After nearly 16 years in the Washington, D.C., metro area, I’m moving to Connecticut.

This move has been a long time coming. I’ve worked at USA Today for a dozen years now, mostly with Baseball Weekly/Sports Weekly, but starting later this month I’ll be taking a job at NBCSports.com.

Although I don’t fully yet know what days and nights of the week I’ll be working, you can assume that I’ll be showing up at games in and around the area.

What else does this mean for D3football.com? The site is not going away — shoot, D3football.com/D3hoops.com experience helped me get this job. But we’ll be relying on other people within the organization to do a little more on game nights, when I’m at work, in terms of doing the first updates on the front page, stuff like that. Our recently announced partnership with D3Scoreboard.com will help out as well, since it will improve our collection of scores as well as server performance.

The transition period might be a little rough, and there will be entire days where I am away from the computer, most likely. The job search also has contributed to the somewhat quiet nature of the blog this summer. We ask your patience. But yes, I do have a full-time job, and D3sports.com is not it. We have to pay the bills and feed the three kids, after all.

Now, unlike the D3football.com Top 25, everyone in Division III can and will be in the Top 234. That’s the exclusive top-to-bottom ranking of every team D3football.com tracks, from . . . let’s just guess No. 1 will be Mount Union . . . down to the worst team. The ranking is available only to Kickoff subscribers.

Keith McMillan and I started working on this ranking last night. Last year it probably took us about eight hours of deliberations to rank the 231 teams. This time we spent about two hours on it and got the bottom 55 teams ranked, and believe me, the bottom teams are easier to rank than the teams in the middle. We’ll tackle the rest in the coming days.

Even the brand-new teams get into this ranking. We spent a fair amount of time debating the various merits of LaGrange, Morrisville State and SUNY-Maritime. And when teams aren’t connected by head-to-head action or common opponents, it’s certainly a matter of projection. Would Heidelberg beat Juniata? Great question.

Those are the kind of questions we need to answer.

As we get ready to deliver the D3football.com preseason Top 25 next week, I’m reminded of something that comes up every poll season: Not all records are created equal.

A 6-0 for one team isn’t necessarily as good as a 4-2 for someone else. With 234 teams in Division III, you could go years without playing a schedule worthy of getting into the Top 25. While in Division I-A there are less than five teams for every spot in the Top 25, there are more than nine teams for every Top 25 spot in Division III.

In fact, it’s almost twice as hard in Division III. There are 117 Division I-A teams, 234 Division III teams (though provisionals are not eligible for our Top 25). So when your favorite Centennial Conference or Midwest Conference or USA South or MIAA team doesn’t make the Top 25, it isn’t because we’re biased against your team, it’s because you haven’t earned the spot yet.

See last year’s playoff results for confirmation.