NCAA 2015 Football Divisions - Simplified (Ha!)

I am a dedicated Auburn fan and a football fanatic, but for a long time I didn’t understand that the NCAA’s Division I football category has two subdivisions. I kept trying to make FBS and FCS two different divisions. (I am still annoyed that the NCAA didn’t take the time to make things a little clearer for those of us who illogically want things to be logical.) As I read through several websites, almost defeated by the boring history of frequent changes of categories and names, I finally got a little closure on this topic. Here are the results of my “research” for any of you who share my confusion.

The placement into divisions and subdivisions for football depends on the financial ability of a school to support a sports program based on NCAA’s somewhat bewildering requirements, including a maximum number of scholarships, minimum average attendance for home games, a specified number of funded sports by gender, and a commitment to academic achievement and appropriate facilities—all this plus adherence to scheduling criteria with plenty of legalese tossed into the mix. A school can even be in different categories for different sports!

Challenge: Try this crossword puzzle before (or after) reading below.

I.                 Division I – Two different groups of teams!

A.     FBS - Football Bowl Subdivision (128 football teams*)

                        Examples: Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, UCLA

FBS schools are allowed 85** athletic scholarships.

The college football playoff is a contractual system of six bowl games (Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta, and Peach), plus the championship game.

A committee following NCAA protocol selects twelve schools for the six bowl games. These must include the champions of the five major conferences plus wild cards. (It's actually much more complicated than this!)

List of 2015 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Teams

B.     FCS - Football Championship Subdivision (125 football teams)

                        Examples: Jacksonville State and Samford (Alabama) and

Mercer and Kennesaw State (Georgia)

FCS schools are limited to 63 athletic scholarships.

For national playoffs, the field consists of 10 automatic qualifiers through conference wins and 14 at-large teams selected by the NCAA. The teams participate in a typical playoff format.

An aside: Jacksonville State advanced to the national finals in January, 2016, but lost to North Dakota State, now a five-time national champion.

List of 2015 Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) Teams

II.               Division II (170 football teams)

Examples: North Alabama and Tuskegee (Alabama) and

Valdosta State and Fort Valley State (Georgia)

These schools are limited to 36 athletic scholarships.

The NCAA selects 28 teams in four regions to participate in the national finals in typical bracket structure.

List of 2015 Division II Football Teams

.

III.              Division III (248 football teams)

Examples: Birmingham-Southern and Huntington (Alabama) and

Berry and LaGrange (Georgia)

These schools do not offer athletic scholarships. (But athletes can get other types of scholarships, such as leadership.)

For the playoffs, automatic bids are issued to the winners of 25 conferences and seven at-large teams, resulting in eight teams in four brackets in a typical playoff structure.

An aside: For several years the national championship Stagg Bowl was played in Phenix City, Alabama.

List of 2015 Division III Football Teams

*The number of teams in each category varies with the different sources of information. One of the reasons for the inconsistency is that schools are constantly entering/leaving categories.

**The number of scholarships in each category varies with the different sources of information. Sometimes scholarships can be part- or full-time; this option leads to varying numbers of scholarships. The numbers here are approximations.

SOURCES

www.ncaa.com/                    www.ncaa.org/                      www.wikipedia.org/

www.d2football.com/            www.d3football.com/            www.bleacherreport.com/

www.herosports.com/            www.sbnation.com/               www.collegefootballplayoff.com/

In Memory of Warren Starke (1939-1992)

The Vine Spring, 1993 After the service, back at the house,  someone asked about the vine  on the front fence. You remember, the one  I always nagged you  to dig up and out and gone  because the thick dead trails  of thin gray string made such a mess  after the blooms stopped and I was tired of cleaning the fence.  You always refused,  saying--approval in your voice--  the vine paid its way in blossom time. Disinterested, I regarded  the small flowers  in the mass of crawling vine and  tried to give it a name.  I couldn't. Later, someone exclaimed,  "Look!  A hummingbird vine!"  and moved to get a closer look.  In the afterfuneral smalltalk, two visitors  recalled childhood memories  richly flavored with such a vine.  To a chorus of startmesome, I promised.

Today, for the second year  I've known the name,  I pulled the gray tendrils off the fence  and I thought of you. And, with pleasure, I thought of  the perfect, five-pointed blossoms unpretentious scarlet stars soon to appear summer's bright red dots punctuating the delicate, dark green traceries  cascading, looping from post to post  hiding the ugly wire fence.

