The Fightin' Engineers are off to an 0-3 start, but none of those losses are in conference games, so Rose-Hulman has a HCAC crown left to play for.  Rose-Hulman athletics photo

By Greg Thomas
D3sports.com

It’s that time of the season. The leaves are starting to change. Homecoming weekends abound. You might need to start wearing long sleeves at your tailgates. Conference play sweeps across the nation. 

Before we immerse ourselves over the next seven weeks into those 27 different horse races for automatic bids to the postseason, however, Around the Nation is going to spend another week celebrating the bounty of outstanding non-conference games that we’ve all been fortunate to partake in this September. 

Yes, we’ve had the headliner games with St. John’s, UW-Whitewater, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Trinity, and Wheaton. While those games, and the winners of those games, have rightly taken up a disproportionate amount of D-III oxygen, Rose-Hulman and Maryville have both challenged themselves in the first three weeks of this season, but with drastically different results. 

Rose-Hulman and Maryville’s 2022 opponents have a combined record of 16-1 this season; the lone loss being Berry’s 17-3 loss to UW-Whitewater. Building non-conference schedules is challenging, but when Rose-Hulman coach Jeff Sokol looks for non-conference opponents, he’s thinking about the impact those teams may have on his potential postseason chances. “Our primary reason for scheduling the teams we do is to have quality wins that are regionally ranked opponents,” Sokol said. “Our goal is to go to the playoffs every year and ultimately to win playoff games and you know the importance of strength of schedule both from that standpoint as well as it’s (strength of schedule) a tiebreaker for a three-way tie in our conference.”

Rose-Hulman’s search for quality opponents has led them to rekindle series with old Indiana Collegiate Athletic Conference rivals Wabash and DePauw, maintaining historically important series is a priority for Maryville head coach Ben Fox. “We want to preserve traditional rivals. We've been really lucky and it's a blessing here that we've played football for over one hundred years. So there are several programs and, and schools within kind of a day trip to us that are traditional rivals that we played over 50 times in the school's history,” Fox said.

Proximity is also important for Fox’s program. “We want to try to have day trips that are easy to get to. It's good for our fans. Relatively local games.” Fox continued, “When we play Berry, you know, like last year we went down there, we have a large amount of kids from Georgia on our team so that's good for us too to have a chance for those kids to kind of go back home and play.”

Whether playing with selection criteria in mind or playing for institutional priorities, both teams have been challenged and have been on the bad side of some tough losses. Rose-Hulman has lost fourth quarter leads to DePauw and Trine in the opening weeks of the season. Being challenged early, however, helps Sokol gauge his players against good teams. 

“You learn something about your players, right? We always rely on our secondary to do some really difficult things to kind of allow us to do what we do up front. We might learn that we have to get those guys, in a different situation at certain times in the games, Sokol said. “You learn about what you need to have in those really important situations and games and about playing close games against good competition. It certainly doesn't feel good to lose, but if there is a silver lining it's that it hopefully will make you better and more battle tested.”

It’s hard to find a team with a pair of more dramatic defeats than Maryville. The Scots lost to Berry when the Vikings scored with just 16 seconds to play in Week 1 and, after rallying from a 28-7 halftime deficit, were felled by Shenandoah when the Hornets scored a touchdown with just 24 seconds left in the game.

Despite the disappointment of those results, Fox believes that his Scots can take positives away from these games. 

The Scots have had their hearts broken twice so far this season, but like Rose-Hulman, none of those heartbreaks came in conference games. Maryville athletics photo by Brennan Chekalski

“I think for our players, I hope that they've seen what happens when they play hard and they play together and they do what they're being coached to do,” Fox said. “There is a level of mistakes that we made — some of that is inflicted by the other teams being good and making plays too — but we made some mistakes early in both games and we had opportunities to do some stuff and probably change the outcome of the games. And then we did what we were coached to do and played together and played complementary football and made plays on both sides of the ball. In the second half of both of the home games we've had, we scored points and got stops and made them really exciting fun games.”

Despite ending the non-conference portions of their seasons without a win, both the Fightin’ Engineers and the Scots have conference championships to play for, and with those conference championships come automatic access to the postseason, so season goals are still very much attainable. 

“I think what really helps us is we really treat every game exactly the same,” Sokol said about refocusing his team for HCAC play after Rose-Hulman’s bye week. “We're going to prepare for Anderson like it's the Stagg Bowl. And then we will prepare for Manchester the next week like it's the Stagg Bowl. It's very much just hitting the reset button and believing in our routine, and believing that how we prepare our players is going to be enough for us to do what we need to do.”

