FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Cardinal773]

WashU find a home?

https://x.com/IWUhoopscom/status/1845206890243846488?t=qFJdBTOKj2GD8c68SGXHoA&s=19

WashU is going to be the NCAC's version of the University of Hawaii in the Mountain West... D3 Football Map

[The Third Division]

If North Park didn't blow their game vs Elmhurst they would be the lone other undefeated team in the CCIW other than North Central.

Times have certainly changed.

[Gregory Sager]

If North Park didn't blow their game vs Elmhurst they would be the lone other undefeated team in the CCIW other than North Central.

Hence, my comment yesterday:

That game a week from Saturday at home against Illinois Wesleyan looms absolutely huge. Win it, and the dream to finally end The Streak can be realized with a win the following week in Kenosha. Lose it, and it's another feel-good 5-5 campaign that will nevertheless cast a shadow of lingering regret over how 6-4 got away.

And ...

Times have certainly changed.

Yes, they have ... and, while advancing age usually means continual opportunities to bemoan the decline of the world both in general and in specific facets of daily life, one thing that really makes me happy in my incipient codgerhood is the dramatic upturn in North Park's football fortunes. It's part of a much bigger theme of NPU now being competitive in a wide variety of sports rather than just the traditional one or two (at most) at a time while all of the other Vikings teams on campus languished in CCIW-cellar-dwelling humiliation.

But football was a particular sticking point among NPU's former athletics woes, both because of its visibility and because North Park was so spectacularly bad at it by CCIW standards. Mike Conway did a good job of at least getting the Vikings out of the bottom of the CCIW standings every season, but Kyle Rooker has definitely taken NPU firmly into the middle of the pack -- where they haven't been found since the late Tim Rucks lifted the Vikings up to the promised land of mediocrity back in the mid-'90s.

The fact that the possibility of recording the first winning season for the Vikings since 1968 is now a viable topic for discussion is mind-blowing. I've been on record many times in this room as saying that it couldn't be done, because a major-city urban school couldn't draw the necessary volume of quality recruits in what is undeniably a suburban sport. Nobody will ever be happier than me to have been proven wrong if Kyle, his staff, and his players can do so by beating IWU on the 26th and Carthage on Nov. 2.

[mwunder]

Times have certainly changed.

Not in Kenosha...same old stuff

Points Allowed:235
Points Scored:33
Total Minutes Played: 300
Total Minutes Led: 3:14 seconds

We are leading the conference in total punting yards though so there is a bright spot I guess.

[augie77]

Gregory Sager- I've been on record many times in this room as saying that it couldn't be done, because a major-city urban school couldn't draw the necessary volume of quality recruits in what is undeniably a suburban sport.
 

Greg, your eastern Vikings have already proven you wrong on this point, no matter how the remaining games unfold.  I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on what specifically Rooks and company are doing differently from a half century of predecessors. 

[Pat Coleman]

Gregory Sager- I've been on record many times in this room as saying that it couldn't be done, because a major-city urban school couldn't draw the necessary volume of quality recruits in what is undeniably a suburban sport.
 

Greg, your eastern Vikings have already proven you wrong on this point, no matter how the remaining games unfold.  I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on what specifically Rooks and company are doing differently from a half century of predecessors. 

Greg will absolutely have great insight on this, but I'd like to also invite you to check out the front page of D3football.com in about 20 minutes for a feature story by Joe Sager on the subject as well. Finishing up editing now.

[Gregory Sager]

Greg will absolutely have great insight on this, but I'd like to also invite you to check out the front page of D3football.com in about 20 minutes for a feature story by Joe Sager on the subject as well. Finishing up editing now.

And let me head off any possible questions before they're asked by stating that Joe and I aren't related, as far as I know. (I can't say that with 100% certainty, since I'm neither European royalty nor a Mormon, so my awareness of the identity of my fourth or fifth cousins is nonexistent.)

[Gregory Sager]

Greg, your eastern Vikings have already proven you wrong on this point, no matter how the remaining games unfold.  I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on what specifically Rooks and company are doing differently from a half century of predecessors.

As a practical matter you're right, Steve, but technically it hasn't happened until, uh, it happens. 

I firmly believe that at least 80% of college coaching is recruiting, no matter what the sport. If you recruit well, your chances for success are promising. If you recruit poorly, your odds of making any headway on the scoreboard and in the standings are dim.

A big part of recruiting is knowing where and how to recruit, and this varies from school to school. The vast majority of North Park's head football coaches have recruited almost exclusively locally, and this hasn't worked for half a century. Why? Because for well over half a century football has been a suburban sport. That's not to say that there haven't been a handful of decent programs in the city -- Lane Tech, Mount Carmel, St. Rita, and Gordon Tech / DePaul Prep all leap to mind -- but they're few and far between. Football is a resource-intensive sport, and the resources are simply lacking in Chicago high schools to produce good football players -- plus, Chicago high schoolers tend to lack the resources for self-development as football players, such as access to decent lifting equipment or to summer football camps.

