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| Rowan back in the day, or Wesley in recent years, laid legitimate claim to the moniker The Beast of the East out of the New Jersey Athletic Conference. These days, The Beast of the East may well come out of an area called Region 2. Rowan athletics photo |
The Beast of Region 2 simply doesn't ring the same.
We've been on the record on this previously: Some Division III sports needed a realignment. Football wasn't one of them. But ... we got one anyway. So, gone are the traditional North, South, East and West regions which NCAA Division III has used in football for as long as we can remember, and in its place are six regions, denoted by numbers.
One could easily think of Region 1 as the Northeast, Region 2 as the East, Region 3 as the South or South Atlantic, Region 4 as the Great Lakes, Region 5 as the Central and Region 6 as the West. Followers of other Division III sports will find familiar arrangements such as the Ohio/Indiana/Michigan teams being separate from the Illinois teams, or the American Southwest Conference being placed with schools from the west coast.
Football didn't need this, but now we have it. And as of today, D3football.com reflects it. With the closure of Becker and Wesley, the departure of Iowa Wesleyan and Louisiana College to the NAIA, St. Thomas moving to Division I, Emory & Henry to Division II and the dissolution of the programs at Occidental and Maine Maritime, plus the debut of the Keystone program, Division III football will be at 239 schools for the 2021 season.
Most team schedules are in for 2021 as well, so check out team by team pages for this as well!