Hey, we get it — you don’t like to think about math during the summer. If you’re taking a class during the summer, it’s probably not math-related, rather some elective. But unfortunately, the math is now going to be just as important in Division III football as it was in the BCS days in Division I.
We know. That’s not encouraging. And maybe we can’t be encouraging about it, at least not the way it’s currently set up, but we can sure as heck talk about it and try to explain about it. That’s why we’ve brought back in our math correspondent, Logan Hansen of @loghanratings, to talk about what the new NPI — the NCAA Power Index — the new math — means for the Division III football playoffs and selection format. We’ll talk about how many years the NCAA folks tested this formula on, and we’ll talk about how many they should have tested it on, and what Logan found when he went back further.
We also talk with Delaware Valley football coach Mike Isgro, a former Aggie player under Duke Greco and assistant coach under Greco who now goes on to replace him. We talk about the long conference winning streak, where the opportunities for improvement are for the Aggies and more.
And we also chat with Jessica Huntley, founding commissioner of the Atlantic East Conference. No, this isn’t another conference looking to take an automatic bid, but something even more interesting to talk about — the growth of women’s flag football and how much growth we might expect to see at the Division III level in the near future. It’s a great conversation about a way schools can look to help manage their enrollment as things get tight out there in higher education, and expand the country’s most popular sport in a new venue and new format.
Plus we take THREE mailbag questions, so make sure you stick around to hear them all, and talk about some of the latest coaching changes and conference shuffles.
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 monthly in the offseason.
Hit play, or subscribe to get this podcast on your mobile device.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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:
- Apple Podcasts: D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast
- iHeart Radio: D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast
- Spotify: D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast
Theme music: Power 2 by DJmentos.
Photo by Tom Nettleton, d3photography.com
Three weeks into the season a fair amount of the non-conference schedule is in the books, games that provide the basis for much of what we do in terms of ranking conferences twice a season. This week Keith and Pat discuss not only the big games from the past weekend but also take a snapshot of which conferences exceeded expectations and which underperformed.