NCAA Football Division Ii

Every week during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Good Cop Bad Cop -- The American Football Coaches Association is trying to inject some sportsmanship into an opening week pregame near you. The AFCA has put forth a non-binding proposal that teams shake hands en masse before each Week 1 game, roughly four minutes before spending the next four hours in violent, competitive, collision-heavy contact.

Kudos, I guess. It's well-meaning and doesn't necessarily do any harm, but this seems more for show than sincerity given the necessarily violent nature of the game. As AFCA honcho Grant Teaff says, "It is symbolic, but it is, we think, a very important initiative." Meanwhile, the NCAA rules committee has cooked up its own, much more dangerous plan to counter unsportsmanlike play.

Tobias Lemke, a native of Germany, plans to chase his American Dream one day. But, at the moment, Lemke is dreaming repeat. Make elbow room on the national stage, please. The Florida Gators are not the only college football team chasing consecutive national titles.

Lemke and the defending NCAA Division II football champion Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs open preseason practice Saturday.

"Last season was something I will never forget, especially knowing where we were coming from," Lemke told FanHouse. "It was so much fun. Playing for the national title, being catered to at that level, coming back into town -- this is a big hockey town -- and just seeing how were able to win over the community and the students. I wouldn't mind doing it all over again."

Division II football players like Pittsburg State's Joe Windscheffel don't always have it as easy as major college players are perceived to. Many of them hold down jobs, in addition to their full-time school schedule and a practice schedule that isn't a whole lot different from their big-time brethren.

In the case of Windscheffel, the need to get some work done off the football field has cost him any chance of playing this season.

It is never easy for Division II sports programs to make news without a major criminal investigation or a tragedy. Bringing on a "name" hire is the one exception, meaning the University of Nebraska-Omaha stands a chance of making SportsCenter with the hiring of Trev Alberts as its new athletic director.

The former Nebraska Cornhusker star and college football analyst was the obvious front-runner. Alberts was the only candidate for the position brought to Omaha to meet with the public and media the week before the hiring.

The former ESPN talking head currently in the witness protection program known as being a college football analyst on the CBS College Sports channel, is looking to make a career move. Trev Alberts is the leading candidate to become the athletic director at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Alberts is the only candidate invited to come to the school and meet with the public and media to this point. The former Nebraska star would be a name hire. The Mavericks play Division II sports and is primarily known as a commuter school. The UN-O chancellor, John Christensen, is eager to hire someone who would be able to make a splash in the Omaha community and be able to raise funds.

Because nobody loves him, it's true. Not like his mom does, at least. And hey, a Third joke! As in, he's about to quarterback his third team in five years after bolting from Florida to Maryland to California...of Pennsylvania. Thanks to fellow Fanhouser Bruce Ciskie, I now recognize them as the team that got worked something terrible in the D-II playoffs by Minnesota-Duluth. Before then, I knew it as the very same school that Virginia's own exiled QB, Kevin McCabe, shuffled off to after an unceremonious benching during the 2006 season.

And while McCabe got in Al Groh's doghouse during a rebuilding year for a couple of INT's (resulting in a longer leash down the line for turnover machine Marc Verica in the same situation?), Portis was basically a weapon that the Terps couldn't seem to find a use for, in spite of his rave-worthy athleticism. Even with Ralph Friedgen's rep as an offensive innovator, the steadier, if not somewhat uninspiring Chris Turner's progression led to a diminished need for the potential for Portis gadget plays. Portis attempted three passes all year and ran 36 times. Somewhere down the road, it's not unthinkable that his huge upside could land him in the "sleeper" territory in 2010's mock draft (similar to Rhett Bomar), but as for now, it's somewhat disappointing that a rare talent in quarterbacking didn't pan out in a conference that really needs it.

It's a good thing the transitive property doesn't work in football. You might remember that property from a math class somewhere in your past. What the transitive property states is, if a > b and b > c, then a > c. It's a good thing that doesn't work in football, because if it did, tonight's BCS Championship Game wouldn't matter. Both Florida and Oklahoma have already been transitively defeated by the champions of Division I-AA the Football Championship Subdivision, Division II, Division III, and the NAIA. I kid you not. Fasten your seat belts, Chuckles; this is going to get strange.

