you more than the customary 24 hours to get that emotion out of your system, to turn the page.

If you were Hope, which had defeat snatched from the jaws of victory on Saturday afternoon, in a turn of events so unexpected that it has garnered 211,000 views as of this writing on our X account, you could be excused. But the Flying Dutchmen will show up for the 6:30 team meeting with head coach Peter Stuursma today and be asked to turn the page.

No, the MIAA can’t overturn the result — they tried to with a basketball game back in 2001. Will the conference issue a statement about the officiating at the end of the game? They should. The answer to our question to the conference office came while we were recording, and you’ll hear our reaction as the response came in, live.

Coach Stuursma joins us to talk about the play and the aftermath on this edition of the podcast in Fast Five.

Haven’t seen the play? It’s this one below.

Not the only big game, don’t get us wrong. Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas dive into the Christopher Newport-Susquehanna game, the interesting ways in which quarterback Josh Ehrlich and running back Rahshan La Mons were used, and the body language of the two teams down the stretch. And it seemed super likely that the Washington & Jefferson Presidents weren’t going to start the season 0-3, and we look deeply at their game with Grove City from Saturday night.

Plus, we’ll take four your mailbag questions about the Top 25. Why do teams on bye move? What do voters do with Alma and Hope?

Patrick and Greg Thomas hand out game balls, Logan Hansen talks about which conferences have a better than 70% chance of getting an at-large team into the playoffs, we go around each region for even more stories and much more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Mentioned link below:

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

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Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by Kai Foote – NPU media; W&J athletics file; Lynne Powe, Hope athletics

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ATN Podcast 387: 3-0 after three weeks

For some teams, a 3-0 start is precisely in the plan. For others, 3-0 is perhaps a pipe dream, or a first-time occurrence.

In this week’s edition of the podcast, we talk about a few of each as we wrap up Week 3 of the Division III football season.

Johns Hopkins was given just about a 50% chance of starting the season 3-0, with some top-flight competition on the docket. But they got the job done, and we learned a little bit about the Blue Jays in the process. We’ll tell you what we’ve seen and coach Dan Wodicka will do the same.

UW-Whitewater vaulted itself into the same top echelon as the rest of the WIAC contenders with a big win down at Mary Hardin-Baylor. What did we see that bodes well for the Warhawks and what does this do to the Cru’s playoff chances? We’ll discuss.

Plus, a number of teams are surprising at 3-0. How about Calvin? The Knights are in just their second season of varsity football and got to 3-0 in dramatic fashion on the road, against a team from a tough conference. How about Hampden-Sydney? The Tigers moved to 3-0 and did it in dominant fashion, and on the ground. And Lewis & Clark, you know, the school that hired away Linfield offensive coordinator Brett Elliott, the Gagliardi Trophy-winning quarterback, and made him head coach? The Pioneers got the job done with defense on Saturday, and Greg Thomas talks with Elliott in our Fast Five.

Plus, we’ll dive in and take four of your mailbag questions, about the SAA, how many teams we think are in the top tier of Division III, whether D-III’s wins against D-II schools and an FCS program mean that Division III is getting better, and what’s up with Coast Guard.

Patrick and Greg Thomas hand out game balls, Logan Hansen talks about which teams have a better than 50% chance of making the playoffs as an at-large team if needed, we go around each region for the happy and sad stories and much more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

All that and more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Mentioned link below:

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by David Morris, UMHB athletics; Ashley Sap, Calvin athletics; Johns Hopkins athletics

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ATN Podcast 385: Whatever you do, don’t overreact

Finally, games! A huge week of Division III football, with a couple of thrilling upsets, and more than 200 Division III teams taking the field, means there’s a lot to talk about.

So, we in the media were admonished not to overreact, huh? All we have to do is look at our social media feeds if we want to see overreactions run wild, but we’ll play Michael Wilbon’s game. We decided to take four big storylines from this week’s games and decide what the appropriate level of reaction is, and what might constitute an overreaction. So, we take on:

  • The starting debut of Mount Union quarterback Mikey Maloney
  • The plight of the freshman starting quarterback in general
  • The as-of-right-now still unresolved end of the Case-Rowan game
  • The WIAC getting off to a 7-0 start

Plus, we talk with Belhaven quarterback Brock Morris, who lost his dad over the offseason. His dad was also a college quarterback and … well, we’ll let Brock tell the rest in our Fast Five segment, a five-minute interview in our regular season podcasts because it’s hard to carve out more time than that. I mean, have you seen how long this episode is?

Patrick and Greg had content on-site from Belhaven-Millsaps, Catholic-McDaniel, Susquehanna-Union and Lake Forest-Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. They also hand out game balls, highlight the interesting stats from Week 1, and go around each region to spotlight even more games from Week 1 and start to look ahead to Week 2.

There’s this and more in the latest edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Mailbag topics include: Should North Central be on upset watch next week vs. UW-Oshkosh? Are we already regretting some of our answers to the 20 Questions that we posed just a week and a half ago? And what’s the best stadium food we’ve experienced?

And there was so much bonus content this week. Links below:

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by Utica athletics; Wade Gardner, d3photography.com; Franklin athletics photo by Ian Shaw