What am I doing here? Well, let me tell you, internets.
You’re a college football fan, or a college basketball fan. You visit the usual sports websites. ESPN, CNN/SI, Sporting News, CBS Sportsline. They’ve got all the information you could ever possibly want on the BCS leagues, and most of the information you could ever possibly want on the mid-majors (and if basketball’s your thing, you’ve got Kyle Wheliston for that). Division I revenue sports are so thoroughly covered that there’s really no need for any more coverage.
Meanwhile, Division I FCS, Division II, Division III, the NAIA… wasteland. Well, okay, Division III is actually extremely well-covered by the good folks at D3football.com and D3hoops.com, and the NAIA covers itself, somewhat, with some help from Victory Sports, but I’ll address this more in a bit.
You can get scores no problem, of course; ESPN isn’t so full of journalistic lassitude that they fail to provide this. But it’s just scores with no context. You can’t even get conference standings until midway through the season. And let’s be honest: a wall of scores is totally useless to a casual observer.
I did not attend a lower-level institution. Indeed, I attended a BCS school. My primary concern, as a fan, is and always will be what’s happening with my school. But I am also a sports fan, right? As such, I have always at least been curious about what’s going on down there in the dark, where the schools which are not cash-churning athletic factories toil in relative obscurity. I think a lot of other people are, too… or would be, if it weren’t difficult to get into.
The sites I mentioned above are fantastic, really. The Division III sites cover D-III sports with a zeal which rivals the attention paid to BCS schools by ESPN and the like. If you’re actually a die-hard D-III fan, that’s perfect. If you’re just generally curious… it’s not, so much. This isn’t to say that if you’re just curious, you shouldn’t visit them — in fact, you can expect linkage to them from this blog. It’s just that unless you’re already into D-III, diving into the D-III sites can be a little daunting. The reason for this is pretty obvious once you do; D-III has twice as many teams as D-I. Twice as many conferences. Far less inter-regional play, too, and as a sports fan you probably don’t need to be told what impact that has on your comprehension of just what’s going on down there.
So: what am I doing here? My interest in lower-division sports has forced me to learn far more about them than I actually “wanted” to initially. I was curious; I was forced to become, if not an “expert”, at least “extremely well-versed”. As I said previously, I think there are a lot of folks who are curious; they’d like to know what’s going on in the lower divisions, but simply don’t have the time to immerse themselves.
I’m going to solve that problem for you, gentle reader. Each week, I’ll provide a rundown of what’s important, and what’s interesting. Occasionally, I’ll go a little more in-depth, either because I feel the need to, or simply due to capricious whim; in the main, however, I want to keep this simple and direct.
Let me be clear: this blog (and, eventually, community of sorts, I hope) is intended for a specific audience: other folks like me, whose primary loyalty is to one of the Big Boys, but who wants to understand Those Other Guys. That should not, however, imply that if you’re primarily a fan of the lower division schools, you’re not welcome. Indeed, we’ll want you in the commentariat; you provide the perspective. After all, one of the greatest things about BCS-level sports in the internet age is that we can share our rivalries and experience glorious schadenfreude and declare ourselves allies for a day in the face of the enemy and all that other good stuff that makes being a sports fan great. For those of us who don’t live and die by your school’s team, that’s actually another reason it’s hard for us to appreciate it. You can help us understand.
I realize I’m starting this mess in the middle of a football season. Unfortunate in most respects, perhaps, but I think it’s a better method of getting off the ground (at least in terms of “my ability to do so”). If I were trying to start this in pre-season, I would probably feel compelled to try and give a pre-season preview, and that would make it more difficult to provide the accessibility I’m looking for. I think. We’ll see.
Lastly, although I’m relatively certain this won’t impact anyone at all, since I don’t expect to have any actual readers for some time… please bear with the format and appearance until I get it settled. Rather than spend a bunch of time working on the visual details here, I decided to just start writing, because rather than wanting to be a writer, I decided it was time to just be a damned writer. Writers write, right?
Welcome!