We'll start with the FCS champions, the Richmond Spiders. The Spiders beat Montana, who beat Cal Poly, who beat San Diego State, who beat Wyoming, who beat Tennessee, who beat Vanderbilt, who beat Ole Miss, who beat Texas Tech, who beat Texas, who beat Oklahoma. And, of course, Ole Miss beat Florida outright. So we've established that as long as we can get to Cal Poly from a given team, they've transitively defeated both the Sooners and the Gators. Do you still doubt that all the other national champs who won the playoffs we can't have beat them? See you after the jump.

It's been an amusing little sidebar for the past couple years of the annual coaching carousel. A job would open up in Division 1-A and Terry Bowden would do what he could to get an interview or be considered for the job. Even if he didn't know a thing about the job or the region.

Now that is over with Terry Bowden assuming the reigns at North Alabama in Division II. One of the more successful D-II programs over the past few years. Bowden takes over from Mark Hudspeth who left to become an assistant coach at Mississippi State. Hudspeth had been the coach of the Lions for the past seven years, and the past four years North Alabama made the D-II playoffs and won at least 10 games.

Bowden has attributed his open pursuit of just about any job, to a burning desire to get back to coaching. Realizing how much he had missed it after being out of it since 1998. It probably didn't hurt that the money in college coaching has gotten much larger.

The problem for Bowden has been that he was out of coaching for nearly a decade and the fact that he resigned from Auburn in mid-season (though, with the recent insanity at Auburn, his departure has taken a slightly different perspective). His father, Bobby Bowden had recently advised Terry to stop shooting for big jobs, and just find a job that fit best to help rebuild his coaching reputation.

There could be one other reason for Bowden taking the North Alabama job over other possible jobs in D-II or even 1-AA. Bowden spent about five years at Auburn. The Alabama pension system only vests after ten years. If he just left the money there instead of rolling it into a IRA, then he could definitely use a few more years in Alabama (and even if he did roll it over, he likely would be able to buy back the years if he so chose).

Even a Division II playoff run was a journey into the unknown for the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

When UMD went to Allendale, Michigan, three weeks ago and handed Grand Valley State their first home loss since 2004, it became much more than just a "playoff run." The national championship dream was real.

Saturday, the dream was realized.

Minnesota-Duluth won their first Division II championship in any sport, upsetting Northwest Missouri State 21-14. The win caps a 15-0 season for the Bulldogs, who were making their first appearance in the title game. It's UMD's first national title in 76 years of football.

Senior quarterback Ted Schlafke threw a touchdown pass to Tony Doherty late in the second quarter to open the scoring, and UMD's defense forced four Bearcat turnovers. Two of those turnovers were interceptions thrown by senior quarterback Joel Osborn, who had six picks all season entering the game Saturday.

The storylines between Northwest Missouri State and the University of Minnesota-Duluth couldn't be any more different heading into the Division II Championship later today in Florence, Ala.

Northwest Missouri State (13-1) is in the title game for the fourth straight year. They have lost the last three, falling twice to Grand Valley State and once to Valdosta State. The Bearcats play in the powerful Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, a league that has placed a team in the Division II football title game ten times in the last 18 years.

Minnesota-Duluth (14-0) is the nation's only unbeaten team at that level, having plowed through the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference with only one serious challenge all season. The mere fact that they played in the NSIC, not considered to be one of Division II's stronger leagues, left UM-D as a relative unknown entering the Division II tournament.

They weren't an unknown for long.

The Bulldogs took out perennial power Grand Valley State in the quarterfinals, handing GVSU their first home loss since 2004. They intercepted Laker quarterback Brac Iciek three times, matching his 2008 season total entering the game. That defense was on display again last week in California, Pennsylvania, where the Bulldogs dismantled the host Vulcans 45-7.

Those performances give UMD the full attention of Northwest Missouri State entering Saturday's final.