D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast

We’re just 72 days away from the start of the Division III football season, and in that time, there’s a bunch of work to get done, including getting ready for the D3football.com preseason Top 25. We’re hungry for football to get started! And we’re getting you there with a couple of great conversations with coaches and Division III schools putting in that offseason work. Tha...

It’s been a big year for the Denison Big Red, and although that hasn’t completely trickled down to the Denison football team, we thought we’d check in with coach Jack Hatem . The North Coast Athletic Conference has definitely been in transition of late, with John Carroll joining the league in all sports, and WashU in football specifically, and Denison lost its rising junior quart...

The mailbag is pretty active in this podcast, with listeners chiming in with questions about how Concordia (Wis.) will do in transitioning from the NACC to the CCIW, whether this year’s new technology in Division III will be added more smoothly than last year, what Trinity (Texas) was leaving behind in leaving its long-time conference home, and which mascot matchup would be our favorite. We&...

The biggest news for Division III football coming out of the NFL draft was, as usual, not about a player getting drafted. We are accustomed to that by now, sadly, and no amount of tweeting is going to convince the NFL to draft D-III players. But for Tyren Montgomery, the contract offer came. And for four additional players so far, the rookie minicamp invite arrived. And on this podcast, we talk to...

The NFL Draft is coming up this week, and Division III has had only three players drafted since 2012, all of them offensive linemen who were thought of quite highly and drafted quite highly: Ali Marpet of Hobart, Ben Bartch of St. John’s and Quinn Meinerz of UW-Whitewater. If Division III has a player drafted from any position other than O-line, it’s probably most likely to be Ty Montg...

The Coaching Carousel took many spins since we dropped our previous podcast, and it’s time we caught up with those movements and get someone on the podcast! That honor goes to Michael Zweifel at UW-La Crosse, who replaces Matt Janus after Janus’s move to Division II. Zweifel was one of two finalists who were UW-L coordinators, but he says there was no feats of strength competition with...

The UW-River Falls postseason media campaign continued through the end of January, all the way through a parade through town and yes, one last interview with the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast about the 2025 season. Our guests on this podcast: UW-River Falls coach Matt Walker, John Carroll coach Brian Polian, and Whittier coach Cory White. It’s the first episode of our 20th season,...

It isn’t quite the best Stagg Bowl of all time, but surely there’s nobody in River Falls, Wisconsin, who cares about that as UW-River Falls brought Walnut and Bronze home to the town of 16,000 on Monday after a 24-14 win against North Central in Stagg Bowl LII. Kaleb Blaha, with 419 yards of total offense, and three total touchdowns responsible for, with one final NCAA record to his na...

Coming to you from Canton, Ohio, it’s our Stagg Bowl preview edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast. Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas are joined by Keith McMillan, as well as Seth Howard of the Left Hash Podcast and D1 Rejects, a former UW-River Falls quarterback and assistant coach who will be our sideline reporter for our audio broadcast of Stagg Bowl 52. (Watch on ESPN, th...

One of the two semifinals was a classic, fit for kids from 1 to 92 … if you can handle stress, that is. And we aren’t just spouting cliches when we say this is as good as it gets — in the history of the national semifinals since automatic bids were added and the playoffs expanded beyond four rounds in 1999, there have been only two years where both semifinals were close. It&#8217...

It’s a milestone podcast, but we’re not quite to the final stage of the Division III football season. You can’t blame us for getting dressed up — OK, maybe just Greg decided to dress up for the audio podcast. But answering the call to the Final Four ball were who most people thought they were in our predictions this week: Johns Hopkins, John Carroll, North Central and UW-Ri...

When the previous “biggest win in school history” is from the 1950s, replacing the entry at the top of the list means something. Sure, you could quibble over whether a win against Syracuse from seven decades ago, or a national quarterfinal win at Brockport in 2002 , or a quarterfinal win at UW-Whitewater in 2016 should be next on the list, but no regular season win, even one against Mo...

We knew to expect a ton of snow for every game between Collegeville and Holland. We knew to expect Susquehanna would have more than a fighting chance at Christopher Newport. We knew to expect a likely rematch of former OAC rivals. What we didn’t know to expect was five road teams winning in the round of 32! Last year, which was the first year the playoff bracket had 40 teams, there was just...

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&...

We made some progress in the bracketing process for the NCAA playoffs this year! Every team that earned a first-round bye was actually awarded one. Seems like a low bar when you talk about it that way, but … if there were a big sign up in the committee room, it would say, “1 year without giving a first-round bye to a team which didn’t earn it via NPI.” In the end, this brac...

The Captains of Christopher Newport are back in the playoffs for the second time in three years and for the 12th time in their relatively short history. And they got there by knocking the Sea Gulls of Salisbury off their perch on Saturday night, in a pretty epic battle under the lights. In one week, Eastern went from the driver’s seat in the Middle Atlantic Conference to booking a ticket to...

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. More postgame...

We have just three weeks left in the regular season, with Selection Sunday and the bracket announcement coming on Nov. 16. With the NCAA Division III football national committee no longer responsible for selecting teams to play in the playoffs, what does the committee chair do? It’s a little more than just handing the trophy off to the team that wins the Stagg Bowl, like John Snell is doing...

We’re getting ever closer to Selection Sunday, and closer to automatic bids being clinched. We’ve already discussed how few unbeaten teams there are this time of year compared to previous years, and of course, we had one more go down on Saturday when Wartburg defeated Central. Wartburg has been really consistent at the top of the American Rivers Conference, or near the top of it. Head...

Montie Quinn should have been a household name to you already. He was a D3football.com All-America running back last season, rushing for 1,600 yards. He’d had two 200-yard rushing games already this season, he’s now over 5,000 rushing yards for his career … if you only found out about him on Saturday, or Sunday, that’s a bummer. When he exploded for 522 yards in a win vs. N...

These are the things that make up Division III football this time of year. W’s and L’s as in wins and losses, X’s and O’s as in how plays and schemes are drawn up on paper, and 0’s and 1’s as in the data that is used to determine who will make the playoffs and how they’ll be seeded, in the NCAA Power Index. We got the first look at the NCAA’s version...

Ah yes, we not only go from the land of serious tailgating to also serious tailgating. From 20,000 fans to 6,500 fans in a rivalry game. These are two great tastes that tasted great together on Saturday, part of a smorgasbord of great Division III football, with so many games that we actually didn’t even talk about Muhlenberg-Ursinus in this podcast. (But we will probably talk about Muhlenbe...

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 tha...

For some teams, a 3-0 start is precisely in the plan. For others, 3-0 is perhaps a pipe dream, or a first-time occurrence. In this week’s edition of the podcast, we talk about a few of each as we wrap up Week 3 of the Division III football season. Johns Hopkins was given just about a 50% chance of starting the season 3-0, with some top-flight competition on the docket. But they got the job d...

It’s sad to think that we are already phasing out of Great Non-Conference Game Season, but at least it is leaving us with some quality memories. Yes, Mary Hardin-Baylor and UW-Whitewater still get to grace us with their presence, and so do Springfield and UW-Platteville, and Johns Hopkins and Susquehanna, but … well, OK, we’ll hold on for one more week. Meanwhile, the rest of the...