National Siblings Day Post – A Day Late

It’s appropriate that this post is a day late because I don’t have any siblings! But I am lucky to have had ten wonderful cousins: four on my mother’s side in one Alabama family, and six on my father’s, three in Alabama and three in South Carolina.  My maternal grandmother lived in my second home across the street from my four Oneonta cousins so the five of us grew up together, and I thought of them as mine before I ever heard the word siblings and realized I didn't have any. During my growing-up years, I spent nearly every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day with them, plus weeks in the summer.

This picture was taken on Mother’s Day.  Although I don’t know the year because there is no notation on the back (Oh, Mama, why didn’t you? Maybe the same reason I didn’t either?) I know it was Mother’s Day. I look at the flowers and remember our annual ritual of cutting white and red roses in Grandmother’s garden, making a white corsage for her, and pinning red roses on each other.

When I was about ten, the five of us stood in a circle, held hands, and solemnly promised each other that we would never, under any circumstances, become teachers.  Why was such a commitment necessary? We were supersaturated with school things.  Both of my parents and my aunt were teachers.  My grandmother was the principal of the elementary school, and my grandfather was the superintendent of education for Blount County.  Of the five of us, three became teachers!

Although I was greatly influenced by my cousins, we departed ways when it came to college loyalty. As the child of an Auburn staff member, I of course yelled War Eagle, while the others screamed Roll Tide. (The youngest cousin, however, wound up at Georgia Tech with a PhD in something way out there, like nuclear physics.)

I look at this picture with sadness because these four cousins are all gone now but also with happiness because I still enjoy the great memories of our time together.

The Checkerboard Table

On my last round of over 300 booths in a Columbus antique mall, I saw a checkerboard table that looked vaguely familiar. It was stripped but not finished. Not pretty. Price: $45. I had already spent my budget for the junking trip, I was exhausted, and my friend was waiting for me, so we loaded our purchases into the car and started down the road.  After a few miles it sunk in: that table had to be THE table!
 
Nearly 40 years ago, I took an old checkerboard table to a re-finishing store in Columbus to be stripped, repaired, and finished. After a year and many calls, I went to the store to check on the table. The owner said he hadn’t finished the project because the repair on the inlaid blocks was so difficult. A year later, I went back to the store; this time I saw the stripped table and was very disappointed. He assured me that it would look better when he finished the repairs. After another year of not hearing from the re-finisher, I went to the store to see what was going on. He told me that I had not complied with our agreement to pick up the table in a timely manner, and he had to sell it to get his money. I was furious. But the table was gone. I just walked away, sobbing. Occasionally, through the years, that table would haunt me. Several days prior to the visit to the antique mall, I had thought once again about how I lost that family possession and how I could have kept it.

The missing table, a library table, and a set of bookends were given to Aunt Alma by a skilled woodworker who wanted to marry her. But she was destined to be an old maid; her father decided that this man wasn’t good enough for his daughter. These three items were in the old family house when we moved in. Although the other pieces were stained, the checkerboard table was painted white, with the inlaid checker squares painted black and white. My husband remembered using the table to play checkers with Aunt Alma when he was a child, and my sons Tom and Ben used it frequently when they were kids.

So I turned around, drove back to the antique mall, and bought the table.

When Tom took it out of the van, without prompting he immediately exclaimed that it was Aunt Alma's table, pointing out some broken squares that he remembered. Then he recalled a broken part of the leg that had been glued. After he described the break, we examined the leg and saw where it had been glued together. Oh, my goodness. That's the only time I have ever seen him get excited about a piece of furniture!  The next day, as I was cleaning the table, I checked the supporting curves on its leg and compared the design with the curves on the library table. The pattern of the curves is exactly the same. And there are other similarities in the techniques. It's ridiculous how happy this homecoming made me! (One day, I will get around to sanding and staining it.) And Tom pointed out how much money I had saved; surely the re-finishing guy would have charged me much more than $45 for stripping, repairing, and re-finishing the table!

Thanksgiving Assignment

While teaching tenth-grade English, I devised a Thanksgiving writing assignment that called for each student to help decorate a large wall with two index cards telling—in no more than two printed sentences—what he was thankful for, both serious and silly. I was amazed by the students’ humorous creativity and touched by their unabashed honesty as they read their two cards to the class and then posted them on the wall in the two categories. About three decades later, the presentation that still sticks in my head was that of the timid girl who softly proclaimed her serious thanksgiving to the class: “I’m thankful that I know who my daddy is.” In the hush that followed, there were no laughs or giggles, only quiet uh huhs from several parts of the room. I loved all my students.

