Author Archives: Pat Coleman

Everyone vote Brett Elliott for Heisman

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It’s one of those times where we need to mobilize the power of Division III fans behind one of its own. The online public voting for the Heisman Trophy is now available, and we’ve managed to get Linfield quarterback Brett Elliott added to the ballot (thanks to correspondent Ron Boerger, who got the process started).

The top three vote-getters in the online voting receive the equivalent of a first-place, second-place and third-place vote in the official ballot tally. Now, we’re coming to this late in the game, so we need to get cracking.

Click here to vote

You can vote from a particular e-mail address once per week. Each vote must be confirmed — they send you a link via e-mail to click on to confirm your vote before it will be counted.

Elliott trails by 12,642 votes and has just 12, but if each person who visits D3football.com on a typical Wednesday votes for him, we will catch up. Let’s show yet another national site the power of Division III, like we did to ESPN.com with the Wabash/DePauw rivalry over the summer.

And if you doubt Division III in the Heisman race, don’t forget Plymouth State running back Joe Dudek finished ninth in the balloting in 1985. Some guy named Bo Jackson won the thing that year.

Immediate thoughts on Week 8

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So I first got a call around 2:15 or so that Ohio Northern was leading Mount Union 21-7 in the second quarter. Ehh, yeah, whatever — if I had a dime for every time someone called me or sent me an instant message that Mount Union was losing, we’d have enough money to stop running pop-up ads.

Oh wait, we stopped doing that a couple months ago.

So yeah, didn’t really think much of it. Got another call at halftime. One late in the third quarter and then another with three minutes or so left in the game. At that point it gets serious — you have to doubt even Mount Union’s chances of scoring twice in three minutes. I’m already on the way out the door from the game I was covering, so I’m heading to a wireless hotspot I know sits about two blocks from the stadium. Got cut off at a stop light. Missed the end of the game. Caught the Mount Union student station giving the final score.

So everyone voting, have fun with your Top 10. I’m thinking of starting with my ballot from like six weeks ago. You know, when Mary Hardin-Baylor was still ahead of HSU and Ohio Northern was in my top 10.

Deep down inside, too, I’ve had this nagging feeling about Hardin-Simmons without Jordan Neal at quarterback. Descriptions of the UMHB defense today reminds me of its performance at W&J in the national quarterfinals last year. Could be time for another roll.

We’re getting close to the time where we’ll start having teams clinch playoff bids. Some of these will involve our favorite 11-letter word: tiebreakers. However, Johns Hopkins is 4-0 with a two-game lead on Dickinson (have not played yet) and Muhlenberg (Hopkins beat them today). They have two games left to play. Lakeland plays Aurora next week and can clinch the Illini-Badger with a win.

Speaking of tiebreakers, we could be seeing them in several conferences. How odd is it for half the HCAC to be in first place and Hanover not be one of the teams?

I had to call the folks at Wesley to confirm that Brockport score. No injuries or suspensions to report. No excuses made for the long bus ride. Wonder what that means for the Salisbury/Wesley game next week.

Congrats to Brad Duesing, definitely back on pace now to get 1,000 receiving yards for the fourth straight year. Only one other receiver has done that, Susquehanna’s Mark Bartosic.

Interested in:
The NCAA’s appeals process. How does it work, really? Is Ohio Northern really off the hook until the appeal is heard? That sounds more like Major League Baseball than the NCAA.
Kalamazoo. Upset Alma. How did that happen?

Concerned about:
Union. For the second week in a row. If you were playing the comparative scores game (always dangerous — ask Mount Union) then look at Union’s results vs. Coast Guard and Kings Point (a seven-point game at home and an OT game), then look at RPI’s (a 17-point game on the road, 41-point win at home).
Wheaton. Looks like the team that played the second half against North Central went to Illinois Wesleyan.

Crazy e-mail of the week:

So, for three years every game that Mt. Union has played has been
significant, but when Linfield
is the #1 ranked team in the nation and defending National Champs their
games and players aren’t
worthy of a mention because??????????????????????
Love you dearly, Wake Up and report Division III football!!??!!??:)

Let’s ask the Mount Union fans what they feel about our coverage the past three years, k? Heck, we don’t even have to go back through three years. Just last week Linfield was on the front page and Mount Union was not. The week before Linfield was on the front page and Mount Union was not. There was a week Mount Union was on the front and Linfield was not (Oct. 1, when Mount Union needed 28 unanswered points to beat Capital). The week before that, neither team was on the front. But that was also Linfield’s bye week. The week before that, Linfield was on the front page and Mount Union was not. And both schools were on the front page for their respective season openers.

Get your facts straight before you complain. Thanks.

