Under the direction of veteran hall-of-fame broadcaster Jim Doyle, when Penn State began competing in the Big Ten in football in 1993, I made my initial trek to Beaver Stadium for their annual football media day for Doyle’s longtime and popular Sunday Morning Quarterback show.
Over the next 32 years, I covered the collegiate gridiron gospel from State College to Bloomsburg to Bucknell. Not once did I find myself in Selinsgrove taking in a Susquehanna University football game.
That changed this past Saturday and let’s just say the differences weren’t subtle.
They were audible, edible, and existential.
No one was inching toward Lot 36 like at Penn State in a mile-long convoy, while your forgotten $45 parking pass lounges on your kitchen table awaiting its new role as an overpriced bookmark. Lot 36’s impending $80 penalty fee hits harder than a fourth-quarter pick-six for Ohio State. The parking quagmire is nothing short of a fiscal penalty flag. The only thing worse than the outrageous cost is realizing you are still three lots away from Beaver Stadium and the game kicked off five minutes ago.
There are no orange-vested rent-a-cops waving you into a dust bowl that doubles as a game day parking lot choreographed by an army of undergrads armed with walkie-talkies who will earn a minor in traffic theater at the end of the seven-home game Penn State football season.
At Susquehanna, you won’t find yourself rerouted through a cow pasture that has been temporarily rebranded as Lot 36 that is now closed to livestock until Monday morning.
At this tucked away Division-III enclave, parking was in a paved lot, perhaps next to an anthropology professor’s minivan or public address announcer Mike Ferlazzo’s pickup truck. It was the kind of game atmosphere where showing up is enough and no one is charging you a second mortgage for the privilege.
Division-III doesn’t do extortion by blacktop or cow pasture.
There are little to no NIL deals for the players. No multi-millionaire head-phoned coaches roaming the sidelines looking like they just jumped out of an Adidas catalog. There are no hyped-up choreographed videos set to obnoxious music tracks that are at least four decades old. And best of all, there are no extended media timeouts that last longer than the line at the Berkey Creamery that makes you forget what quarter the game is in.
The stadium crowd is not a sea of strangers, but your roommate, your professor, and perhaps your local optometrist. Such intimacy creates a communal heartbeat that can’t be replicated in cavernous stadiums. Home games feel less like ESPN primetime and more like a borough council meeting with plenty of Gatorade.
Every Saturday in quiet corners across our fruited American plain, Division-III players suit up not for sizeable payouts and television look-at-me pose time, but for the sheer joy of playing the game in its most authentic form. It is where the press box roster not only includes the names, class and hometown of the players but also the cheerleaders.
There is plenty of raw grit that is unfiltered, and often unglamorous. Players hold summer jobs, lift weights in basements and garages and play through pain without the headlines and never-ending press conferences and social media updates.
In an age when college athletics often moonlights as minor league professional franchises replete with billion-dollar television contracts, blockbuster NIL deals and nonstop transfer dramas, Division-III football hums along as the quiet counter-narrative. It is football stripped of its commercial costume, played by true student-athletes who juggle homework with lab times, internships, and practice not out of obligation, but out of a true love for the game.
There are no postgame press conferences sponsored by energy drinks and internet service providers. There are, however, a fair number of mechanical engineering majors who possess respectable size and speed that compliments a decent spin move with a modest goal of making it to chow after practice before the campus dining hall closes.
Division-III football attracts a unique breed: the intellectual athlete. These are players who might quote Thoreau, Burke and Friedman in the locker room or debate the growing national deficit between reps.
Football plays a role in their academic journey, but it’s not the whole map and it is certainly no Faustian trade-off. Football becomes a lifelong metaphor and fosters a culture where curiosity is as valued as competitiveness. Coaches often double as mentors more than recruiters. These players are more likely to have a group chat for their Econ 302 project than a legion of Instagram followers.
Rarely will anyone play professionally but they will be professionals of the first-degree in life. The discipline, teamwork, and resilience forged on these fields of play translate into boardrooms, classrooms, and operating rooms. The game teaches time management like no seminar ever could where players learn to prioritize, sacrifice, and lead.
Division-III football is not a steppingstone: it’s a destination. It is where the sport returns to its roots: community, character, and competition without corruption. In a landscape increasingly dominated by spectacle, their dogged, no frills play offers substance.
In the grand American sports narrative, Division-III is the quiet subplot, the kind that does not get a Netflix docu-series or a primetime viewing slot. It is where the post-game meal is courtesy of the local alumni who owns the nearby Subway franchise.
You won’t spot any future Heisman Trophy winners or witness any College GameDay cameos, but you will catch the future of leadership, love and sportsmanship for the game, the kind that seems benched elsewhere.
These are the players who show up early, stay late, and still make it to their 8 a.m. class. It is the heart and hustle of football without the filters.
It is the kind of grit that doesn’t trend on social media but endures.
It is certainly not the loudest story in collegiate athletics, but it might be the most honest.
Division-III football is where walk-ons become captains, and undersized linemen become legends. The next time you pass a small college stadium on a crisp, autumn Saturday afternoon, stop in.
You won’t be disappointed.