Today I’m still fascinated by the things people announce that they’re thankful for, and this year I’ve been very interested to read the Facebook posts of my friends in the 30 Days of Thanksgiving project--in particular, the wonderful (and serious) writings of Louise Tolbert and Patricia Monterella. They are an inspiration! Since I can’t say what they have said as well as they have said it, I’ve decided to revise my original writing assignment to include a third category: the “sorta serious” category. You know, the things that are not silly, but the things that definitely can’t be included along with family, God, health, country, and the other serious blessings we have.

Today, I’m thankful for the old things in my old house—no cracks about old people, please—particularly the old Christmas decorations, and particularly the old nativity set. (I’m also grateful for the blog format, which apparently does not require that I stay on topic, or keep to the dreaded five-paragraph formula, with specified items like introductions and conclusions; I can cheerfully segue into another topic without losing cohesion points, as long as ideas are tangentially related. Or not. Ah, the joy of an English teacher set free!)

Anyway, about the nativity set, aka manger scene, or crèche. I don’t know what happened to the one I routinely set up in my childhood years but assume that Mama threw it out when it started looking worn. I wish I still had it, no matter the condition. Nearly 50 years ago, when our boys were toddlers, we bought a boxed manger scene at Sears, and now my grandchildren put those figures out first and pack them up last when we decorate. The stable, now in bad shape, well represents the desperate status of the Holy Family. No hotel, no money, no doctor. The devotional today in Daily Guideposts is an account of Pam Kidd’s visit to a museum exhibit of classic, famous paintings of the manager scene, all showing the Holy Family garbed in fancy clothes. She questioned the necessity of a “gold-leaf Jesus” and said she missed “smelling the hay.” What a powerful statement about the significance of the humble origins of Jesus! One of my favorite Christmas songs is 4Him’s “A Strange Way to Save the World,” a song from Joseph’s perspective, emphasizing his belief that he and Mary were just ordinary people.

As my thoughts wander, I wonder. I wonder how did I get lucky enough to have so many blessings in my life. The silly and the serious. And the sorta serious.

Last random comment before posting: I’m watching the very good Alabama-Georgia game as I type and am thinking that it would be really great if they could both lose. (Yep, I’m orange and blue for life.)

BOOKS: Ramblings with No Thesis Statement, No Conclusion, Little Coherence, and a Big Need for Hyperlinks

A book person. That’s what I’ve always been. I learned how to read early and started collecting books before I started school. During my early years, when we lived in Jacksonville, my parents would drop me at the Anniston public library and museum while they went shopping. I felt like I knew all the items in the museum on a first-name basis and, almost 70 years later, still remember its faintly musty smell. I always visited the mummies first, then wandered to the stuffed animals, the harpsichord, and my other friends and finally to My Spot among the books. I remember getting my first library card there when I was six and checking out my first Hans Christian Andersen book, The Little Mermaid, by myself. Several years ago, I was disappointed to learn that this wonderful old building in Anniston had been demolished but am pleased that the new museum still houses some of my old friends.

We moved to Auburn when I was ten, and I was thrilled to find that my father’s office was next to the college library, there was a great bookstore two blocks away, and the public library was in the same block as the bookstore. In a tiny, second-floor children’s library, I discovered Jules Verne and Agatha Christie under the supervision of a kindly woman whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. (She was such a great influence on me—you’d think I could at least remember her name!) The school librarian was Mrs. Francis, who assigned enjoyable library tasks to the new kid in town. That year I read The Robe, The Magnificent Obsession, all the Sue Barton, Student Nurse books, and a lame sport series that included Blocking Back, but I had to hide under the sheet to read Gone with the Wind with a flashlight. Unfortunately, I cried so hard at the end that my mother heard me and punished me for reading a forbidden book.

For years I collected the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and The Hardy Boys, and the less-known Five Little Peppers series. Oh, and the Miss Minerva and William Green Hill books! And of course I had the Louisa May Alcott books. Pollyanna. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Cricket: A Little Girl of the Old West. When I married and left home, Mama gave away all my books that were “cluttering up” the house. Sigh. But I've found a few of these titles in flea markets over the decades.

I love books. I love libraries and bookstores. I love the way books make my hands feel and my eyes smile. Imagine my surprise when I learned that I also love to read on my Kindle! Tired of tripping on the stack of paperbacks on my bedroom floor (because there was no more room on the shelves), I began to read books on my Kindle (first generation, October 2008) and now on my Kindle Fire. And also on the Kindle apps on my cell phone and two computers.

Visualize a laundry room. Mine is not typical. In addition to its clothes responsibilities, this fairly large room with tall ceilings has an additional function in my dilapidated old house: It is my library. The walls are covered in shelves. So when two rooms were recently remodeled and repainted, all books had to be removed from the laundry room shelves. The guys randomly threw everything in boxes, and when there were no more boxes, stacked the books throughout the house. And then covered everything in heavy white dust from sheetrock and ceramic tile.

