FB: Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference

[OzJohnnie]

The SJU home schedule is excellent this year. I'll be subscribing again and up at 4am on a Sunday for these games.

[faunch]

The SJU home schedule is excellent this year. I'll be subscribing again and up at 4am on a Sunday for these games.

I don't understand why we host BU, GAC and Concordia this year and were on the road with them last year. Figure out a way to make a schedule where the top 5 teams play 2 on the road and 2 at home against each other each season.

[Patrick Coleman]

The SJU home schedule is excellent this year. I'll be subscribing again and up at 4am on a Sunday for these games.

I don't understand why we host BU, GAC and Concordia this year and were on the road with them last year. Figure out a way to make a schedule where the top 5 teams play 2 on the road and 2 at home against each other each season.

Conference offices tend to not like to get involved in that sort of thing, and set master schedules via random draw.

[hazzben]

Will be interesting to see what this means for Drake/Walker and UST/Caruso. Walker was making real inroads recruiting in the Twin Cities. I'm sure that will remain an area of opportunity for him at Drake. Also probably a benefit for Bethel, SJU, and top 3rd of the MIAC. An ascendent UWRF, with tuition reciprocity, was a tough recruiting battle.

Winners would seem to be Bethel, SJU, Drake, UWP, UWL ... losers are UWRF (not wishing them ill, just think they take a clear step back post Blaha/Walker) and potentially UST.

[art76]

Bethel officially announces schedule:

https://x.com/BethelRoyalsFB/status/2025992889507962972?s=20

Both NCC and St. Johns away

https://www.d3football.com/teams/Bethel/2026/index

We get a home night game against Hamline, which I appreciate, as I have a club launch scheduled that day as well.

[faunch]

This MIAC charging PPV for conference basketball playoffs....also women's basketball, and men's and women's hockey playoff streams are also PPV.  Johnnies and Bennies have teams in 3 out of 4 of the playoff tournaments.

$10 per game...$25 for all games.
Thoughts?

[OzJohnnie]

I'm in Delhi this week and was thinking about the new AI search engines and how powerful they are. Using Grok, Twitter's LLM which I have found is the best search engine available by a long way and leaving Google well in the dust.  Anyway, I took a generic street picture, removed all the meta data and loaded it into grok. It not only picked the city, it picked the building behind me that I was standing outside of.

I wonder if the AD dept has the computer science department using some student job spots for training analytical models on opposition analysis. Play/scenario deep dives and trends, etc.  OC's and DC's will really be able to lift their games at the lower levels like DIII. 

[DuffMan]

I get that you want it to be free, Faunch, but it costs money to produce these streams.  Do you think the schools should just eat the cost?  How much would it actually cost you to go to the game?

I'm not saying that I like having to pay, but if the option is paying for a decent broadcast vs. watching a CSS Football stream, I'll gladly pay the $10-$15.

[faunch]

I get that you want it to be free, Faunch, but it costs money to produce these streams.  Do you think the schools should just eat the cost?  How much would it actually cost you to go to the game?

I'm not saying that I like having to pay, but if the option is paying for a decent broadcast vs. watching a CSS Football stream, I'll gladly pay the $10-$15.

It kind of sucks that the streams for hoops and hockey are free all season and then they charge for the playoffs. I'm not that invested in this season's SJU hoops team to fork out the $$$ to stream it.
I wonder how much money they'll actually make of the basketball and hockey playoffs.
Agreed...I could probably be convinced to pay $100 for conference football if it got CSS to improve their ****-y production.

[DuffMan]

Agreed...I could probably be convinced to pay $100 for conference football if it got CSS to improve their ****-y production.

Video production or on-field production? 

[sjusection105]

I get that you want it to be free, Faunch, but it costs money to produce these streams.  Do you think the schools should just eat the cost?  How much would it actually cost you to go to the game?

I'm not saying that I like having to pay, but if the option is paying for a decent broadcast vs. watching a CSS Football stream, I'll gladly pay the $10-$15.

There are a lot of variables on the table such as cost of tuition. There could be a lot of "nickel & dime" charges and price increases for things we already pay for in the not too distant future.

[hazzben]

I get that you want it to be free, Faunch, but it costs money to produce these streams.  Do you think the schools should just eat the cost?  How much would it actually cost you to go to the game?

I'm not saying that I like having to pay, but if the option is paying for a decent broadcast vs. watching a CSS Football stream, I'll gladly pay the $10-$15.

It kind of sucks that the streams for hoops and hockey are free all season and then they charge for the playoffs. I'm not that invested in this season's SJU hoops team to fork out the $$$ to stream it.
I wonder how much money they'll actually make of the basketball and hockey playoffs.
Agreed...I could probably be convinced to pay $100 for conference football if it got CSS to improve their ****-y production.

That's the rub right ... it's annoying when Concordia has a post in the press box blocking out the view anytime the play isn't in the middle of the field. But it's free, so how much can you really complain.

I'd probably be ok paying a fee if the entire conference slate was included, but only if the production value was consistent.

Flip side, I know Bethel pivoted to a fully student run broadcast, from camera's to announcers. Makes sense, it's "live reps" for the media communications students. But the reality is, you get a bumpy ride early in the year. Zoomed in too tight, replay running over the start of the next play, etc. Not sure how it works to have student run productions and also charge for the product.

[faunch]

Agreed...I could probably be convinced to pay $100 for conference football if it got CSS to improve their ****-y production.

Video production or on-field production? 

