Football might not be the game of stats that baseball is, but it’s a time of year when numbers are plentiful — numbers of recruits and numbers of kids in camp.

When you see published numbers, pass them along with a link. Don’t pass second-hand information, what you heard from your buddies, etc. Give us a link.

To start things off, Maryville (Tenn.) has 129 in camp and 76 freshmen.
St. John’s has 190 at practice, down from 197 last year.
Louisiana College had 102 players report to camp.
Linfield expects 170 when camp opens.

Retired Pacific Lutheran coach Frosty Westering, who led the Lutes to the 1999 Division III national championship, is one of two former Division III coaches being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame this weekend. And he’s still having a profound impact on those who are getting to know of him for the first time. Witness this piece on Westering from the South Bend Tribune.

It reminds us that we had first impressions as well, or at least second impressions in Mark Simon’s post-Stagg Bowl feature from six years ago.

Longtime UW-La Crosse coach Roger Harring, who led the Eagles to the 1992 and 1995 Division III national titles, is in this year’s induction class as well.

As you might have observed, over the past year D3football.com (and to a lesser extent, D3hoops.com) has suffered occasional slowdowns, times at which one site or the other would move at a crawl because of high traffic.

We attempted to alleviate that in February by moving D3hoops.com’s message board, Posting Up, onto a separate server within the same host. While that worked, it was only a temporary measure — we have more planned.

Unfortunately, our message board software itself, which we have been using since Posting Up opened in November 1998, is part of the problem. Although we love Discus because it was written by programmers associated with Hope College, we have outgrown it and it can not support a site of our size.

To this end, we’re changing message board software. We’re also combining Post Patterns with Posting Up and we’re putting the combined message board on a separate server. We believe this will make both D3hoops.com and D3football.com run more smoothly all year.

The new board will also have more modern features, the types of things you’re used to if you use forums on other sites. Your username and password will carry over to the new site and we’ll transfer the posts. To this end, we will temporarily shut down new user registration later in the week, and will shut down the entire board sometime on Saturday evening before the transfer. When all is complete we’ll put up the new link.

If you are registered for both Posting Up and Post Patterns, we are attempting to determine that now so we can combine them into one account, with one post total. We’ll attempt to use your password from Post Patterns, since this sport is more active at the moment.