When my favorite football teams are eliminated from the playoff hunt, I like to see if the remaining teams have connections back to our world. As an Oakland Raider fan, I can get an early start since they have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs by Week 6 the past couple seasons.

In any event, you may know that Steelers ILB Clint Kriewaldt is a graduate of UW-Stevens Point. Or that D3football.com All-American Jerheme Urban (Trinity, Texas) has played for the Seahawks the past three seasons.

But did you know Ben Roethlisberger has a Division III connection?

According to the San Jose Mercury News “Big Ben” didn’t play quarterback until his senior year at Findlay (Ohio) High. That’s because he was behind Ryan Hite, son of the high school coach. Hite didn’t reach the same lofty, um, heights as Roethlisberger in football but still had a solid career at Denison where he played wide receiver and, evidently, some quarterback.

You can break that tidbit out while watching the big game this weekend. It would impress even the biggest NFL aficionados. Like former Seattle Seahawks Coach — and Juniata College Alum — Chuck Knox.

They’re the overworked and underpaid, talented yet unappreciated glue that holds an athletic department together.

No, they’re not assistant coaches (although they certainly qualify under every word except “glue”). They’re the Sports Information Directors.

Every school has one (almost) and almost none works as few as 40 hours per week. They’re the ones who make sure the media knows what’s going on in the athletic department. At the Division III level, it’s usually one full-time person (who works 50-70 hours per week) covering about 15 sports. They write and design media guides, issue press releases, write feature stories, update the department Web site, often traveling to away games. They’re often the department photographer, historian or technology expert.

Underpaid, overworked and disgruntled. Such is the life of a Division III SID.

I wasn’t kidding about them working 50-70 hours per week. That is the range cited by 72.8% of Division III SIDs who responded to a salary and job responsibilities survey presented at last summer’s College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) convention.

Well, for all that extra work and responsibility, they must be getting paid well, correct? Decidedly not. The national average full-time SID salary is $34,953, with the average brutally low in some of the areas with the highest costs of living ($32,637 in the mid-atlantic, with full-time SIDs in that area making as low as $20,000). At 60 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that’s $11.65 per hour.

When you throw in having to deal with all forms of questions from people who don’t know a person’s job responsibilities (i.e., this is not the person you call to ask when the pool is open or how to get a booster club membership), this is a group of professionals seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

That pressure has led to a decidedly early 21st-century outlet, a blog called Disgruntled SID. This is for the parents who compile their own statistics of their son or daughter and complain to the SID when the official stats don’t match. It’s for the coaches who want a flyer for their summer camp or want to know why they don’t have a media guide two weeks after submitting the information.

I don’t know who posts on this blog, but to be honest, I don’t care. This is a brutally accurate picture of the profession as it stands in Division III. Talented people leave the profession all the time to take jobs where they are appreciated, where they can spend time with their families, where they can make enough to someday pay off their student loans, let alone afford a mortgage. It’s a job prone to breakdowns — I had colleagues in the business who were forced to take medical leave because of exhaustion. As the talent drain continues, we’ll be left with the lowest common denominator at the level at which a good SID is most helpful. When the local media ignores the small schools, an SID can be the most helpful in terms of getting the word out. Unfortunately, too many schools take a short-sighted approach and nickle-and-dime the position, rather than realizing the public relations potential and exposure one can gain with a top-notch SID.

I used to be an SID myself. Thankfully, my time in the business was short, but it doesn’t take away from my appreciation for the hard work these people do seven days a week.

These people deserve more respect, not just from the fans or the coaches, but the administrators as well.

Don’t dismiss a key part of your institutional mission.

Football fans and/or those who have read everything there is to read about D3basketball:

Keith McMillan here. Thanks for stopping by the football site still. Some of you have long anticipated this year’s installment of our Year in Review. Thank you for patiently waiting. I can finally confirm that it is up and awaiting your perusal and/or feedback.

If you want to skip right to it, go ahead. If you’re interested in the process, read on:

I turned in the year-in-review to Pat earlier this week. It took him a couple days to format and edit for publication, not to mention fill in a few items I left unfinished when I gave it to him (Hey, there were 108 categories, can you blame me?)

Perhaps you’ve already seen it, and maybe even read through half of it. It is so long Pat broke it into three parts, but we’d like to think it’s longer because we cast our net wider this year and our coverage was more comprehensive.

The year-in-review itself took no less than 25 hours to compile (a normal ATN takes about 6-10), so that’s where the delay came in. Opening up 55 of last year’s categories to fans and readers helped us cover some things we would not have thought of ourselves (like the Marietta/Baldwin-Wallace game, for instance), but it meant that I was working an hour or two a day until about Jan. 10 (we usually take a break from the Stagg Bowl and start up on this project sometime after New Year’s) simply cutting and pasting from people’s e-mails — including those solicited from d3 staff members — into different category headers. Once I got to there, I started writing … and chopping, re-organizing, etc. Pat offered to help write categories a few times, and although Gordon, Pat and Pat Cummings included their input, and several fans contributed quite a bit, I was still hardheaded enough to think I could do it all myself. Perhaps I bit off more than I could chew, as I told Pat at least three times that I was finishing up, and it went on for days and possibly weeks after that.

The first year we reviewed, 2003, Pat wrote half and I wrote the other half, which may have been why it was up by Jan. 6. Last year I believe it posted Jan. 27, and this year my goal was the 15th, which we missed by a few days.

But for good reason. Even after chopping down fan submissions and other writers’ submissions, and getting rid of a few categories that didn’t fit this year or we didn’t have anything for, it apparently reached Pat at more than 14,000 words. We tried to break it up into parts and make it as readable as possible, as half that would have been a lengthy read.

A couple things you should know about the year-end, if you cared to read this far into this post:

1. Some e-mails and quotes were edited for clarity, grammar and length.

2. I’d love to have a research assistant or two next year, either all season or just for this project. I spent hours just charting how all 231 teams did in comparison to our preseason prediction, for example. We also spent some time researching where Justin Beaver’s season fit among the great D3 rushing seasons.

3. I wrote most of the capsules, or tried to source the quoted material where I didn’t. But there are some parts written or re-written by other D3 staff, for the record. (That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have liked to write it … just means that some capsules, like No. 88, were sent to Pat with an unfinished idea, and Pat did the wording … so if you e-mail me asking why I’m dissing this guy or that guy, forgive me if I know not of what you speak 🙂

4. The beauty of the internet is that mistakes can be fixed quickly and even the print edition is not final. As a habit, we don’t like to change things after publication, but if you do spot something, you have the choice of e-mailing one of us and having us fix it quietly or blowing us up on the board and pointing while you laugh. Choose wisely.

That pretty much covers it. I think I’ve said enough. Time to open up the floor to you all. I’ll be answering questions, I guess, and considering your comments here and on the blog for the next week or two, depending on interest.

Hope you enjoyed your insight into the process.