Growing up as a sports-crazed child, my daily routine from the ages of 10 to 18 was always the same. I’d get home from school, flip on the TV and turn on one of four different channels – MLB Network, NHL Network, NFL Network and, of course, ESPN. In early December, in the midst of the NFL season and toward the end of the college football season, SportsCenter was filled with highlights of the Vikings-Packers and Michigan-Ohio State matchups.
I waited in anticipation to see the latest highlights of Adrian Peterson running over NFL defenses.
But as I sat on my living room couch with my post-school bowl of Chef Boyardee ravioli I was faced with highlights of something called the Stagg Bowl and a matchup between the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Mount Union.
Where is Mount Union? Why would anyone care about Division III football? These teams aren’t on ESPN.
Why care about the exploits of non-scholarship athletes when the best players in the world were on my TV 12 hours each Sunday?
Fast forward to December 2024, and I am preparing to make the 3-hour trek to Waverly, Iowa for the third round of the NCAA DIII football playoffs – my fifth road trip of the year to cover the Royals.
Now, the St. John’s-Bethel rivalry holds as much interest and intrigue as the Gophers reclaiming Paul Bunyan’s axe from the Badgers. The precision of Colin Duling’s spread offense is as good a story as the Sam Darnold-redemption arc occurring Sundays at U.S. Bank Stadium.
This Saturday, I’ll be watching the Wartburg College Knights duke it out with the Bethel Royals while Googling updates of the Oregon Ducks and Penn State Nittany Lions Big Ten title game during time outs.
I will be following the live stats of the Susquehanna-St. John’s quarterfinal matchup on the edge of my cramped Wartburg press box seat, as the promise of a potential third Royals-Johnnies matchup in the semifinals looms.
Even if traveling to Hamline on an October afternoon to watch a 70-0 thrashing is a slog in the second half, it’s all worth it to write about Cooper Drews’ six touchdown passes.
So why wouldn’t I spend my Thanksgiving weekend driving three hours from my grandparents’ house in Duluth to sit on metal bleachers in 13-degree weather at Royal Stadium?
I packed up my bags at 9 p.m. on Friday night, leaving me just enough time to partake in a holiday tradition of scarfing down two pieces of my grandma’s homemade lefse before I hit the road. I Missed out on the end of an eight overtime thriller between Georgia and Georgia Tech in the process.
Instead,I got a chance to witness and write about the special teams’ trickery of Aaron Ellingson’s gutsy fake punt call on fourth down and watch Caden DeWall break through the Foresters’ line to block not one, but two punts. Yeah, too boring for me.
All of this culminated in the experience of walking into the Bethel Sports and Recreation Center (SRC) to see two chairs and a folding table set up for a press conference. I asked Division III athletes about their interrupted Thanksgiving plans all while the Lake Forest players used the other half of the SRC as their makeshift locker room.
As Double Coverage podcast guest and Bethel offensive coordinator Colin Duling said, Division III is a “pure brand of football” — a comment that 15-year-old me would have scoffed at.
