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ATN Podcast 388: Upon further review …

You’ve gotten the stop, pounced on a fumble, you’re celebrating a key win to open up your conference slate. Only then do the officials huddle up, and without the benefit of replay, overturn the call originally made on the field and give the team which by all rights lost the game another chance.

You’d be forgiven, perhaps, if it took you more than the customary 24 hours to get that emotion out of your system, to turn the page.

If you were Hope, which had defeat snatched from the jaws of victory on Saturday afternoon, in a turn of events so unexpected that it has garnered 211,000 views as of this writing on our X account, you could be excused. But the Flying Dutchmen will show up for the 6:30 team meeting with head coach Peter Stuursma today and be asked to turn the page.

No, the MIAA can’t overturn the result — they tried to with a basketball game back in 2001. Will the conference issue a statement about the officiating at the end of the game? They should. The answer to our question to the conference office came while we were recording, and you’ll hear our reaction as the response came in, live.

Coach Stuursma joins us to talk about the play and the aftermath on this edition of the podcast in Fast Five.

Haven’t seen the play? It’s this one below.

Not the only big game, don’t get us wrong. Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas dive into the Christopher Newport-Susquehanna game, the interesting ways in which quarterback Josh Ehrlich and running back Rahshan La Mons were used, and the body language of the two teams down the stretch. And it seemed super likely that the Washington & Jefferson Presidents weren’t going to start the season 0-3, and we look deeply at their game with Grove City from Saturday night.

Plus, we’ll take four your mailbag questions about the Top 25. Why do teams on bye move? What do voters do with Alma and Hope?

Patrick and Greg Thomas hand out game balls, Logan Hansen talks about which conferences have a better than 70% chance of getting an at-large team into the playoffs, we go around each region for even more stories and much more in this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

Mentioned link below:

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

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Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photos by Kai Foote – NPU media; W&J athletics file; Lynne Powe, Hope athletics

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ATN Podcast 369: Easing into the playoffs

This slimmed-down version of the first round actually worked out pretty well. Five of the eight games went down to the final couple of minutes, and the three blowouts were against the No. 38, No. 39 and No. 40 seeds in the tournament. So now that that’s out of the way, we can move on to the Round of 32. But first, we’ll recap those eight games, you’ll hear from some of the key playmakers on Saturday, including both winners of our game balls, just like it should be.

Is John Carroll upset at having to play Mount Union? Not that we can tell. Is Mary Hardin-Baylor upset about playing Hardin-Simmons? Not exactly — UMHB is just happy to be playing a D-III team, as Cru coach Larry Harmon said after the game.

How did the ESPN+ experiment work out after one game? Should there be more bowl games? We’ll tackle those questions and get an insider’s advice on how to punch up your broadcasts. And we’ll talk about who this Round of 40 really benefited.

Plus, we chat with John Carroll coach Jeff Behrman for Fast Five (Nifty Nine), about the injury to quarterback Nick Semptimphelter and his quick recovery, Behrman’s approach to practice, his quarterback and top receiver’s quick rapport, and facing Mount Union again

The D3football.com podcast is a weekly in-season podcast by Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas, which was started in 2007. New episodes are published weekly during the season.

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.
John Carroll athletics photo by Doug Beigie

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ATN Podcast 368: Much ado about bracketing

Why is Endicott playing in the first round? Why is Ursinus? Why does Centre get a bye? Why does Salisbury have to face a 6 or 7 seed in its first game instead of a 9 or 10?

When the teams are already identified and all boiled down to a number value by a mathematical equation, the bracket is all we can talk about, and go figure, sometimes decisions are still being made by geography. Sometimes the NPI ranking of a team doesn’t match up with what the general Division III fandom thinks, or what our voters think.

And it doesn’t seem like we would learn anything from talking to the NCAA committee chair, so we decided instead to interview the algorithm. Or in this case, we talked to Logan Hansen about who the last teams in and first teams out were, how John Carroll and Mary Hardin-Baylor made their big jumps up the NPI ranking, and exactly how much of an impact the UW-River Falls win over UW-Oshkosh on Saturday had — it’s more than you probably think. And it’s way more insightful than most committee chair conversations, so we hope you agree.

Plus, we chat with Linfield coach Joe Smith for Fast Five, about west coast D-III football, his team’s two-quarterback system, and the Wildcats finally being able to put last season’s loss to Whitworth in Week 11 behind them. And we take a number of your questions in our mailbag segment.

The D3football.com podcast is a weekly in-season podcast by Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas, which was started in 2007. New episodes are published weekly during the season.

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.
Endicott athletics photo