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| Jhe'Quay Cretin gives Aurora a valuable and experienced weapon in the backfield. Aurora athletics photo |
By Greg Thomas
D3sports.com
Fifth year seniors. COVID seniors. Super seniors.
Whatever you might call the student-athletes that are using the extra eligibility afforded by the NCAA’s blanket waiver for student-athletes whose seasons were impacted in the 2020-2021 academic year, they have had an enormous impact on Division III football since the resumption of football in the traditional fall season in 2021.
Pre-COVID, fifth year seniors were a relative rarity on Division III football rosters. Institutional emphasis on graduating in four years, the NCAA’s eligibility clock, and the lack of scholarships in Division III have all meant, historically, that the occasional fifth-year senior on a roster had been granted an eligibility waiver because of injury — colloquially, the medical redshirt. With the NCAA’s blanket waiver from the COVID-impacted seasons in 2020-2021, it is currently common for football rosters to have a dozen or more fifth-year seniors.
A quick examination of D3football.com’s 2023 preseason All-America Team informs us that 14 of the 25 players named to the first team are seniors who were also seniors when they were named as All-Americans at the conclusion of the 2022 season. Ten more players who were All-Americans in 2022 are on the second and third team preseason lists. There are almost certainly others who were All-Region performers last year that are on our preseason All-American lists. The point is clear — a lot of the very best players last fall, are back leading their teams in the chase for a national championship. If you’re curious about why Mount Union isn’t going to budge from their spot at No. 2 in the Top 25, it probably has a lot to do with five super senior All-Americans returning to take another run at the Walnut & Bronze.
Another team loaded with super seniors are the Aurora Spartans. Following a 2022 run to the national quarterfinals which included a first round win at UW-Whitewater, the Spartans have three returning All-Americans among their cadre of fifth-year seniors and coach Don Beebe is quick to cite running back Jhe’Quay Chretin as a model for what an extra year of development in the football program can do for a student-athlete.
“Having him in the system for five years and seeing how he's matured, not just as a player, but as a person as well, he really came into his own last year,” Beebe said of his star running back. “This past year was his best offseason by far. He really matured as a kid and he grew up a lot. His body fat went down 4%, his 40-yard dash went down. All of his tests that we do with the athlete, he did all of them much better from a quick twitch test that we do on the athlete and, you know, different things that we do in training him. Just giving him the program, there was nobody that did better than Jhe’Quay. Last year could have been his last year.”
The leading rusher in the Division after the first two weeks of the season, Chretin’s physical maturity has been on full display. A demonstration of his mental maturity came in Aurora’s NACC opener against Benedictine when a coach’s decision to rest a minor injury had Cretin sit out in the 63-7 Spartan win.
“He dressed. He went through pregame, and I just said, ‘Jhe’Quay, let's just see how this game goes early.’ We jumped up 21-0, really quick and I said, ‘You're probably not going to play this game.’ ” Beebe recounted from Week 3: “He handled it like a pro. He wasn't mad. He wasn't upset. He just wanted to win. And that just showed a true testament of his character. I was very pleased. I think [the COVID waiver], it gives them that extra year of maturity as an athlete and a person. And that's what I've seen the most in our kids here.“
At Salve Regina, the Seahawks are off to a 3-1 start as their fifth year players lead the way. “We have 14 guys that are back for graduate school. The beautiful thing is they know the system, they know what they're supposed to be doing,” Seahawks head coach Kevin Gilmartin said. “We're hardly coaching them right from day one. They're like, ‘all right, we just have to fine tune, polish up my skills.’”
Gilmartin’s seniors have become so seasoned, that their improvements are increasingly self-actualized. “These fifth-years are telling us, hey, I can do this better. And it's true, because they know what they're supposed to be doing at this point in time,” Gilmartin told Patrick Coleman following the Seahawks’ 34-7 victory over MIT in their first conference game as a member of the NEWMAC. Gilmartin reinforced that: “Any team that is able to get to keep guys [for a fifth year] is blessed. Our guys want to stay in Newport (Rhode Island). I mean, why wouldn't you want to stay in Newport? So we’ve got guys that are sticking around, and that's huge. Hopefully it'll help us down the road.”
At Aurora, Beebe is seeing accelerated growth with his younger players as a result of the examples being set by his fifth-year student-athletes. “I think the biggest thing is off field issues when you're dealing with 18- and 19-year-old kids. I haven't had to deal with one off the field issue this season. Not one.” Beebe also sees great accountability in the classroom. “Not only that but academic alerts, this is by far the least amount of academic alerts that I've gotten from professors on our players. That has gone significantly in the right direction because I believe that what we're talking about here, the maturity of a 23-year-old as opposed to a 19-year-old.”