It was a forced, perfect time to analyze which books could continue to live here. Getting rid of all college textbooks? A no-brainer. They were so outdated that they were useless, so they hit the garbage can. Cans.  And I actually had fun trashing the old curriculum and ed psych books. And statistics! I didn’t like them then, don’t need them now, wonder why I kept them so long, and then remember, oh, yeah, because it takes time and effort to make such decisions. Most of my beloved English-teacher books (anthologies and volumes on teaching composition and literature) went to the Teacher Resource Center in Columbus—two trips with the mini-van so overloaded that it wobbled. The BK (before Kindle) contemporary books went to a local charity. Boxes and boxes, outta here. Don’t even miss them. I still have too many books on the shelves, for example, too many really OLD books, not valuable but just old enough to be interesting. To me. And I haven’t even started on the shelves in the other rooms. Or the tall stack behind the door in the dining room.

Now I can check in on Amazon (is this beginning to sound like a commercial?) to see all the books I have read in recent years—well, nearly all of them. And this circuitous journey takes me to what’s on my mind today: a recent strand in my reading. (I always have several strands going at one time; for example, right now my second strand is historical fiction about medieval England.)

Within the last year, I’ve gotten into World War II, the Pacific Theater. Unbroken (sub-title: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand, 2010) is amazing. It also is about much more than a battle in the Pacific Theater. When I told my brother-in-law Don about this excellent book, he recommended Flyboys (sub-title: A True Story of Courage, by James Bradley, 2003). From there, I bounced to Flags of Our Fathers (by Ron Powers and James Bradley, 2000).*

In the latter book, I met General Howlin’ Mad Smith, a person of great interest to me beyond my fascination with World War II. A historic marker (http://seale.starketech.com/markers/smith.htm) on my property in Seale indicates his birthplace—an amusing proclamation since according to his autobiography, Coral and Brass, he was born in Hatchechubbee, a few miles down the road in Russell County. His family later moved to Seale, and he graduated from nearby Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) in 1901. He died in 1967 and left a small bequest to the Seale United Methodist Church.
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*I like checking out movies that relate to my books. The title Flyboys is sometimes confused with a movie that takes place in WW I France and also The Flyboys, about two stowaways. Unbroken will soon be a movie. I have ordered a Flags of Our Fathers DVD and have Letters from Iwo Jima on my Netflix instant queue. I am currently exploring a somewhat related strand on Netflix: “Non-battle” WW II movies. Examples: Island at War (occupation of a channel island), Wish Me Luck and Charlotte Gray (British spies in France), The Aryan Couple and Sarah’s Key (Jewish persecution), and Land Girls (Women's Land Army).

The Pain of Learning New Words

Recently, I was the victim of a felon. On my right pinkie. Not the place you would generally look for a bad guy. For this Miz Word person, who delights in learning new words, to have gained a new definition of the word felon, well, I could have passed it up.  

Two weeks ago, I cut a stubborn cuticle a little too close and a couple of hours later noticed that there was an infection around the nail. The next afternoon, after teaching a SMART Board class all day and becoming very aware that something was just not right under the band-aid, I left class a little early and drove to my doctor’s office. With a great deal of concern (and interest) he inspected the back of my finger and said, “That looks like a felon.” Then he called in two other doctors to take a look and they nodded their heads, Yep, it’s a felon. He quickly arranged transportation for me to see an orthopedic surgeon, saying he couldn’t let me drive (by then I was really hurting and was a little dizzy and nauseated) and it would take too long for my son to drive to town. Wow. The surgeon gave me pain pills and scheduled emergency surgery early the next morning. At that point the pad of my finger was tight and smooth and really looked weird, and the inflection around the nail even worse. Not for the squeamish. (That’s me.)

The speed of the infection was the flag that this was a possible big problem. Fortunately, we got to the infection before the bone was damaged. I give thanks to God for my doctor, who acted so quickly, to my teaching partner, for covering the end of the class for me, and to my son, who hauled me to the operation and the not-yet-completed therapy.

And that’s why I now have nine nails and a big bandage. And why a very patient physical therapist changes the dressing every other day and tries to coerce me to bend my finger--without hollering or fainting. But I have occasionally done both. Actually. And why I have had two drug reactions, one from the antibiotic and one from the pain meds. Can you say wimp?

And the lesson is:  Clean your cuticle cutters with rubbing alcohol every time you use them. The surgeon said he sees this problem frequently after women visit nail salons. He was nice enough not to lecture me. Also, another lesson:  Learn new words, but try not to apply them to your own personal body.