FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[oldnuthin]

What a difference a week makes. Big Blue D came out inspired and stayed that way the whole game. Good pressure on the quarterback, caused a pick with a big return that set up a score. Even though they gave up over 200 yds on the ground, it  was a complete 180 from last week. IWU was able to move the ball, but did not score at will like Aurora was able to do. Due to injuries, Millikin was starting 7 freshman by the end of the game. Galick found that the much improved first year players were much harder to throw on, along with TJ Sullivan, the lone senior in the D Backfield. 3 year starter Jake Hazelton left with what looked like a serious knee injury, but the D refused to quit. The remaining non freshman defenders, Rosner, Beach and Flood showed great leadership and an incredible will to win working with 7 freshmen. They were stout on the line and ate up blocks that the young freshman LBs  and DBs were able to finish off though not always in a timely fashion.

  On offense QB Pippen played flawlessly for 51 minutes, not forcing anything and taking what the IWU defense gave him. Unfortunately he threw 2 picks in the final 9 minutes that sealed their fate. Nothing to hang his head about. RB Brooks, also left the game early with a leg injury, which left the running load to Sean Dunning. The same IWU defense that gave up 80 yards to Hope gave up over 100 to Dunning alone. The o-line was great and really deserves alot of credit. All in all a great effort with great emotion and attitude, one of the funnest D3 games for me to date.

[AndOne]

Article on the North Central win over Elmhurst yesterday.

Tied 14-14 at the half, the Cardinals overcame both sloppy weather and sloppy 1st half play, before getting it in gear in the 2nd half to score 17 unanswered points to come away with a 31-14 win. Immediately after the 2nd half kickoff. rain and accompanying lighting forced a 90 minute delay.

If the Cardinals have conference championship aspirations they better start carrying the mental aspect of the game with them when they get off of the bus. They committed 11 penalties for a total of 79 yards yesterday. 9 of those penalties occurred in the 1st half, including mistakes that negated both a 63 yard Ryan Kent touchdown run, and another 74 yard Kent run.
With road games against tough competition at Wheaton and Wesleyan, the Cardinals will get their collective butts kicked if they neglect to bring the mental part of their game and play like bird brains.     

http://northcentralcardinals.com/news/2013/10/5/FB_1005135248.aspx

[AndOne]

Thanks, bleedpurple and New Tradition!

And? 

[Gregory Sager]

Thanks, bleedpurple and New Tradition!

And? 

I was simply thanking the two posters who complimented my CC @ NPU recap.

[kiko]

New poll is out.

North Central remains #4 and loses one point from last week.

Wheaton up two spots to #13 and gains 40 points.  They leapfrog Pacific Lutheran, which lost, and Franklin, which lost 14 poll points after an 80-14 victory over HCAC cellar-dwellar Earlham.

Titans up 7 points in total and are now one point outside of the Top 25.  At the risk of stating the obvious, if IWU keeps winning, they will keep climbing.

-----

From my perspective way up here in the nosebleed section, North Central has not been playing like the #4 team in the country.  (And my loyalties are well-documented...)  Andone documented some of the sloppiness that still needs to get sorted out.  Wheaton feels like they're in roughly the right place.  And I'd have the Titans around five or six spots higher.

But the powers-that-be would surely revoke my voting privileges when they discovered that my ballot also ranked North Park 25th for this week only in honor of their streakbusting prowess...

[Pat Coleman]

Franklin had a bye this week.

[FormerCard]

It has been years since I have posted (surprised I remembered my login), but I wanted to send some congratulations towards the Vikings of North Park and especially the seniors who have been working towards a CCIW victory for 4 years.  Great day for the North Park program, Alumni and the CCIW!

[badgerwarhawk]

Check it out Greg.....

http://footballscoop.com/news/11099-this-program-got-their-first-conference-win-in-13-years-yesterday

[matblake]

Good discussion on NPU in this weeks Around the Nation Podcast.  It's right at the beginning so you do even have to wait.

[Gotberg]

I don't think this one was posted:  http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-05/sports/chi-heavens-rain-success-on-north-park-football-20131005_1_first-year-vikings-rain-football-coach

Nice follow up from Friday's article - like the headline too.

[79jaybird]

Yeah! That stupid streak is over!  Congratulations to the North Park players for getting this dubious streak nullified.  Hope they can pick up a 2nd victory this year and build from there.

