Commonly speculated at the time, now it’s official: UW-Stout coach Todd Strop was indeed forced out in January. Since he was under contract to the school through July 1, he only recently spoke to the Eau Claire, Wis., Leader-Telegram.

You may recall his resignation came shortly after an outgoing UW-Stout player was arrested on drug problems.

“Obviously, from my point of view, I feel it was mishandled,” Strop said. “To me, from an outsider looking in, it looks like it was just swept under the rug and that, ‘OK, that situation is all cleaned up.’ But the reality is, the situation is still there to be dealt with, and I felt like I was the guy to deal with it.”

Of course, athletic director Larry Terry later got forced out in a similar manner, after it was revealed that six of 58 UW-Stout football players (10.3%) tested positive for steroids, five (8.6%) for marijuana and one (1.7%) for amphetamines. That apparently got him the ax, though the newspaper points out that 20% of Division III student-athletes in a recent NCAA survey said they had used marijuana in the past 12 months.

“I don’t think there’s another school in the conference that we could drug test where you wouldn’t find out that college kids smoke dope. It’s a reality,” Terry said.

I hope new coach Duey Naatz knows what he’s getting into — first piece of bad news and the chancellor could be calling for him, too.

… D3football.com opened. I’m sure I’ve told this story before but I can’t find it, so I’m repeating it, here on 7-7-07.

This was kind of a risk for us to take in 1999. We — the Division III Basketball Online inner circle of myself, Ray Martel and Jim Stout — had a very successful and well-received men’s and women’s basketball site. But there was a Division III Football Online out there already, and we were kinda pushing into their territory. We’d tried to acquire that site, like we’d acquired the basketball site two years earlier, but it wasn’t for sale.

So we started our own, trying to collect football info as much under the radar as possible, though people eventually put two and two together. And on July 7, a Wednesday, we opened the virtual doors on both this site and the renamed D3hoops.com.

And 21.7 million front page views later, here we are. Since then, we’ve been working in two separate worlds, in a sense, and three with the opening of D3baseball.com this winter. But we’re working on that, in making all three sites more unified, in a way that will open the doors of the D3sports.com family to even more coverage and sharing of resources.

Our 2007 preseason coverage will begin in a matter of days. If you’ve taken the long offseason off, welcome back!