This time of year pretty much every Division III team is optimistic. Or at least, that’s what they say publicly. If you read season previews in their unedited form, eventually you’ll begin to believe every team has 18 returning starters, is poised for a breakthrough, looking to build on last year’s success, returning to tradition, etc. It’s a wonder everyone doesn’t finish 7-3 or 8-2.
Try to figure out how they determine number of returning starters. It should really count members of the starting 22 who started half of the previous season’s games. Special teams should be noted separately. But of course, not everyone does this. Sometimes a “returning starter” is anyone who started a game last year. Sometimes schools count up to five special teams starters: kicker, punter, long snapper, punt return, kick return. These are all crucial positions but including them in the same count as the other 22 can be misleading.
Here’s some other examples of preview-speak:
Keep a special eye on phrases like this. We tend to edit those lines out unless the conference really is always tough, like the WIAC, OAC, CCIW, NWC, etc. But oftentimes conferences aren’t all that tough — they’re just tough because the teams writing this aren’t that good. I’ve seen this written about the “always-tough NEFC.”
This is a telltale sign of a school whose coach or SID has been given a hard time in the past by parents of bench players who complain that their son isn’t mentioned in the preview. Note to parents: You aren’t doing yourself, your son or the program any favors by complaining about things like this. Be realistic about your son’s chances. If he deserves to play, he will. I don’t know many coaches who don’t want to win.
There’s only a couple reasons why an entire sophomore class gets a lot of experience, and neither of them are good. Either the team was so bad last year that the freshmen got a lot of experience in blowouts or there were a lot of injuries that year. (There’s also junior varsity experience, which is a different animal.)
Honestly, at this point, anyone is an All-American candidate. This means a little more around the end of October.
If you replace this with “nervous” the meaning usually doesn’t change much. Usually the line separating optimistic and cautiously optimistic is drawn between returning 15 starters and 10 starters.
If a program has truly reached the status where they reload instead of rebuild, then we already know that. Anyone else trying to claim that is probably suffering from a bout of wishful thinking.
So just keep those things in the back of your mind and you’ll enjoy season previews a good bit more. It’s a little more than two months until kickoff!
Are you trying to say that NOT every team is as good as the SID thinks? (note the sarcasm) rev
with that out of the way we can all begin packing the bandwagons for our favorite teams
Oh, I’m a huge fan of preview-speak. My favorite is when all references to things that happened in the past are made in future tense.
“After starting the season with two wins, they would go on to lose their next eight.”
Would they?
Then there are teams that tell you how good they have been in the past. Thomas More’s preview talks about their “storied” past. Two playoff appearances in 14 years is apparently all it takes …
Almost as funny of some of the season previews are the season reviews.
This classic jem comes from Lewis and Clark’s 2004 season in review:
“The 2004 Pioneer football (1-8 overall, 0-5 NWC) team led the Northwest Conference in big plays in 2004.”
Come on…….how bad are you reaching when you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for that positive spin.
Our tech guy finally got around to something I’ve been bugging him for for a couple of years — the ability to access old season previews.
Now from the main preview page you can access previous years’ previews. We started running them in 2000.
http://www.d3football.com/preview.php
OK, so I’ve read a bunch of these. Some of them are painful. Try this sentence on for size. I’ve removed the quarterback’s name to protect the identity of the school.
“This year protecting (John Doe) in the pocket and making holes for the backfield will be a job for a mostly upper class conglomerate of offensive lineman.”
This I turned into a six-word sentence, one which didn’t mention corporate mergers, use a singular in place of plural, overdescribe the role of the offensive line or refer to their disposable income level. 🙂