With Ashland being the only GLIAC club in the field and their having a bye, there aren't any games to preview for this weekend. There is still plenty going on around the league, however, so here are a few nuggets to tide us over until next week:


Dennison to Retire

Walsh head coach Jim Dennison has decided to hang'em up. Dennison is one of the deans of Ohio college football. He's the only head coach that Walsh has known since starting their program 18 seasons ago, and when you combine that with the 13 years he led D1 Akron, Dennison has a lot of year under his belt leading college football teams. In addition to the 31 years as head coach, Dennison had another 22 years of coaching in both high school and college. After 53 years of teaching and shaping the lives of student-athletes, we think he probably deserves a break! Enjoy your retirement and time with your family, Coach...you've earned it.


Other Coaching Changes?

Over the last few years, most GLIAC schools that want to head in a new direction from a coaching perspective make that call pretty quickly after the season is over. We haven't heard much of anything this week, so for now it might be safe to presume that most (if not all) HC's are safe at the moment. Several coaches have only finished their first or second year and seldom do we see a staff not get at least three years to make something happen. Plus, a lot of those "new" coaches have shown some steps forward with their clubs so it's hard to see any schools making a move this year. While there's no getting around that several of the league's fan-bases could be wishing their administrations might make a change, the amount of pull and political strife that boosters and alums might cause typically isn't quite the same in D2 as it is for the BCS-level schools. Of course, we'll keep our ear to the ground but for now it appears that Walsh is the only GLIAC member looking for a new boss.


GLIAC in the Playoffs

As we talked about last week, Ashland was surefire to get in. We also thought that Grand Valley was likely the only other league member that could have played their way into the field. Tough to know for sure if they would have made that six-line instead of WT had they defeated Saginaw Valley, but the case wouldn't have been flimsy...we're pretty confident of that. All of that said, what we and many others suspected could happen did: The GLIAC North didn't get a single club into the bracket. Does that mean that no North teams are good enough to make a run or are not better than some of the clubs that did make it? Hardly. No offense to the other teams, but we'd take our chances with any of the three-loss North clubs against most of them. "Damage-doers" or not, they aren't in the field and will have to get to work on figuring out how to win more in 2013...and win more they must, as being 10-1 or better is probably going to be the only way to ensure a spot. The parameters the NCAA uses for selecting the brackets are known going into each season, and the only true recipe for making sure you're in and seeded where you want is to "just win, baby". Depth in the North will be similar next year, so that could once again prove to be a tall task.


All-GLIAC Teams

The league release their post-season awards this week. There has been a fair amount of discussion on the boards this week about it, but to be honest this shook out just about how we would have figured. We could kinda see the case for swapping awards for Taylor Housewright and Jeff Janis, but let's face it...that's ultimately a hair-splitting issue...both were nothing short of unreal this year and deserve great accolades. Other than that, there weren't really any names that we found out of place or conspicuously absent. There might be some legit gripes over guys that didn't make first or second team, but with a 16-member league you're going to see some of that. The number of players vying for spots has increased, but the number of spots hasn't. Simple as that.


Stay tuned next week for our preview of Ashland's game. We'll also talk a bit about next year's schedule and how the GLIAC will be handling Notre Dame's departure...you won't want to miss that!