After keeping fans waiting for more than a year, the American Southwest Conference finally had something to say about its membership situation, and it did so with a bang, swiping two teams from the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference to shore up its membership and bring it back to six for the fall of 2026.

Who does that affect? It affects the SCAC folks, who were on the way to getting an automatic bid to the NCAA playoffs, and we’ll hear more about the reaction of the conference when we sit down with conference commissioner Dwayne Hanberry on this edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation Podcast.

Plus …

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Plus, the two schools that are going back to the ASC are doing so, apparently $4 million richer apiece. But for Schreiner, this represents a big leap up in competition for a program which hasn’t even played a game yet! Schreiner isn’t set to play a varsity game until 2026, but the Mountaineers’ timeline just got altered a bit. We talk with Schreiner’s head coach — Keith Allen, the second coach in this young program’s history — about how that changes things for him, one month into his tenure.

And more change in Division III this upcoming season includes, of course, the fact that there won’t be nearly as many fifth-year players. That’s the case all over now that the extra year of eligibility because of the COVID pandemic has largely worked its way through the system. At Coe, they’ll feel the loss of two seniors classes at once, and coach Tyler Staker tells us how they’ll adjust and what’s expected of the student-athletes who need to step up in 2025.

A lot of news happened in the past month aside from the ASC/SCAC as well, and we’ll talk through it all, including the upcoming NESCAC presidents’ meeting, the new Cortland coach, our soon-to-become Division III schools in Azusa Pacific and St. Francis (Pa.), and which one of those said it will dominate Division III. Plus, with two brand-new football programs coming online in the Conference of New England in the fall, where would the CONE likely rank? Stat of the Week in March? Conference rankings in March? Patrick and Greg cover it all in the latest edition of the D3football.com Around the Nation podcast.

The D3football.com podcast is a podcast that is weekly during the season and monthly in the offseason, by Patrick Coleman and Greg Thomas. The podcast was started in 2007. 

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