The SUNY Cortland football team, in their first-ever national championship appearance, has successfully managed to defeat the defending North Central College of Naperville, thereby taking home the 50th Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl trophy at 7 p.m. in Salem, Virginia, on 15 December 2023.
Zac Boyes, the quarterback for the State University of New York at Cortland, started pointing at his ring finger during the fourth quarter of Friday’s NCAA Division III football national championship, signaling that they are seconds away from winning the championship rings.
At the Salem Stadium, the Red Dragons defeated the Cardinals 38–37 after Boyes completed a couple of kneeldowns, making sure their victory was secured. With the first-ever national title win for the program, the junior captain expressed, “I’m so proud of these guys.”
The Cardinals team had won two of the previous three national titles, namely in 2019 and 2022, and this was also their fourth consecutive appearance in the championship match. Cortland’s triumph over this juggernaut of a team officially ended North Central’s 29-game winning run, which stretched back to the start of the 2022 season.
Massive Victory for Red Dragons
SUNY Cortland head coach Curt Fitzpatrick said to ESPNU, “It means everything.” He also expressed his thought process before the victory: “I was over there talking to the officials on the sideline, asking if we can kneel it out. We just wanted the clock to hit zero. It’s just amazing.”
Zac Boyes made the difference on Friday night for Cortland, and their head coach announced in a post-game interview that he deserved the prestigious Gagliardi Trophy, which is awarded to the top Division III football player each season. However, this year, it was instead awarded to North Central quarterback Luke Lehnen.
Boyes’ stats include rushing for 134 yards on 16 carries and completing 26 of 34 passes with 349 yards and five touchdowns, therefore making football history by being the second Cortland quarterback to ever finish a game with over 300 passing yards and over 100 rushing yards. Fitzpatrick declared him “the best quarterback in the nation.”
The game was viewed on ESPNU, ESPN+, and at watch parties throughout America, with a full list of parties hosted by the SUNY Cortland Alumni Association provided online, along with complete coverage of the match.
What is D-III Football?
In the United States, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has a division known as NCAA Division III (D-III), which includes those colleges and institutions that decided not to provide their student-athletes with athletic scholarships.
In 1956, the NCAA broke into the University and College Divisions, with the latter being created for smaller schools without the funding of the nation’s major sports teams. The College Division separated once more when the NCAA adopted Division I, Division II, and Division III as its present name convention in 1973.
The NCAA’s largest category, D-III, is the home to about 40% of all NCAA student-athletes and has about 450 member institutions, of which 80% are private and 20% are public. D-III schools have undergraduate enrollment ranging from 418 to nearly 38,000, with a median of 2,750.
D-III includes American football, also known as gridiron football, which is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end, where the offense and the defense try to get possession of an oval-shaped ball to score points.
