Sam Riddle, his wife Briahnna, and their son, Mason, after a recent Linfield football game. Riddle family photo

By Ryan Tipps
D3sports.com

Sam Riddle’s 2-year-old son has 135 uncles.

Not biological uncles, of course. Rather it’s his Linfield teammates, who respect the star quarterback’s role as both a father and leader on the field.

Riddle found out his girlfriend was pregnant in October of his senior year in high school. Still a teenager and in the middle of football season, he was terrified and nervous about how his life would be affected.

“I really thought it was going to be one of those stories in that I wasn’t going to graduate from high school, I wasn’t going to be able to go to college, I was going to work a minimum-wage job for the rest of my life,” Riddle said. “I immediately thought of all the worst things that could happen.”

Luckily for him and luckily for Linfield, that isn’t how his story goes.

The story, though, detours through the University of North Dakota before snaking back to McMinnville, Ore., and the Linfield campus.

During high school, Riddle and his then-girlfriend, Briahnna Krokum, struggled with the decision of how to handle the pregnancy. Family members urged them to put all options on the table – the choice, no matter which direction they went, would be a difficult one.

“Having that pressure on our shoulders was hard on us,” said Riddle, who is now 20.

The couple decided to keep the child, named Mason, and raise him themselves. That was made despite the fact that Riddle was going to leave home and move 1,500 miles away with an athletic scholarship to Division I-FCS UND.

Almost immediately, Riddle recognized that he couldn’t handle being away from his son and from Krokum, who by that point was his fiancée.

He used Skype and Facetime to connect with them, but it was emotionally straining to be gone while his child grew up.

“It was making it worse” to be so far away, he said.

After a month at UND’s fall camp, Riddle was done. He cashed out almost his entire savings to buy a ticket for a train ride back to Oregon. It was a 31-hour trip filled with anticipation.

He arrived home on a Friday. Two days later, he was moving into the dorms at Linfield and getting ready to start classes Monday morning.

Riddle spent his first two years at Linfield living in the dorms and being with Krokum and Mason as much as possible on weekends while they lived with family members.

In that time, too, Riddle’s college career took off. He was named the Wildcats’ starter in the second game of 2014. Anchored by a senior-laden team and a veteran offensive line, he led Linfield to the national semifinals, losing a heartbreaker by just six points to the eventual national champions.

Just a few weeks after that season-ending loss, Briahnna officially became Briahnna Riddle.

Sam Riddle is having another fine season on the field for Linfield, with 11 touchdowns and just two interceptions. Linfield athletics photo

“Sam is really a terrific leader for us,” said Joseph Smith, who has coached the team since 2006. “His life experiences are a little bit further advanced than most of our other college students. I think he has a maturity about him that is quite impressive. I think even without that, Sam has a tremendous magnetic personality and charisma to him.”

The road to get here has been difficult for Riddle. He said he leans on a supporting cast that consists of his mother, who watches Mason a couple of days a week, a coach’s wife, who picks Mason up from daycare, his teammates and, of course, his wife.

“The whole support of the community has made things much easier,” Riddle said.

“Quite frankly, he’s probably pretty worn down,” said Smith, himself a Linfield grad. “It’s been hard, and I think because of that, the team has tremendous admiration for him, as do the coaches. They have respect for what he’s doing. He goes home and cooks and cleans when he has to, and that’s not easy with the time demands of going to college and running a football team.”

The coach said that Riddle came into his own during the 2014 playoff run and established himself as a dominant presence on the team. This season, he’s built upon that end-of-year success and recently helped Linfield extend to 60 its streak of consecutive winning seasons.

Riddle said it’s an honor to be a part of what’s called simply “The Streak,” a feat unparalleled in any division of college football. There’s a connection to the players of the past six decades.

“Now that The Streak is at 60, it’s really starting to set in that we’re a part of something bigger,” Riddle said. “We’re representing 60 years’ worth of Linfield football teams.”

Smith notes that the team’s expectations are always higher than merely breaking .500. Over the course of The Streak, Linfield’s winning percentage tops .800.

“I think our team is quite excited about it,” the coach said. “I think they got the gist of the size of that and the feel for how big it is to be a part of the history and tradition.”

