Author Archives: Pat Coleman

Game Day: The best two hours of the year

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McMurry
Josh Chatman is one of 10 players to catch a TD pass and one of 20 McMurry players to catch a pass this season.
McMurry athletics photo by Gerald Ewing

Around 2:00 p.m. ET, it will get really crazy. With nine noon games, six 1 p.m. games and a 3 p.m. game, things get really intense, and they do every year.

Some of the noon games come down to the wire. Some will be upsets. Some will have last-minute victories. The dust we’ll settle, we’ll move names forward in the brackets, and then the 1 p.m. games will come down as well. Follow it all here, with our live chat, on the scoreboard, and all the rest.

Follow with the live chat below, and use the #d3fb hashtag to join the conversation as well.

ATN Podcast: What they got right

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Mickey Inns
Linfield has gone 9-0 with Mickey Inns at quarterback this season.
Photo by Rusty Rae

Usually we have some complaints about the bracket, so much so that there’s a category in the annual predictions column asking what the committee blew.

It’s not so much this time. There are a couple things that would have been better if fixed, and we’ll touch on those, but it’s not a deal-breaker. Unless, say, you’re Hobart.

Pat Coleman and Keith McMillan run down the brackets, give their surprises, look at some of the great matchups potentially ahead in the second and third weekends and have just a word of warning for UW-Whitewater fans. That and much more in this week’s Around the Nation Podcast. Scroll to the bottom and read the tags to see which teams are mentioned in this week’s show.

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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

Plus, here’s this week’s D3football.com reports. Keith checks in from Randolph-Macon, Ryan Tipps from Wabash-DePauw and more.

Reaction to the brackets

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Well, this was a stunner! A positive one, but a stunner nonetheless. Just going to paste in some quick analysis and open the floor.

In short, no Endicott in this field and no Case, with St. John Fisher and Illinois College replacing them. So on a day in which we finally officially gave up on getting a two-loss at-large team into the field over a one-loss team, the NCAA finally did the right thing.

The NCAA also sprung for an extra flight, sending Cal Lutheran back to Linfield and giving Redlands a trip to Mary Hardin-Baylor.

The top eight seeds, teams placed at either end of the four brackets: UW-Whitewater and Salisbury (top left), St. Thomas and Delaware Valley (bottom left), Mary Hardin-Baylor and Wesley (top right), and Wabash and Mount Union (bottom right).

This is a bracket similar to the ones the NCAA Division III mens basketball committee has been putting out the past couple of years. Mount Union is in a bracket with three other north teams, two west teams and two south teams. Hobart is essentially a seven seed, sent to Wesley for the first round and would fly if it won that game.

Opening the floor. Thoughts?