Banner year for the pros?

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I’m no NFL expert and I steadfastly do not claim to be. All I know is that it seems from sheer numbers that Division III has had a banner draft and free agent season.

Rob Rodriguez, the Christopher Newport defensive back who was a senior in 2006, got his name added to the list and will be in the Kansas City Chiefs’ minicamp this weekend. That means nearly a dozen new D-III players will be in camps along with the two draftees. And we had two draftees for the second year in a row.

The D-III/NFL connection was looking a little light in recent years, after Ethan Brooks, R.J. Bowers, R-Kal Truluck and Bill Schroeder left the game. But Fred Jackson was a nice addition to the NFL contingent last season and Rodriguez is another alumnus who has stuck with the game. Former UW-Whitewater tight end Pete Schmitt is working out with the Washington Redskins during their offseason period and is in their minicamp this weekend after entering training camp with the team last year. John Carroll’s London Fletcher continues to carry the flag for Division III players in the league and Trinity (Texas) grad Jerheme Urban got some notice as an Arizona Cardinal last season.

Won’t argue with it and won’t try to explain it. Just hope Division III fans can enjoy the ride.

Yes, we still blog

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Whoa … so it’s been a while since we wrote a blog post on football, I know, but wanted to let people know we haven’t given up on it.

There’s been a bunch of little initiatives in the works here and I wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to.

We’ve been building out the D3sports.com Network a little bit at a time. A year ago, Jim Dixon brought his existing baseball site into the network and D3baseball.com was born. This year we’re going to have a similar situation as Jim Matson (known as Hiker Jim on our message boards) is bringing his love of soccer to the network and will be running D3soccer.com. (Contact me if you are interested in joining the D3soccer news team, by the way.)

We’ve added a jobs site, replacing the job boards that we had before. Our goal is to eventually have listings for all sports, as well as administrative jobs such as AD and SID positions. If you have a job to post, click here. We won’t be listing just Division III jobs, but any job that a D-III coach or player could reasonably aspire too, so we welcome high school jobs and college jobs from other divisions.

And we’ve made some interim upgrades to D3sports.com, which encompasses the top news stories from all of our sites. We’ve also added RSS feeds for all of our sites, which you can access from D3sports.com. That will deliver the latest Division III stories straight to your RSS reader. Here’s the link to the D3football.com RSS feed. In order to make room for this D3sports move, we moved the message boards to their own domain: D3boards.com.

Plus, we’ve been slowly but surely putting the football schedules into the system and we’re about two-thirds of the way there.

So while we haven’t been blogging, we’ve still been working. Sorry for the silence.

Around the Nation Year in Review

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Alright, well, Keith McMillan filed more than 12,000 words just for this part of the Around the Nation 2007 Year in Review. I’d be scared to count how many words he wrote this season, or just in the Year in Review. Or even to copy and paste them all back into Word and let Bill Gates do the work.

Yes, I know those of you who still write checks have been writing ‘2008’ without fail for some time now, but it takes a while to write 20,000 words.

So there were many, many memories included. (My former copy desk chief would ding me for repeating the adjective, but shoot, it’s 1 a.m. and I don’t work there anymore.) There were memories that I was glad to read about, and others I’d rather forget. (Hello? ’80s music anyone?) And it’s always good to get the retrospective/reality check on the preseason poll, our Kickoff predictions, and the like.

But no simple (hah!) column can fully wrap up the 2007 season. I mean, we didn’t even get to read about how Keith didn’t make it to Catholic in time to see his alma mater finish beating my alma mater back in September — a game which ended up being between teams that combined for 13 wins instead of what we thought might be more like five.

So certainly you have memories that we haven’t considered. Or ones we’ve forgotten. Or perhaps you just have a good story to make up and try to slip past us.

Whatever your reason, we throw the floor open for the final Around the Nation of the 2007 season. But nope of the 2008 year. There’s that copy editor again.