🏈 It’s Finally Here. And a long holiday weekend as well.

🎶 Your Morning Pick Me Up. The Heat Is On. Glenn Frey

“The Division III Commissioners Association (DIIICA) has named Rabbit Barnes and Alison Mueller-Hickler the 2025-26 Men's and Women's Sport Athletes of the Year, respectively, recognizing two Colorado College and Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) student-athletes whose accomplishments exemplify the Division III model of excellence in athletics, academics, leadership and community engagement.”

» Rabbit Barnes. “A neuroscience major who graduated with an outstanding 3.972 GPA, Barnes combined national-level success in track and field and cross country with academic achievement, mentorship, leadership and community service.

Barnes was the 2026 NCAA Indoor National Runner-Up and All-American in the mile, adding another national honor to an accomplished career. He was named the 2025 SCAC Track Athlete of the Year and is a six-time individual SCAC Track & Field Champion. He also holds the SCAC conference record in the 800 meters and Colorado College school records in seven events.

Barnes' excellence in competition was matched by his performance in the classroom. He was named a 2025 First Team Academic All-American in Track & Field/Cross Country by College Sports Communicators (CSC) and was a three-time CSC Academic All-District honoree. “

» Alison Mueller-Hickler. “Mueller-Hickler graduated from Colorado College with a 3.913 GPA, majoring in Environmental Science with a minor in History. A standout in both cross country and track and field, she established herself as one of the nation's premier distance runners while making significant contributions to environmental research, student leadership and campus life.

Mueller-Hickler capped her cross country career with an outstanding 2025 season, finishing 26th at the NCAA Division III Cross Country Championship to earn All-American honors. She was named the 2025 West Region Champion and West Region Runner of the Year, as well as the 2025 SCAC Champion and SCAC Runner of the Year.

Her academic accomplishments were equally impressive. Mueller-Hickler was named to the CSC Academic All-District Team in 2024 and 2025 and was a four-time SCAC Honor Roll recipient. In 2025, she received the Crown Goodman Presidential Scholarship, recognizing students with exemplary academic records and significant contributions to the total life of the college.”

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Division III certainly tops DI when it comes to opening-week matchups on the gridiron with two games involving top-5 teams.

In addition to No. 3 Mount Union taking on No. 5 Wheaton (Ill.), the top two teams in preseason Division III polls will square off for the No. 1 position in the country.

No. 1 North Central (Ill.) plays host to No. 2 Bethel in a first-ever matchup between #1-2 in the opening game of the season. The game is a rematch of the 2025 NCAA DIII quarterfinals that saw the Cardinals down the Royals, 35-21, on their way to the Stagg Bowl.

Bethel handed NCC its last home loss, downing the Cardinals, 27-24, in the 2018 playoffs.

“As a plaintiff attorney cross-examined SEC commissioner Greg Sankey on the witness stand in a Louisiana courtroom Thursday afternoon, news broke that his conference had filed a lawsuit against one of his own members.

The SEC sued LSU.

If you're keeping tabs, this is the second time that a league filed a legal challenge against its own school in the last couple of months.”

» Court Awareness. “Just in the last three years, four schools have filed lawsuits against another school or their own player (for buyouts and tortious interference); a group of players or an individual player has twice sued their coach (broken NIL promises); and a conference has sued another conference or one of their member schools at least nine different times (mostly over realignment).”

» State of Play. “College sports remains mired in the worst kind of purgatory. The industry wobbles erratically, caught between the old amateurism model and full-blown professionalism. Its stakeholders disagree on a way forward. Do you push back against mounting legal challenges with conference-wide restrictions? Or lunge forward into a more pro scheme through collective bargaining? There is a group, too, still stacking their eggs in the congressional basket, hoping for a federal bill to regulate the industry — something that took a hit on Thursday morning, when House leaders announced they would end their September session two weeks earlier than expected.”

» Quotable. One power league athletic director summed it up quite nicely on Thursday. "At this point, you got to wonder what people are thinking about our industry," he said. "It's embarrassing."

» Football. “The Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association (MIAA) is bringing fans closer to the action with the launch of The MIAA Pulse, a new weekly football television program produced by Calvin Video Productions throughout the 2026 MIAA football season.”

» Tax-Exempt Status. “Private colleges could lose their federal tax-exempt status if they engage in diversity, equity and inclusion work, under a proposed rule issued by the U.S. Department of Treasury on Thursday. The IRS tax code does not grant tax-exempt status to private colleges that discriminate based on race. The Treasury’s proposal would align the agency’s definition of racial discrimination with a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump that declared DEI policies and programs to be violations of federal civil rights law.”

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