[thunderdog]

What a day. I'm still hoarse from shouting into my headset. I apologize to any listeners who had to turn the sound down on the webcast due to my shouting!

It was a sloppy Homecoming win for the Park, but it was just as magnificent as if the Vikings had played a picture-perfect game. In spite of the 78-minute lightning delay, in spite of 12 penalties for 116 yards, in spite of three turnovers, in spite of two missed extra points, and in spite of a couple of jumbo-sized kick returns by Carthage, North Park managed to snap that stupid streak today by sheer cussed determination. What the stats don't show is that senior WR John Barnabee's game-winning touchdown reception from T.D. Conway with four minutes and change remaining and the Vikings trailing by four points was completed at the five yard line. Barnabee was immediately hit by two Red Men, whom he then dragged into the end zone with him. As Mike Conway said in his postgame interview on the air, these NPU seniors have an incredible amount of fight in them. No way were they going to fall short today, and if it took absorbing two hits and dragging two men into the end zone with you, then so be it.

But this was not a fluke win. NPU outgained Carthage on the day by over 160 yards. The Vikes had twice as many first downs, won time of possession in spite of the fact that NPU's a passing team and CC is a running team, and took the ball away from Carthage five times -- none of those takeaways bigger than senior LB Bennett Dettlinger's interception at midfield with three and a half minutes remaining. I'm going to come out and say it: The Vikings, for all their faults, are a better football team than Carthage. And, yes, nobody is more surprised to see me typing those words than me.

Mike Conway was pretty emotional in that postgame interview. That says so much about him, because, heck, the man is 1-0 in his career as a CCIW coach. He bears no responsibility at all for any part of that 89-game debacle. He could've simply chose to look forward by shrugging off a losing streak that had nothing to do with him. But he cares so much about these upperclassmen -- kids that he inherited rather than recruited -- that he was pretty choked up about how much this win meant to them. T.D. Conway was, too. They really, really care about not making the seniors, especially, feel as though they're just steppingstones who will never see the Vikings reap the benefits of a turnaround. And, sure, I know that NPU will struggle throughout the rest of the CCIW slate. The next two weeks will see them take the field as massive underdogs against Wesleyan and North Central. Nevertheless, the upperclassmen, the seniors in particular, had their moment in the sun today on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

During that interview, as the NPU women's soccer team ran off the field when the heavens opened up again for a brief but intense shower, senior co-captain Tyler Krebs, who had apparently forgotten some item on the sidelines, ran back into the stadium by himself, still in uniform. He picked up whatever it was, ran back across the empty field, and raised his arms to the opened heavens in soaked exultation. Mike and I started laughing on the air. I don't think I've ever seen anybody over the age of five so incredibly happy to be running around outside in the rain. That moment of pure joy said it all.

It's no secret that everyone on the CCIW board is impressed with your writing, Greg, but you know someone is DAMN good when, through words in black and white, you can FEEL their emotion. Not just seeping through, mind you, but blasting you in the gut. I was really looking forward to reading your post after I saw the score. It's better than I could have hoped. Thanks so much for sharing and congrats again.

I'll second that New T! Just got caught up on the last few days of posts while at work.  Honestly, I was fighting back tears reading Greg's post, hoping none of my co-workers walked in to see me "glassy-eyed".  Fantastic stuff Greg and congrats to the NPU Vikes.

[ExTartanPlayer]

One thing I'd like to add, although it may even have been discussed on the podcast:

Not to slight the North Park kids that were already there, but I think the Conway kids deserve some kudos for deciding to join their father in the ground-floor rebuilding project at NPU.  I've lived in Pittsburgh for a while now and heard of those kids while they were playing in high school.  They were both already on the team at Division II California (Pa), which is a pretty decent Division II team in a good league, and probably could have decided to stay there instead of going when their dad took the NPU job.  I'm sure that some kids would have said "Sorry, dad, but I'm going to stay here instead of moving halfway across the country to join a team that hasn't won a conference game in a decade."  Instead they saddled up and made the move with him.

Instead they're both on board and likely to play a tremendous part in resurrecting the NPU program, indeed they're already making quite an impact as the starting QB and WR.  Kinda cool, especially when I read Greg's comment that TD Conway and his father both seemed to genuinely care about the kids already on the team rather than viewing themselves as the saviors riding in to send these bums out and replace them with better players.  That's neat to see.

