☺ Happy Tuesday. Back to work

📆 What’s Happening Today. The DIII Presidents Council Futures subcommittee meets.

🎶 Your Morning Pick Me Up. All I Wanna Do. Sheryl Crow

“Short on writers and needing to fill pages last October, Ava Harvey did what any sports editor for a small newspaper would have done: she assigned herself a football story. But since Harvey, then a senior at Oberlin College, was writing for the Oberlin Review, covering football was a rather tricky proposition. Oberlin’s team, the Yeomen, had finished 1–9 each of the previous two seasons. When Harvey began working on her column, during the 2025 season, the team was already 0–4, almost halfway to its eventual record of 0–10. A story breaking down Oberlin’s next opponent seemed useless. A feature on the team’s defense wouldn’t work, either. In its season opener, a home game against Calvin University, Oberlin had allowed its opponent to score seventy-four points before the start of the fourth quarter.

The Review has a history of publishing big feelings about football, keeping with the Oberlin tradition of having big feelings about a lot of things. Harvey decided that she wanted to write something “a little more controversial.” Her take? The school and its students should support the team more.”

» Driving The News. “She felt bad for her friends on the team, not just because of their dreadful record but because of what she saw as a stark divide between football players and the rest of the student body. In her article, “Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: Back Oberlin Football,” she argued that “the majority of students are, at best, indifferent—if not outright hostile—to the sport.” She also noted that “the homogenized coastal culture historically propagated by the school”—despite Oberlin’s campus being in northern Ohio—“alienates Midwest athletes seeking a sense of home.””

» Reality Check. “Oberlin is a Division III school that, by N.C.A.A. rule, doesn’t offer athletic scholarships. But having a football team, even one that never wins, is a suck on resources. As the Yeomen continued losing games last year, the larger college-football machine kept humming at campuses across the country. A core American truth is that football is a reflection of wherever it exists. Oberlin, it turned out, is no different, no matter how much it might want to be.”

» Of Note. "Football at Oberlin has not always felt so oxymoronic. But the true tradition, no matter the era, is the debate about how—or whether—football fits into Oberlin’s culture. “It’s part of Oberlin folklore to think of athletics as a problem, in some way,” said Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic studies.”

» What They’re Saying. “Actually having the football team is the inclusive thing,” Ghulam Woolman told me. “And we don’t need it to be good for it to be meaningful.” In a vacuum, this was an intuitive argument: the idea that, unlike most of higher education, Oberlin can field a team without bending to the country’s football obsession.”

“As most baseball and softball fans know, the challenge for many managers is knowing when to replace the starter with someone from the bullpen. In basketball or soccer, it’s subbing in a replacement.

With that in mind, we wondered if college sports, circa 2027, will eventually suffer from what marketing professors call the “Substitution Effect?” That’s the moment customers start replacing, sometimes en masse, traditional purchases with less expensive alternatives.”

» Driving The News. “The substitution effect acknowledges consumers have choices. You can choose to see a bad football team that didn’t buy a top-notch quarterback and build team depth, or you can go to the State Fair, the movies or out for dinner. You can even stay home and stream Ted Lasso or Slow Horses.”

» Why It Matters. “You see, attending sporting contests ultimately undertakes a value equation tied to entertainment, ambiance, social connectivity and overpriced concessions. When the fan believes there is some parity in the teams participating in a league, that most teams can be competitive all season long, fans willingly suspend belief (their 100% certainty the home team will win) and instead buy into the residual benefits provided by in-person attendance.”

» Worth Noting. “This is where the 1976 social psychology research by Robert Cialdini (and his team) generated the concept of Basking in Reflected Glory (or BIRGing). Their research showed that fans strengthen their association with a successful team even though they played no direct role in producing that success. They found that students were more likely to wear university-identifying clothing following a football victory and, tellingly, were more likely to use the pronoun “we” when describing a win than a loss. The opposite finding, applied to sports fans, the language can shift quickly from “We’re No. 1” after a victory to “They stink” or “They don’t know what they’re doing out there” after a loss. Notice what has happened to the pronoun: “We” became “they.”

A MESSAGE FROM FACTOR

Try Factor, America's #1 ready-to-eat meal delivery service.

Made from ingredients you recognize. Whole food. Nothing unnecessary. Let’s eat real.

Get 50% off your first Factor box + Free Breakfast for a year *1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year while subscription active.

Try Factor Now

“The Little Brass Bell Brothers pulled off the double win on Saturday, with No. 1 North Central handling No. 2 Bethel with ease and No. 5 Wheaton knocking off No. 3 Mount Union on a blocked extra point in the final seconds.

QB Garret Wilson threw for 325 yards and four TDs as the Cardinals drilled the Royals, 44-26. Purple Raider RB Kayden Minner scored with 22 seconds remaining, but the ensuing extra point was blocked, giving the Thunder a 24-23 victory. The loss was the first for Mount Union in the regular season since 1987.

The DIII Committee on Infractions found financial aid violations at both Loras College and Whittier College and levied penalties.

Loras’ infractions included “improper awarding of financial aid to international student-athletes in a pattern that was clearly distinguishable from other students at the institution. Specifically, the institution permitted a donor to contribute $214,588 to fund private financial aid awards for four Colombian baseball student-athletes during the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years. The institution selected the recipients and awarded the awards to the same four baseball student athletes in both academic years. As a result, the student-athletes received an award totaling at least $24,800 each year. Combined with the institution’s $28,000 international student financial aid award, their total aid packages covered approximately 97% of the cost of attendance for each student-athlete.”

Whittier’s case involved the institution “providing impermissible financial aid awards during the 2024-25 academic year to 11 international men's and women's soccer student-athletes in a pattern clearly distinguishable from the financial aid patterns for all students at the institution. The case also involved a failure to monitor violation. Whittier's enrollment office recommended recruiting prospects from Sweden for the 2024-25 academic year in order to help ease the burden of the institution's enrollment crisis.”

» Loras Resolution. “The parties’ agreed-upon penalties include public reprimand and censure, two years of probation, a $2,500 fine, a Level II review by the Financial Aid Committee and required compliance education for institutional staff responsible for creating or awarding financial aid.”

» Whittier Resolution. “The parties agreed the penalties include public reprimand and censure, one year of probation, a Level II review by the Financial Aid Committee, a fine of $2,500 and compliance education programming with the NCAA staff.”

» NIL Working Group. “The working group revisited its goals during its August meeting and began to plan a presentation for the 2027 NCAA Convention. Working group members committed to clearly conveying its work from the fall, providing the membership adequate time for discussion and outlining planned work for the spring. The working group provided feedback to finalize the sets of questions that will survey administrators, coaches and student-athletes across Division III regarding the state of name, image and likeness activities.”

☕ Thanks for starting your day with us.
Please support D3Playbook with a subscription

Copyright © 2026, D3Playbook.com All rights reserved