The biggest little games: we go to Division III for a look at three classic college rivalries

Football Digest, Dec, 2003 by Joe Donatelli

THE FIERCEST RIVALRIES IN COLLEGE football don't take place in the Horseshoe, Rose Bowl, or Bryant-Denny Stadium. They aren't played before nationally televised audiences. And no bowl games are ever at stake.

These rivalries are contested by players who compete for the same reason their forefathers did 100 years ago: pride. No 100,000-seat stadiums. No NFL scouts. No big scholarships. Just football for the sake of football.

If you have a son or a nephew who played the game at the Division III level, or you yourself attended Mount Union in Ohio or St. John's in Minnesota, then you know the joys of Division III football. There are many, such as:

* It's good football, coached by local legends who have been with the same school for 20 or 30 years.

* There are massive chips on the shoulders of every linebacker and tailback who thinks he should be playing in Division I.

* The rivalries are ancient and storied, the kind that can turn an 0-7 season of failure into a 1-7 season of triumph.

Says D3football.com publisher Pat Coleman, "A few years ago, we had a coach tell us, 'You can lose them all, but you better win that last game.' That season he lost the last game and was removed."

The players take these rivalries seriously. For many, the last game of their career comes against the same players they lined up against on their first play in junior high.

With no bowls to play for, season-ending contests such as the one between Wabash and DePauw have become de facto bowl games that are more popular, in a way, than their Division I counterparts.

Says DePauw sports information director Bill Wagner. 'They have an enrollment of 2,300, and we have an enrollment of 800. We draw 8,000 fans to this game. That would be like Ohio State-Michigan drawing 200,000."

Here, then, is our look at three Division III rivalries that are as good as any in all of college football:

WILLIAMS-AMHERST

Considering its bloodline, Williams-Amherst might be the purest rivalry in all of sports.

In 1821, Williams president Zephaniah Swift Moore was so convinced that no college could thrive in northwest Massachusetts that he took a group of students, faculty, and--legend has it--a few library books 60 miles southeast to start a new school, Amherst College. Amherst students and staff have since been labeled "defectors."

"We hold it against them every chance we get," says Williams sports information director Dick Quinn. He's not kidding. A few years ago, the Williams band presented the Amherst band with an overdue library fine for $1.6 billion.

For this and many other reasons, the Williams College Ephs vs. the Amherst College Lord Jeffs has been dubbed "The Biggest Little Game in America."

It's truly a sibling rivalry, complete with all the sophomoric shenanigans one would expect. Like the year Amherst tried to sneak a student onto the field wearing a Williams uniform, only to have the student disrobed by officials before the crowd.

Then there's the legend no one will confirm or deny about a group of Williams alumni who kidnapped the Amherst quarterback the night before the game, got him drunk, locked him in a closet, and then discovered he was injured and wouldn't be playing anyway.

Because the teams have been playing since 1884, tradition is a major part of each game. When Williams wins at home, players walk with fans out of Weston Field and down Spring Street to St. Pierre's Barber Shop, a local institution that displayed a sign reading STILL ONLY THREE HOURS FROM FENWAY PARK when it moved to a different part of town. Shades drawn, the coaches and players celebrate at St. Pierre's with stogies and cold beverages.

Obviously still bitter about being abandoned for greener pastures, Williams leads the series 65-47-5. November 8 win mark the teams' 118th meeting, the most among Division III schools and the fourth-most in all of college football.

Last year the storied tradition continued when Amherst denied Williams a perfect season with a 45-35 win at Pratt Field. Though both liberal arts colleges' enrollments number around 2,000, the game was attended by 8,000 fans, most of whom probably knew each other.

"This is a pure rivalry," Quinn says. "Harvard and Yale, that's a big rivalry. But Yale didn't defect from Harvard."

WABASH-DEPAUW

Yes, the Monon Bell sounds just like the Bronze Boot and the Little Brown Jug and Ye Olde English Butter Churner and the rest of college football's old-time-rivalry hardware. But the bell is truly a superior piece of battle bauble.

For starters, it weighs in at an impressive 258 pounds. It gets stolen more often than Rosco P. Coltrane's squad car. And it has history. The bell once sat atop the Monon Line railroad engine that carried students to and from Wabash-DePauw football games.

"I call the bell the greatest symbol of any rivalry in the country," says DePauw head coach Nick Mourouzis, who has coached in 22 Monon Bell games, more than anyone in history. "We love to ring it. It makes a great sound. It resonates."

Alumni from the two Indiana schools would know. The bell has officially been stolen eight times, most recently in 1998. One of the more clever heists occurred in 1965, when a Wabash student appeared on the DePauw campus disguised as a Mexican dignitary. The impostor asked the president if he could see the bell. The president complied, and the student later returned with friends and absconded with it.