[kiko]

Franklin had a bye this week.

My mistake - I looked at the latest result and didn't gaze over at the date.  Dropping points makes a lot more sense in that context.

[Gregory Sager]

Check it out Greg.....

http://footballscoop.com/news/11099-this-program-got-their-first-conference-win-in-13-years-yesterday

Thanks for the link, BW. Interesting that this writer comes right out and declares the CCIW to be one of the top four leagues in D3 football, in light of the recent discussion that took place here.

Good discussion on NPU in this weeks Around the Nation Podcast.  It's right at the beginning so you do even have to wait.

I think that Pat and Keith did a nice job of putting Saturday's win in perspective. Vis-a-vis Pat's comments about North Park's student base -- and I realize that he admitted that he was "out of [his] comfort zone" in addressing it -- it should be noted that Covenant students from across the country, while a sizable proportion of the resident-student population among North Park undergrads, are a minority among the NPU student-athlete population. Most of the student-athletes at North Park, including the vast majority of football players, are Chicagoland kids that the coaching staff recruits in the same manner as six of the other seven CCIW programs. In fact, NPU is often after the same players as those other six schools on the recruiting trail. North Park is unlike Wheaton in that regard.

What handicaps NPU football more than anything, as I've said before -- even more than the losing tradition -- is the fact that it's an urban school that's trying to recruit suburban high-school football players. Except for a few Catholic League programs that can be counted upon one hand, Chicago high-school football is a barren field for recruitment purposes. The few Public League schools that have football teams don't produce players who can compete on the field in the CCIW and/or excel in the classroom at North Park. Their rosters are tiny; their equipment is a sad joke; their coaches are too few and too inexperienced; their players don't have the luxury of being schooled in the game at summer camps, on grade-school teams, or on Pop Warner teams; there's no JV or freshman teams; and the basic drama of life as a working-class or impoverished teenager in the city often overwhelms even the most dedicated high-school football player in Chicago. (There's always exceptions, and a great one this year is tiny (5'2, 155) NPU freshman running back D.J. Jones from Simeon, a South Side public high school better known for being the alma mater of Derrick Rose and countless other basketball stars than for turning out college football players. The elusive Jones played a big role in Saturday's win over Carthage.)

It's simply a fact of life that most suburban kids do not want to go to college in the big city. DePaul and Loyola face the same problem as NPU in that regard. And nobody faults those suburban kids for being reticent about stepping outside of their comfort zones, because college is an extremely expensive proposition; nobody should be forced to attend a school that he or she is reluctant to attend. That's less of a problem for North Park in other sports, since the volume of recruits that those other programs need to bring in each year is relatively small. The men's soccer and baseball teams are pretty successful at NPU, and those programs only need to bring in a dozen or so recruits each year to continue being successful. But football requires forty or more incoming recruits per year in order to have a viable program, and that's simply been too steep a hill to climb for a North Park coach in terms of recruiting. It's a mammoth task to find forty or more football players from Glenbard East and Wheaton-Warrenville South and Oswego and Grayslake Central and Neuqua Valley and Stagg and Maine East, and all of the other outposts of leafy suburbia, who are willing to spend four years in the significantly alien environment of a city of 2.7 million people, most of whom don't look, think, talk, or act like said residents of leafy suburbia. The NPU head football coach, therefore, has to think outside the box in terms of how to bring in players if he wants to be successful. Scott Pethtel had some creative approaches in that regard, but even he got stuck in the end in terms of meeting that minimum recruiting quota. We will see how Mike Conway approaches it as he goes through his first full recruiting cycle this year.

Yeah! That stupid streak is over!  Congratulations to the North Park players for getting this dubious streak nullified.  Hope they can pick up a 2nd victory this year and build from there.

Then you'd better not listen to the podcast, Mark, 'cause Pat and Keith have your Bluejays lined up as one of three possible Win #2 candidates for NPU. (However, it appears to me that by far the most viable possibility for the Vikings to get a second CCIW win this year is against Millikin, even though that game will be played in Decatur; I think that the Park will be at least a two-touchdown underdog against Elmhurst at Hedstrand Field on November 2.)