post

ATN Podcast 415: Looking at a great Week 1

Kickoff comes tomorrow! That’s right, it’s Kickoff Eve and here at D3football.com we drop a new podcast to get you ready for the 2026 season openers on Thursday night, Friday night and all day Saturday.

This edition of the D3football.com Podcast is sponsored by GameStrat, the most reliable & fastest in-game video replay system on the market. Find out more at GameStrat.com.

If this is your first time following Division III football, well, welcome! We want to make sure you are as up to speed as possible when you get to your tailgating spot, and that includes us walking you through the basics of how Division III is structured, how big it is (and how hard it is to get into the Top 25!), as well as how the playoffs are put together.

We’ll also take you around all six regions on the Week 1 schedule and go through a game of the week for each region, plus two more games to keep an eye on. Who’s on the run in Region 1? Who’s in the queue in Region 2? You get the idea. Plus, Greg and Patrick take us through a Week 1 viewing schedule, one game at a time, and it’s a new season, so there’s a new bit in this podcast. A new feature. Check it out.

We have this and more in the latest edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Mailbag topics include: Which Division III coach could be next to take a Division I FCS head coaching job? Is Division III really losing too much in terms of transfers? Which unlikely predictions are most likely to come true? How will D-III fare against non-Division III opponents this week? Plus, yes, we will talk about Manchester leaving D-III next season and what it means for the HCAC, perhaps the OAC and perhaps the SAA.

Notes from the show: Etchglow’s transfer portal tracker

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

Photos: Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com; JCU athletics photo by CJ Lyon; UMHB athletics; Eastern athletics; Steve Woltmann for North Central athletics; Millsaps athletics

post

ATN Podcast 397: Now you see it, now you don’t

We thought this year we were going to get to work on staggering playoff game times, so we don’t have eight of the best games going on at the same time. We thought we were going to get to work on getting video review for officials at games before the semifinals. OK, that at least is happening in some places, but otherwise, we found out on Saturday we need to go back one year and work on 2024’s thing some more — having all of these games on ESPN+.

When you look back at this podcast years later, yes, this is the one where the first-round playoff streaming was a borderline disaster. Essentially half of our opening eight games had some streaming issue, one of them so severe that it never got on the air at all.

That’s bad. That’s a problem. The NCAA folks will talk to ESPN about it this week, but it’s also the NCAA that puts all of this work on overworked sports information professionals in a division where we already expanded the basketball season so that these folks are working winter sports and football and any other fall sport that might still be in its playoffs at the same time.

But the action on the field was really good, so we’ll spend the last 85% or so of the podcast talking about that. About the big plays that fueled Susquehanna’s win. The way the final drive of the Chapman-Whitworth game ended. How Muhlenberg came away with the win against Union. What Springfield did to keep Cortland in check. How LaGrange overcame some difficulties to advance.

It’s also the end of the season for eight more teams, and the end of careers for many. At Grove City, this was a season with challenges, and this team got through them to rally and get to the playoffs, and rally when down big in the second half. Patch Flanagan’s career at Union ends on a high note personally, even if he could not will his team into the second round. Crown grew up a lot this season and achieved things never done before in the program’s history. We talk about all that and more.

And our guest is Casey Shine, head coach of Chapman. He’ll tell us what was going through his head when his quarterback took a taunting penalty that left the door open for a Whitworth comeback.

We also hand out game balls, bring you through the stats of the week, we look at a bunch of second round games, and we take your questions in the mailbag segment. That and more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Postgame news conferences:

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

 

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Susquehanna athletics photo by Michael Lipscomb; photo by Chapman athletics

post

ATN Podcast 394: All the Falcons, and Knights, and Panthers

Two top 10 teams square off, and one team does something it hasn’t done in a quarter century. Yep, that’s a big deal. Heck, UW-River Falls hadn’t beaten UW-Whitewater that handily since the 1980s. We have talked about Kaleb Blaha fairly often on this podcast in the last few years, and that’s because he’s darn good, and was a big-game player on Saturday.

Three of the 27 automatic bids to the playoffs have already been handed out, and we give our assessment of how Wartburg, Concordia Wisconsin and Hanover will likely fare, what type of seeding they might end up with, and the like. Plus there are several head-to-head games for conference automatic bids this weekend, and we’ll talk through those as well.

Of course, you’ll never guess whether home teams or road teams won the big games in the WIAC. OK, maybe you’ll guess.

Plus, one time drove perfectly all day in Division III, and another drove perfectly long, more than 12 minutes?! Patrick and Greg hand out game balls. We take four mailbag questions, and make good use of Logan Hansen’s D-III NPI Simulator in the process. Who should you root for or against if you need an at-large bid? There are answers out there for you.

Logan Hansen talks about which teams still have a chance of getting an at-large bid and at least one of them may surprise you! We go around each region for even more stories and much more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.

You can subscribe to the Around the Nation Podcast in Apple Podcasts, and many other places. You can also get this and any of our future Around the Nation podcasts automatically by subscribing to this RSS feed: http://www.d3blogs.com/d3football/?feed=podcast

Here’s how to find us on some of the major podcasting apps:

 

Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by Wade Gardner, d3photography.com; Hanover athletics; Photo for Concordia (Wis.) athletics by Katelyn Cardinale