Not sure which might happen first? Maybe they're intentionally keeping the video production so poor to keep people from seeing how bad the on-field performance is.
I'm guessing SJU is not terribly interested in having conference wide PPV for football as it might cost them some revenue.
I would really love to know how much revenue SJU garners from the PPV football webcasts.

[art76]

Here's the link to the following from Frank Rossi of In The D3FB Huddle:
https://www.facebook.com/D3Huddle

(I copied and pasted because not all of you are on FaceBook.)

IT TOOK A NATIONAL CHAMPION TO SHOW US THE HARD WAY THAT THE SYSTEM IS ABSOLUTELY BROKEN
By Frank Rossi - "In the (D3FB) Huddle"

In over 30 years of covering #d3fb, I am watching, along with @D3FBHuddle, something I have never witnessed before -- and there are aspects of it that I'm hoping we never see again.

First, there was the natural progression of life and college for UWRF Football. The team packed with insane levels of talent wins a National Championship, and a number of key seniors graduate off. Names like Kaleb Blaha and Gage Timm would be part of D3FB legend -- not just UWRF legend. These types of losses are nothing unusual, and it was often where the story would end before we moved to the next season.

Yet, the story was just beginning there. The new paradigm in NCAA College Football took hold with the Falcons players that realized they might have an opportunity to play at a higher level. We saw phenom WR Blake Rohrer jump into the Transfer Portal, along with OL D.J. Fox and others. Fox landed at James Madison quickly, but Rohrer's story and the stories of others showed us the tough reality of what Nick Saban pointed out in 2025 -- the Portal's calendar approach makes zero sense. Either those players needed to find quality representation to navigate the system in record time and strike instant gold, or they would be unable to make a jump in time for Spring practice and would face months of uncertainty. Yet, what it also showed was an instability inside the foundation of the National Champs for players that had not made that decision to enter the Portal yet but who were already concerned about the graduation losses.

With things seeming to stabilize in late-January to early-February, the story was still not over. With Drake's Head Coach resigning on February 9th, an opportunity opened for UWRF Head Coach Matt Walker to parlay his success over especially the post-Covid years into his own chance to go to a higher NCAA level. An unheard-of Sunday night announcement of a National Champion coach leaving created yet another domino effect starting on February 22nd, with rumblings of most of the offensive staff joining Walker making things even more unstable. Even with the quick naming of Interim Head Coach Jake Wissing, the Defensive Coordinator who masterminded the defense that held North Central to just 14 points on D3's biggest stage, the next round of bleeding was inevitable. Jake Hilton -- a monster WR in size and speed -- highlighted another Portal escapade from the Falcons at a time that we never really saw in the offseason before.

The timing further has blurred how this process works for everyone involved since UWRF, like most other schools, is over a month into their Spring term. Would an upper-level school really demand a transfer occur immediately for Spring practice purposes? How would that affect the academics of a player making such a move? Could an upper-level school even promise an athletic scholarship in this timeframe? For as much as we think we know about the Transfer Portal, the Wild West that exists in D3 is creating a level of confusion and uncertainty that is exposing the weaknesses of the system daily and making more and more people say out loud, "Saban was right."

Several folks have told me we will likely see a few more players hit the Transfer Portal from UWRF at some point based on this newest wave. Several eyes have gone to Rising Freshman Taylor Sussner, who proved in 2025 that he was a Freshman in class year only. His statistics and game play were awesome for a young player on the other side of the ball from a frenetic offensive style. One person familiar with the situation said to me this week about Sussner, "I think he's the guy that could make the jump [to upper-level FBS]." Others have told me that many teams are literally waiting to see what he decides to do because they see huge tangibles and intangibles in Sussner. Again, I have never witnessed something like this in my 30 years where an 18- or 19-year-old player is the focus in the offseason to this extreme, especially in late February. Yet, even though I hate this situation for many reasons, we have to look to ensuring the players understand their options and maximize their potential. Knowing this is what Sussner may be facing, my best advice to him and anyone else in his position is to take a deep breath, talk with knowledgable and trusted potential representation before making any final decision, and ONLY THEN make your decision known to everyone involved -- be it through a Portal entry or the decision to stay at his current school. The likelihood is that any transfer at this point is a Summer transfer, meaning this is a marathon and not a sprint.

Can River Falls successfully defend their WIAC title and National Championship in 2026 with these unheard-of developments, known and unknown at this point? Well, they proved in 2025 to many of us doubters that anything is possible. Yet, Coach Wissing has his hands full and probably still doesn't know for sure exactly who his returning players are or aren't -- which again, in D3 without any actual Portal windows and without the 5/15 rule (and the 30-day Interim Coach delay to talk to players and try to convince them to stay and play at least for one more year), is an epic weakness in the D3 Portal system. While some look at windows as an unfair way to "trap" players at schools, they also try to maintain some semblance of a reality of how academic schedules work. Yet, the academic-facing Division -- D3 -- seems to refuse to embrace these academically-important windows. I can't understand how we got here or why we aren't quickly making changes that are completely necessary.

None of this is UWRF's fault -- not the players who have graduated, not the players who have left via the Portal, not the players who remain in the Portal, not the coaches that have left, and not the next wave of players that have or will enter the Portal. These players and coaches are just trying to maximize their positions and finances in the ways we have told them the past few years they can. This is our fault -- the NCAA, the folks who are close enough to the system to provide input, and the folks that didn't take a step back to understand that 18-22 year olds might have needed a bit more structure and guidance before we just let them dive into shark-infested waters as they make what seem to be justifiable and sensible decisions inside an unjustifiable and insensible system. It's just sad that a National Champion had to potentially experience this level of collateral damage for us to really become fully aware of how much the system sucks.