Heading to Ohio

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We don’t usually travel to Mount Union in the regular season. In the most general terms, we want to go where the news is, and in the past 10 years there hasn’t been much in Alliance, Ohio, this time of year other than a Mount Union victory.

Nothing wrong with Mount Union winning, you know, it’s just that it’s hard to justify the trip when it’s likely to be just another check mark in the ‘W’ column.

But this week I’m breaking with that tradition and heading to Alliance, because of a comment Mount Union coach Larry Kehres made to me during an interview this summer. Kehres asked me, “Have you ever been to Mount Union?”

I was a little taken aback at the question, wondering if he had more than one interview scheduled that day and forgot which one this was. I’ve been there probably 10 times. I think I said, “Sure, I’ve been there.”

He responded, “Well, you haven’t been to Mount Union until you’ve been here at night.”

So I looked at the schedule: two home night games for Mount Union, against Muskingum and Baldwin-Wallace. So off I got. Baldwin-Wallace hasn’t had much success on defense this season and it doesn’t look like a great game on paper, but heck, I’ll have seen Mount Union at night. I’ll be broadcasting audio of the game Saturday night, along with Brandon Stewart.

In the afternoon I’ll be heading over to Meadville, Pa., to see Allegheny host Wabash. By the end of the trip, my all-ime list of schools I’ve seen play will be at 119, halfway to the current Division III total of 238. Adding Baldwin-Wallace and Allegheny, plus Allegheny’s stadium will make 66 schools’ stadiums in which I’ve seen a D-III game.

It’s going to take a while to get those other 119 teams, though.

ATN Podcast: Sold or not sold?

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By this point in the season, it’s hard to call teams flukes, and teams that have gone above and beyond what we expected of them have to be dubbed something else, perhaps surprise teams.

If you’ve played three or four games and are undefeated, that’s one thing. If you’ve knocked off a team that was believed to be better than you are, that’s what makes you a surprise.

But can we believe in you? That’s another question. Most of these teams have yet to play the best team on their schedule. How will they hold up as the road gets tougher? That’s what Keith McMillan and I tackle in this week’s Around the Nation podcast. We look at more than a dozen teams with the goal of answering one simple question: sold or not sold?

One team we didn’t touch on in the podcast is St. Norbert. I would have to go with not sold, for the moment, waiting for the Monmouth game on the road to find out more. Hopefully Keith will weigh in in the comments section.

Click the play button below to listen.

You can load the podcast page in iTunes or can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3football.com/dailydose/?feed=podcast

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Game Day live: From the desk

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There’s nothing I love more about this job than calling play-by-play of a Division III football game. I grew up loving sports on the radio, and living in Ypsilanti, Mich., as an impressionable youngster, I got to listen to Detroit Tigers legend Ernie Harwell call baseball games on WJR.

If I’m not broadcasting, I like being on the sidelines taking pictures, as it gets me right up close to the action. Not taking pictures? In the press box watching the game. But when I’m doing that, I’m distracted by the other 100 games going on the same day.

This week, none of that — I’m at home. I’ve seen five games through the first three weeks of the season and this is how I keep the peace with my family. It’s time to sit back and watch things unfold from the D3sports.com newsdesk here in Minneapolis. So I’ll have multiple live stats windows open, as many video streams as our crappy Comcast bandwidth will allow, and will follow live audio, Twitter and any other updates that are available.

In short, I’m like you are, today, if your team is on the road and you’re not there. Expect lots of updates. Ryan Tipps is at Gettysburg-Muhlenberg and we have photographers out in the field as well.

By the way, you’d hear a little of Ernie Harwell in every football or basketball broadcast I do. When you hear me rattle through that copyright/disclaimer at the end of the game, that’s verbatim what I heard him say at the end of every broadcast from about 1979 to 1983. Harwell is 91 now, recently revealed he has cancer and is on a bit of a farewell tour. Bless him.