Soon, however, Division III will cycle out of student-athletes that qualify for the blanket waiver and Division III will return to its traditional 10 semesters for four seasons eligibility clock and the sparse dotting of rosters with the occasional medical redshirt senior. Coaches will have to adjust and sometimes explain to their younger players that the current eligibility practices won’t necessarily apply to them.
“The freshmen were just saying, we could just stay for a fifth year if we want because we have grad school,” Gilmartin said and then had to explain to his younger players. “It's a little different. You need the medical redshirt.”
Coaches have also had to preach patience to recruits and younger players during this period of extra eligibility for the older players. “The guys coming in now and in the last couple of years, they know they're only going to get four years, right?” Beebe said. “They come in and they see a Jhe’Quay and a Marcellus Romious (2023 preseason first team All-American linebacker) and guys that have been here and should have been done or could have been done, but COVID gave them that extra year. That makes it frustrating for a kid that comes in, he's a superstar in high school, learns the ropes, and now he's going into his sophomore year and he's still behind Jhe’Quay or another player.”
Handling those situations has been a byproduct of the extra eligibility, but one I’m sure most have paid willing. “That's something where I take ownership in this as a coach because I think that's part of my job is to sit them down, paint the big picture for them, and say, your time will come. And nowadays, it's tough, because kids and parents are not patient. I think the biggest thing is just communicate,” Beebe said.
Indeed those situations will wane in the coming seasons and depth charts will inevitably get younger. But in the meantime, teams such as Aurora and Salve Regina and others will take advantage of the experience afforded to them by the expanded eligibility provided by the NCAA.
The luxury of fifth-year seniors is finite, but coaches will not miss the opportunity to leverage their experienced rosters not only on the field, but to set a lasting example for maturity and work ethic that will last well beyond the end of the COVID senior era in Division III football.
Top 25 talk
Endicott’s Friday dominant night win over then-No. 5-ranked Hardin-Simmons was seismic. We’ve called it the most significant victory by a team from New England in Division III’s automatic bid era. We try not to overreact to one result, but that one result should reframe some of the years-old conversation regarding the difference in competition levels between regions. Minds don’t necessarily need to be changed, but what should be clear now is that high quality football does exist in the Northeast.
What’s also clear, is a string of results amongst ranked teams that seem to have created a puzzle for voters. So far this season, Johns Hopkins has defeated Ithaca who has defeated Endicott who has defeated Hardin-Simmons who has defeated UW-La Crosse. The D3football.com Top 25 does not stick closely that chain of head to head events. UW-La Crosse is now ranked five spots ahead of Hardin-Simmons, who they lost to at home just a few weeks ago. Hardin-Simmons is ranked three spots in front of Endicott, who they lost to by 27 points just last week. ATN is going to try to make some sense of this.
Hardin-Simmons fell 13 spots in the poll which is about as far as any ranked team who loses to an unranked team ever falls in the poll. Why didn’t the voters rank Endicott ahead of Hardin-Simmons? Some certainly did (I can speak for myself). Others may have cushioned the blow by noting significant injuries to Hardin-Simmons before and during the game. Maybe some voters also factored the lengthy travel involved, though the Cowboys did have a bye week preceding the contest at Endicott. No doubt some voters had a Hardin-Simmons freefall buoyed by UW-La Crosse, who maintains a high polling position with this voting group. All of these things, even though they are not how I constructed my ballot in the wake of the Beverly Boom, are defensible. It’s important to remember that the Top 25 voters are not a monolith and the poll is not a consensus among the voters. It’s an aggregation of individual opinions, which more often than not produces a ranking of teams that historically holds up very, very well when ranked teams get together at the end of the year. Some voters ranked Endicott above Hardin-Simmons, some didn’t. The average, this week, indicates that slightly more did.
The Endicott win and the subsequent chain of head to head results caused me to essentially blow up my ballot and start over. For this voter, there isn’t enough extra information (yet!) to warrant not honoring that head to head chain in my ballot. My Week 3 ballot had these teams ranked as follows:
5. Hardin-Simmons
13. UW-La Crosse
15. Johns Hopkins
22. Ithaca
Endicott was not ranked on my ballot after Week 3.
My Week 4 ballot shifted to:
11. Johns Hopkins
17. Ithaca
19. Endicott
21. Hardin-Simmons
22. UW-La Crosse
On tap
A supersized September comes to a close in Week 5. As the regular season nears its halfway point, conference play gets underway in 12 conferences including the first weekend in Landmark Conference play. We’ll have all of that and more covered at D3football.com. 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. Patrick 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 Don Beebe and Kevin Gilmartin for spending time with Around the Nation this week. Additional thanks to Aurora University Director of Athletic Communications Brian Kipley and Patrick Coleman for coordinating our conversations!
Read options?
There’s nothing small about small college football. Division III is home to 241 teams, and 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.
