Last year we ran a series of front-page reader polls asking you who would win each bracket in 2004. Obviously, this type of thing is a popularity contest in a sense, as well as a measure of how many fans each team has that visit the site on a regular basis, but we’re going to look back on reader picks from 2004 anyway.
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Monthly Archives: July 2005
Committee upholds PAC’s two-year wait
The NCAA championships committee has affirmed that the Presidents’ Athletic Conference must wait two years for an automatic bid, just like everyone else, according to a report in the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter.
In April 2005 the league announced it was adding Thomas More as a member, effective the fall of 2005. The conference hoped that the NCAA would waive the two-year waiting period. “It seems the waiting period is designed to monitor newly formed conferences to ensure stability, which we feel is not a concern with the PAC,” said Tori Haring-Smith, president of Washington & Jefferson, at the time.
On a related note, I came across this in the Presidents’ Athletic Conference agreement last night.
Article III. MEMBERSHIP
Section C. Contracts Held By New Members
Contracts held by members at the time of joining the conference are obligations not to be abrogated.
For those of you who aren’t dictionary junkies (I did not know what this word meant either), abrogate means “to abolish, do away with, or annul, especially by authority.” Yet five schools willingly did away with one of their football game contracts for this season anyway.
So the PAC broke its own rules to rush Thomas More into the league, in vain hopes of receiving an automatic bid expressly contrary to Division III rules. And Huntingdon and Montclair State are still paying the price, having been unable to find replacement games.
I’m personally glad this behavior was not rewarded. Breaking 10 contracts in April is not the way to get things done, not in Division III. With St. Vincent headed for the PAC, Seton Hill sounding more likely to move to Division III and even Geneva making noise about coming over from the NAIA, coaches should be wary about scheduling PAC teams for the next few years. Your contract could be next.
Now we are six
Today is the sixth birthday of D3football.com, a site we launched with some trepidation on July 7, 1999.
I had been running Division III Basketball Online, as it was then called, for about a year and a half when I and the others involved in the site at the time, primarily Jim Stout and Ray Martel, decided to do a football site.
I had acquired Division III Basketball Online from the Centennial Conference and commissioner Steve Ulrich for free shortly after the beginning of the 1997-98 season after it had been only rarely updated the final months of the season before and we had started to make headway with it. Early in the 1999 offseason, I approached Ulrich to see if we could purchase Division III Football Online from him, offering to run his ads on the front page instead of ours for the first full season as payment, but he wasn’t interested. (Turns out this would have probably netted about $1,200.) I didn’t really want much of the content on Division III Football Online — I wanted the name, to match our other site, and I wanted the established links to that site to follow to ours.
So we forged ahead with building our own site, but we were worried there would be backlash. Our basketball site was very popular, but here we were encroaching on someone else’s already-established territory. Even though we were about to take Division III football coverage to a new level, we were concerned.
Our plans were grandiose for the time — a page of schedule and results for each of the more than 220 Division III football teams, extensive scoreboard updates on game day, printing every game story that we received, publishing columns from every part of the country. And it was difficult to do because we were trying to keep things quiet — it’s hard enough now to collect all of the Division III football schedules, but think back to the Web sites of six years ago and what was available when.
Also, we couldn’t use the Division III Football Online name, so we decided to name the new site for its URL, D3football.com. And we changed the name of the basketball site to D3hoops.com. Division III Football Online closed up shop after a couple of years, and Ulrich sold his last remaining site, College Lacrosse USA, for what I understand is an obnoxious sum of money before the tech bubble burst. (Kudos.)
Thanks for allowing me to reminisce and for us to have such fun covering Division III football and basketball. It would be nothing without the 25 million front-page visitors we’ve had over that time.