I didn’t really know what to think when I read earlier this week on the Williams College athletics website that our traditional NESCAC rival would play host to ESPN College GameDay for their football game against Amherst. When the initial shock and excitement wore off, I was merely perplexed. Why would ESPN lower its marquee college football program from its Division I mainstays to the rarely broadcast, little talked about world of Division III?

College GameDay has always been the gold standard for day-of analysis, predictions, and outright mania about collegiate football. Making its 150th airing in its 11-1 p.m. Saturday slot this past weekend, the program centers around its three hosts: former Indiana head coach, Lee Corso, former Ohio State quarterback, Kirk Herbstreit, and ESPN analyst, Chris Fowler. The three yell, crack jokes, and argue through their two hours together, debating the day’s slot of Division I football games. The feisty Corso, often referred to as “The Coach” and a dead ringer for Mel Brooks both in appearance and personality, provides much of the show’s color, with both his lively commentary and his tendency to underscore his predictions by donning the helmet of the team he picks. Herbstreit and Fowler play off Corso well, which provides for hilarity and intelligent team and player analysis each week. The three have worked together so well that a series of obscure, deadpan T.V. ads promoting the show have become huge YouTube hits over the past month.

Though many shows have dynamic hosts, what sets GameDay apart are its location: every fall Saturday, the set and crew travel to different college campuses across the country, from Baton Rouge to State College. With an outdoor set and a crowd of rowdy fans in the background, GameDay achieves an electricity that other analysis-based shows can only envy. Waves of roaring chants and flashy signs from the gathered masses accompany the charisma and intelligence of the show’s hosts to make GameDay one of television’s most watched sports programs.

With the show’s signature style and success in mind, and the rosters of universities with big football programs, legions of fans, and money-hungry boosters running through my head like a hoard of Wesleyan students running to Goodwill on student discount day, just one question repeated itself: Why Williams v. Amherst? Why set the150th show in Williamstown, Mass.?

First off, I had to give the match-up its due. This was the 122nd game featuring the other two-thirds of the Little Three, and it has been dubbed “The Biggest Little Game In America.” The two teams are both former college football royalty. Former meaning that, back in the leather-helmet days of their first or second meeting, before the NCAA, Division I sponsorships, scholarships, and mass popularity cast the likes of the Ephs and the Lord Jeffs into obscurity.

But who am I and whom was ESPN kidding? This is the NESCAC, where there aren’t playoffs, Bowl Championship Series, or any form of post-season play—the season ends when the regular season ends. And this is Williamstown, population 8,000 on good day. And this was Amherst v. Williams, two tiny liberal arts colleges with a combined student body of no more than 10,000. Honestly, I thought they might have needed ESPN employees to pose as Williams fans in the crowd section that is overrun during a typical GameDay broadcast. While there was some excitement here in Middletown and certainly on other NESCAC campuses, outside of our Division III bubble, most of the country was yawning or changing the channel.

The desired effect, from what I can tell from watching the promos and the broadcast itself, was to broaden the scope of both GameDay analysis and popularity as well as to try to level the playing field a bit for a division of collegiate athletics that has long played the shy, awkward younger brother to its confident, cocky, entertaining DI counterpart.

Quotes from Corso at halftime such as, “Hey, call it what you want, but these guys are football players,” gave the general impression that the show was attempting to prove an equality of football. Pre-game footage of both teams pep talks and head-butts as they prepared to battle their archrivals mirrored the fiery speeches heard weekly on the show from Bobby Bowden, Joe Paterno, Nick Saban, and their respective players. Even the Williams fans themselves, who did turn out for the program, sported their purple and gold with pride and intensity and gave GameDay the familiar din of cheering that it always has in the background.

But by pushing the “this is football” concept so hard and trying to highlight fairly mediocre plays by either team as though they were Division I highlights, the program had created a façade—painting a Division-I atmosphere and competition where one doesn’t and hasn’t existed.

The truth is that Division I football is better and will always be better. At the root, it is money and broader fan bases that provide both scholarships to lure the best athletes and contracts to attract the best coaches. This all adds up to the USCs, Penn States, Oklahomas, Notre Dames (maybe not this year), and other storied teams that everyone has heard about. Such established programs then take on a life of their own, always building more momentum with athletes, coaches, and advertisers alike.

An Amherst, a Williams, or a Wesleyan will never reach this level of national popularity and big money competition. Granted, there was a sea of Williams fans on the GameDay broadcast, but it is more than likely that most of those face-painted fanatics were there to be on TV, not to cheer on the Ephs. Take our football team’s homecoming as a more concrete example. At Boston College, Louisiana State, or Texas, freezing temperatures, gusty wind, and constant rain would do little to dampen the spirits of the fans, who always fill the stands. In Middletown, it was enough to drive almost everyone from the stands and keep most of the University’s student body indoors, away from the game. Where in Division I the indelible support for top programs and the money involved work cyclically to keep these schools at the zenith of college football, in Division III the opposite is true: the meager funds and lack of support work as a constant barrier, keeping the schools from achieving real notability.

As the GameDay crew attempted to break this norm by providing the publicity medium and glorifying the game the way it does its usual games, it undermined a gratifying positive that it they may have created by mistake. With the presentation of football away from the glitz, advertisements, and stadiums that dominate Division I, the program affected a nostalgia that, for me at least, harkened back to high school football.

In the faces of the average-sized, average-speed players, I saw the guys I played with and against in high school. In the beaten-up field and wooden stands, I saw my own high school field. In the cheering fans that could almost step on the field at Williams, I remembered the always-wild student section that seemed to will us to victory.

Chris Fowler got it right when he mentioned the “purity” of the sport and, more generally, of competition. As corny as that sounds, broadcasting a basic Division III game rather than a Division I circus, lets people see football for what it really is: a hardnosed clash of wills and game plans.

This brief window into simple competition can be found every Saturday on high school, and Division II and III, football fields everywhere. For every hyped-up Division I game, there are the Ephs and the Lord Jeffs competing not on the same level, but competing nonetheless. I have to thank Corso, Herbstreit, and Fowler for presenting, on a national stage, a game of football that was just about football.