Episodes
Reading the feed…
Reading the feed…
We’re wrapping up the offseason, one in which we’ve now dropped 11 podcasts for you, including 24 coach and/or student athlete interviews, a commissioner and a collector of college football helmets. And we are here to get you into preseason camp, into your full pads and helmets and much more with Podcast 414. 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. Johns Hopkins is the preseason No. 4 team in our Top 25 poll, and coach Dan Wodicka was glad to talk to us during th
The discussion of 5-for-5, which is to say, a five-year window in which to play up to five years of sports, has been rampant at the Division III level in recent weeks, especially since Division II went in on the concept which was pioneered at the Division I level. Plus, we get you ready for Week 1 by talking with Mike McElroy and Cooper Drews at Bethel, and Jesse Scott at Wheaton. And we pay a visit to the Helmet Guy. 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. Divis
The wait is almost over, and the 2026 Division III football season is kicking off with an absolute bang. On this episode of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast, we are breaking down our newly released Preseason Top 25 poll and looking ahead to a schedule that is already shaping up to be, well, we used the term “gobsmacking.” 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. For the very first time in the 23-year history of the poll, the season opens with a monumen
The Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference has made a lot of waves since last we talked, what with Millsaps and then Southwestern electing to rejoin the SCAC starting in 2027. So, at the risk of there perhaps being a third member of the Southern Athletic Association returning to the SCAC before we could get the podcast out, we sat down with Dwayne Hanberry, commissioner of the SCAC, to discuss the changes, the status of Gallaudet in the conference, and more. This edition of the D3football.com Podcast is sponsored by GameStrat, the most reliable & fastest in-game video replay system on the mar
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. That includes at Ohio Northern, which was stung at the last second in the NPI calculation and just missed the NCAA playoffs. Then the Polar Bears were stung at the last second in their bowl game, as Wabash scored at the end of
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 quarterback, Tyler Green who elected to transfer. More about that in a moment. Hatem talks about how his team has to raise the level of its game to compete in a much stronger conference, what the quarterback situation will l
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’ll also talk about the new quarterback transferring into UW-Oshkosh, and finally get Coe and UW-Oshkosh schedules finalized. Plus, we have two guests: Trinity (Conn.) head coach Jeff Devanney and Ithaca coa
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 Montgomery, the former John Carroll wide receiver, now a member of the Tennessee Titans, about his route to the NFL. If you read our feature on Montgomery last September, you already know the back st
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 Montgomery of John Carroll, who we talked about back in Podcast 404. Why has it been so hard for D-III guys to get drafted lately? We bring in a player agent to talk about what he’s seen in two decades of representing
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 fellow Eagles staffer Tarek Yaeggi, who is a La Crosse alumnus and remains offensive coordinator. Key topics of conversation: Will Zweifel continue to call the defense? And how did the all-time record-holding wi
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, here on the longest running Division III football podcast. Is the next Falcons’ quarterback on campus already, or is there a chance for a transfer for the fall? What did it feel like to lose some key playe
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 name, was a deserving Most Outstanding Player of the Stagg Bowl, and you could make a case for a number of defensive players as well, as many made big plays throughout the night and down the stretch to ensure that
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, then mute the sound and listen to us!) Patrick, Greg and Keith talked with a number of players and both head coaches at Friday’s media day, and we bring a sampling of those conversations, of which you’ll hear
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’s far more likely that both of them are two-score games! So to get not just one good one, but one epic one, well, that’s great. When Kaleb Blaha threaded the tiniest hole to find Blake Rohrer, and Rohrer ran untouched to th
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-River Falls. And instead of doing the blow-by-blow of each game — because, let’s be honest, the average margin of victory was nearly 20 points — let’s hear from people in the middle of each of these games. So we’ll be joined b
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 Mount Union, compares with beating Mount Union at Mount Union in the playoffs. A win of this nature is so iconic that the head coach’s phone blows up, and so does the feed of everyone else even remotely associated w
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 one road win in the second round. Normal seems to be somewhere in between the two, but way closer to one than five. We should have known that Wheaton had a good chance at Wartburg. The Hansen Ratings even 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 ha
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 bracket has a lot to like — even though a number of teams are in the NCAA playoffs for at least the fifth consecutive year, 10 teams, in fact — there are still a lot of new matchups. Susquehanna vs. W&J isn’t seen very often. Co
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 the big dance for the first time — and this is a program that three years ago, had never even been on this metaphorical bus. We bring Eastern coach Billy Crocker for another round on the Fast Five machine,
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 interviews from UWRF’s win vs. UWW (YouTube) 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 s
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 in this photo, but sure, it’s a little less than it used to be. Instead, the role is different, and includes more about bracketing, more about game management, more about how to enhance the entire playoff e
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 coach Chris Winter isn’t the only head coach who has been part of this run, but the Knights coaching staff has been really consistent over the years. We talk with Winter about how the program achieves this consis
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. Nichols on Saturday, you should have said, yeah, actually, I can see that happening. Quinn had an amazing Saturday, and probably spent a good amount of Sunday doing interviews. You can find his story in The Athletic, and on a
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 of the data in the NPI this week, and no surprise to anyone here that the data fully passed inspection and is exactly the same as what we’ve seen on D3datacast — that’s the link on our home page menu, for your reference. Of course, there were some