Fox sees the USA South championship as motivation for his team, but wants to stay focused on the habits that build championships. “I think you have to acknowledge that there is a championship to play for. That is a motivator, but that's a short motivator, right?” Fox continued, “We talk a lot to our kids about being consistent competitors. It doesn't matter who they play. It doesn't matter where we play. What matters is, are we doing the things that we need to do to be the best team that we can be? Am I doing the things I need to do as a player, individually, to be the best player that I can be? Am I studying film? Am I going to class? Am I lifting weights hard? Am I practicing hard? Am I doing all the things that I need to do to be the best player I can be to give me a chance to be successful?” 

Fox also finds the larger-than-sport aspect of his role as a coach in situations like the one Maryville is in now. That's the art or magic of coaching is keeping the players motivated, right,” Fox said. “That's part of what we do is help them see how it's impacting them, because they're gonna face adversity in their life.

“There will be things when they leave here that are going to be hard and they may be quote-unquote down 0-3 in the game of life, but they still have things to do and responsibilities and obligations. So how can they can become the best version of themselves and keep working hard? Those are the things that we strive for.”

Motivating people is definitely part of the magic of coaching, and automatic qualifiers are part of the magic of Division III football. Whether it’s top 10 teams from across the country playing each other or unranked teams challenging themselves with quality regional opponents, everybody’s record goes back to 0-0 at the start of conference play. Rose-Hulman and Maryville may be winless as we get ready to kick off the fourth week of this season, but their access to the tournament is very much the same as the other 230 teams that participate in Division III’s postseason. And despite those 0-3 records, the Fightin’ Engineers and Scots experiences through three weeks might have them better prepared than many of their conference rivals. 

Rising/falling

Or neither? While the Hardin-Simmons domination of Platteville may have been a highlight Week 3 result, I’m of the opinion that UW-La Crosse’s 28-21 victory at Division II Wayne State was the weekend’s most impressive result.

As a voter, I struggle to know how best to handle results against teams from outside of Division III. Wayne State is not nearly as good as last year’s UW-La Crosse GLIAC opponent, Grand Valley State. When one of Division III’s teams does win against a Division II school, it ought to register as a significant accomplishment. So I have to move the Eagles up, right? Wrong. I ended up leaving the Eagles right where I had them after Week 2 — No. 8 on my ballot. Had Hardin-Simmons not been so dominant in Platteville, I might have been convinced to trade places with La Crosse. My inability to find any candidate to reasonably move down so that La Crosse can move up speaks to the high quality of teams in the top 8-10 this season — something that is also reflected in an unprecedented distribution of No. 1 votes among our voters. 

Here’s my Week 3 top 8, unchanged from Week 2: 

1. St. John’s
2. North Central
3. UW-Whitewater
4. Mary Hardin-Baylor
5. Mount Union 
6. Trinity (Texas)
7. Hardin-Simmons
8. UW-La Crosse

There were two big tumblers in my Week 3 ballot. Central, previously ranked 14 for me, and Muhlenberg, previously ranked 17 for me, both fell out of my top 25 entirely after Week 3 losses. A home loss to 0-2 Loras doomed the Dutch while Muhlenberg’s road loss to Ursinus puts the Mules at 1-2 on the season and needing to regroup — and in need of Centennial Conference wins against Susquehanna and Johns Hopkins if they hope to get back into the Top 25 this season and return to the postseason. 

On tap 

The Week 4 schedule certainly offers some great games to watch. Here’s what you can watch for every week at D3football.com:

Tomorrow: Quick Hits featuring our panel’s predictions and insights into this weekend’s games.

Saturday: Game day. The D3football.com scoreboard has all of your links for stats and broadcasts. 

Sunday: New Top 25 poll.

Monday: Around the Nation podcast 312. Pat Coleman and Greg Thomas recap the weekend that was and preview the weekend to come in Division III football.

Tuesday/Wednesday: Team of the Week honors, features columns.

Thursday: Around the Nation column.

I’d like to thank ...

Special thanks this week to Ben Fox and Jeff Sokol for spending time with Around the Nation. Additional thanks to Maryville Assistant Athletic Director for Communications John Painter and Rose-Hulman Associate Athletic Director for Public Relations and Communication Kevin Lanke for coordinating our conversations!

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Small college football is actually pretty massive. Division III is home to 240 teams, many thousands of student-athletes and coaches. There are so many more stories out there than I can find on my own. Please share your stories that make Division III football so special for all of us! Reach out to me at greg.thomas@d3sports.com or on Twitter @wallywabash to share your stories.