But we can’t talk about Week 8 without talking about the tragic death of Minnesota-Morris student and men’s basketball player Rick Rose, who died when the goalposts came down after Morris’ win against Crown, the final game in Morris’ current stadium. Perhaps it’s time to end this tradition. It isn’t worth it.

More talk about realignment

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Geography, philosophy, competitiveness, rivalry.

All of these factor in to how a school selects its conference affiliation and how conferences select members. And with movement starting back up in the past six months and more rumbling barely beneath the surface, it’s worth some rumination of the ramifications.

I’m sure any moment now, Post Patterns hall of famer Ralph Turner will comment with his thoughts about automatic bids spurring conference consolidation and predicting doom and gloom for Pool B in, say, 2013. But I’ll leave that to him. He can copy and paste it, I’m sure. 🙂

Let’s instead just take a look at where teams could go. This latest round of shuffling is still part of the aftershocks of the breakup of the Freedom Football Conference. After the 2003 season, the teams spread to the four winds, with teams heading to the NJAC, UCAA, E8 and Plymouth State left as an independent. The UCAA took on Worcester Polytech, Kings Point and Coast Guard and changed its name to the Liberty League. Then Coast Guard took its liberty of the organization after a year, announcing that after its second year it was heading to the New England Football Conference.

While the Liberty League maintains enough members to keep its automatic bid, it could use an eighth member as a buffer against losing it, which is where the Susquehanna rumors come in. Juniata and Moravian are talked about as heading to the Centennial, which is something that league has been looking at for a while in the name of ease of scheduling. Bringing the conference to nine teams would leave midseason open dates or non-conference games, but would require each school to schedule just one non-conference game, whereas the remaining eight MAC schools could schedule a full round-robin without fear of having the title decided on a tiebreaker.

So what’s next? If the Centennial wants to have 10 football programs, it could look to Catholic, which is within the general geography of the conference (40 minutes from Johns Hopkins and McDaniel, two hours from Gettysburg, slightly further from Dickinson and Franklin and Marshall). Catholic could also go to the MAC, which was a possibility back in the mid-90s when Upsala folded. Allentown (now called DeSales) eventually took the open spot. Juniata and Susquehanna’s departure would presumably open up spots in the MAC’s Commonwealth League (the MAC is split in some sports and unified in others, essentially scamming Division III out of as many automatic bids as possible). The Commonwealth is slightly better travelwise.

Washington and Lee has made little secret of desiring to compete in the Centennial. It sees itself academically as a peer of those schools and already competes in the league for wrestling. But it’s a long trip from W&L to anywhere in the league.

Elsewhere, Buffalo State is in its last year in the ACFC before moving to the NJAC. SUNY-Morrisville, which is a two-year school currently but going to four-year status, is said to be looking at the NJAC and would be a fit philosophically.

That’s the sticking point, usually, that word “philosophically.” In most parts of the country there are overlapping conferences geographically — in the Mid-Atlantic it’s the MAC and Centennial, in New York it’s the Empire 8 and Liberty League, in Ohio it’s the OAC and NCAC, etc. This is almost always because schools that think highly of themselves academically want to associate with other such schools, in hopes of what they think is leveling the playing field. (How level some of those fields are is a subject for the offseason.) So when people say, “why can’t we have one Upstate New York superleague?” and similarly in Ohio and such, that’s the reason. It’s just not going to happen. Heck, in Ohio it used to be that way, with Wittenberg and others in the OAC before breaking off and forming the NCAC. (Similarly with Centennial schools seceding from the MAC.)

But the bottom line remains — the Liberty League is a very insecure group, in terms of the automatic bid. There are just five full Liberty League members which play football, and that includes Rochester, which is evenly split between the Liberty League and University Athletic Association. Hamilton is in the league but plays football in the NESCAC. Kings Point and Worcester Polytech belong to the Skyline and NEWMAC in other sports. And the likelihood of Clarkson, Skidmore or Vassar adding football seems remote. The league needs two associate members for football to maintain an automatic bid unless Susquehanna can fill one of them.

And that’s just one part of the country. There are changes in the works elsewhere as well, with Rose-Hulman pulling out of the SCAC and returning to the Heartland. The SCAC is also safe at eight teams for now and for 2006, but is looking for more football programs. The ASC has nine football programs still after Austin’s departure for the SCAC. The Presidents might be done with their rapid expansion from five to eight (Thomas More, St. Vincent, Geneva), although Seton Hill is still sitting on the NAIA/D-III fence and doesn’t have to declare until next August or so.

With a proposal on the table to facilitate changes in conference membership without losing automatic bids, expect more movement to take place in future years.

Now we throw the floor open.