Riddle has been a major component of that the past two seasons. Now in his junior year, Riddle and his wife and son live off campus in a duplex in McMinnville, about 45 minutes from his hometown.

He studies late at night or very early in the morning. He cooks and cleans and does laundry. A typical day has him juggling his responsibilities from 6:30 a.m. to midnight.

“We’ve been doing well in the few months that we’ve been living together as just us,” Riddle said. “We’ve gotten better at communicating. Living entirely on our own, it’s definitely brought more difficulties, but we wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Riddle is quick to point out that Briahnna is his biggest fan and that he gets a lift from the Linfield community around him.

“They respect that I’m able to be a dad outside of football and the best teammate I can be on the field,” he said.

Playoff picture

We’re seven weeks into the regular season – which puts us nearly halfway to the Stagg Bowl. Accounting for a bye week, most teams have six games under their belts, and it’s certainly not too early to get real about the postseason.

There is a specific formula for getting into the playoffs. For 25 teams, it means winning their conference titles and breaking any ties that may exist with fellow conference institutions. The NCAA doesn’t decide how ties are broken – that’s up to the individual conferences.

Those 25 teams are known as Pool A, the automatic qualifiers. For those of you who are new to Division III, that’s how we get teams that are 7-3 or 6-4 making it to the postseason while 9-1 teams are sitting at home in late November. That’s the structure of D-III, like it or not. At the very least, it’s fair to all teams, and it encourages teams to schedule tough in nonconference play with the knowledge that even if they lose, there is still a path to the playoffs.

A Pool A conference has to include at least seven teams that are full members of Division III.

Beyond that Pool A group, there’s Pool B, which consists of teams that are not in automatic qualifying conferences. This pool fluctuates year to year based on how many teams are unaffiliated with Pool A conferences. This season, there are 13 eligible teams, coming from the ASC, SCAC and independents. McMurry and Belhaven are provisional members of D-III, so they are not eligible for the postseason nor do they count yet toward the ASC’s automatic qualifying tally.

For 2015, one Pool B bid will be handed out. In past seasons, Wesley was as close to a Pool B lock as a team could get. Now, however, the Wolverines are in the NJAC (a Pool A conference), but it seems highly likely that the Pool B bid will go to Mary Hardin-Baylor, Hardin-Simmons or Texas Lutheran.

Finally, there’s Pool C, which is the at-large pool that every team that didn’t get picked in the first two categories falls into. There are six teams this season that will be chosen for these spots.

A detailed breakdown of how the teams in this grouping are selected can be found on D3football.com’s FAQ page. Each region has a committee that ranks its teams based on certain criteria, and this is where strength of schedule is factored in significantly. Teams that are 9-1 against Division III opponents or have 8-2 records against good teams should be paying attention to Pool C.

The committees – each run by a pair of co-chairs – don’t make their picks entirely out of the blue. A couple of weeks before the regular season ends, rankings for each region are released to see how teams are stacking up against one another based on the NCAA’s criteria. (Let me stress that D3football.com’s Top 25 poll in no way factors into these criteria, and neither does the AFCA Top 25.) This year, we’ll get a look at those rankings on Wednesday, Nov. 4, with a subsequent list published Nov. 11, just a couple of days before the final week of the season.

I got an email this week asking me how Chicago potentially fits into the playoff picture. Easiest said (that the Maroons win out and Berry drops two of its remaining games) is not easiest done. There are other ways, too, to pump up Chicago’s resume, such as Case winning out in the PAC. That’s part of the dance for everyone ahead of the postseason – teams themselves need to win while rooting for key losses from opponents.

One thing to look out for, though, is if you’re a likely Pool C candidate, you often want the undefeated teams to keep winning and the current one-loss teams to lose again. If too many of the currently undefeated teams lose a game here in the tail end of the season, that tends to saturate the Pool C field, meaning more 9-1 squads miss the NCAA postseason.

If you want to get more into the weeds of how the Division III playoffs work, here’s some “light” reading courtesy of the NCAA: http://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Prechamps_DIII_Football_2015.pdf