And the flip side to that coin is that it's very hard to recruit suburban Chicagolanders to attend North Park (or DePaul, or Loyola, or Roosevelt, or UIC, etc.). Suburban Chicagolanders grow up watching the daily dose of violent crime broadcast on the local TV news, and a pretty fair percentage of them develop a serious aversion to the city. Not all of them, of course, as suburban Chicagolanders have always made up a sizeable percentage of North Park students. But most of them are students at large, and are therefore self-selected. Student-athletes are a different matter, because you have to specifically target them and then recruit them individually, and that's just a tougher sell for North Park coaches than it is for CCIW coaches from other schools. It's not insurmountable in other sports, because you don't need to bring in 40-50 new recruits per year in other sports. But football is another kettle of fish entirely.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, the first non-insane coach North Park football has had since at least the 1960s was Scott Pethtel (2006-12). He recognized that the only way NPU would ever make headway on the gridiron was to redirect the coaching staff's finite time, energy, and money in terms of recruiting by working the Chicagoland suburbs less and finding a new, untapped source of players. He reasoned that there was a huge pool of underrecruited players in midwestern farming communities and small towns in which the local high schools are so small that they are often forced to play the triple option offense out of sheer necessity, due to a lack of teenaged boys big enough to be traditionally-sized offensive linemen. Only one D3 program in the midwest at that time (Ripon) ran the triple option, so this was a potentially untapped recruiting pool.

Pethtel's adopting the triple option was a stroke of genius, and I'll never believe otherwise. He broke the wheel in terms of North Park coaches wasting all of their efforts trying to get suburban players who chose Augie or North Central or Illinois Wesleyan instead, and settling for suburban players for whom they were competing with Benedictine, Rockford, and Concordia (IL) and got simply because those players wanted to play in the better league. Unfortunately for Scott, he and his staff simply couldn't recruit the necessary volume of talent on the defensive side of the ball, and the program made no headway on the field. But he pointed the way to change, which was: You have to think outside the box (the "box" in this case being Cook, DuPage, Lake, Kane, Will, and McHenry counties) in order to stock a Vikings team that has a decent chance of competing against CCIW opponents.

His successor Mike Conway (2013-18) built on Pethtel's principles, but not on Pethtel's specific strategy. That made sense, because Mike showed up at Foster & Kedzie with his two sons, one a 6'5 D2 quarterback and the other a very adept D2 wide receiver. So the Park went back to a standard offense, but Mike began specifically focusing upon recruiting players from Texas, Florida, and California, a practice that was becoming widespread in D3 football at that time. Conway's recruiting ace in the hole was that he had an assistant on his staff who had coached in American Samoa (aka "Football Island") and thus had contacts both on the island itself and in the stateside Samoan diaspora (California, Utah, Arizona, etc.) and Hawaii's large Samoan population. And thus began the great adventure of Samoan Vikings, who brought us the haka and a handful of really, really good CCIW football players. Mike's efforts ended the disastrous 89-game CCIW losing streak and, for the most part, got the Vikings out of their annual trip straight to the CCIW cellar, and he even won CCIW Coach of the Year in 2013. But his success was, nevertheless, limited; when he resigned after six seasons his CCIW record was only 9-36 (.200).

Kyle Rooker has basically followed the same pattern as Mike Conway, except without the Samoan connection. The bottom line is that he and his staff are better at getting good, CCIW-quality Floridians, Arizonans, Georgians, and (especially) Texans than his predecessor and his staff. Rook's big innovation is to work Indiana heavily; the dividends that that's paid are obvious when you look at the North Park roster and see that two of the team's mainstays, Matt Eck and Jaydin Miller, are from South Bend, and starting TE Mason Wilson is from neighboring Mishawaka, and two of the starters on the D-line, JT Thomas and Elijah Chandler, are also native Hoosiers. The DB who recovered the fumble on the last play in Saturday's win, Ben Foster, is also from South Bend.

Kyle's also done a better job of locating and persuading kids who are from Chicago who have the football skills and ability as well as the academic credentials and financial wherewithal to play for North Park, because there still are some of them around (just not enough to base a program upon). That's how RB Quadrell Hill, who scored the winning TD against Carroll, came to be a Viking. A.J. Harris, NPU's versatile RB/WR star of the past two or three years who graduated last spring, was also a Chicago native.

Rook is a great motivator and a great administrator who has assembled probably the best coaching staff that North Park football has ever had. And he's very much an inspirational type of coach who has sold his players lock, stock, and barrel on the whole "The Right Way" and "1-and-0" philosophies he preaches. But, while coaches supply the vision, it's the players who change the culture.

Thing is, though, it takes good recruiting to bring in those players who are ready, willing, and able to change the culture. And, much to my pleased amazement, Kyle Rooker and his staff have recruited their way into the middle of the CCIW pack.

[Cardinal773]

Nope.  Don't believe it.  Joe wrote an article about North Park.  You're related.

[Gregory Sager]

LOL!

[Gregory Sager]

Good article. Mucho thanks to Pat and to my phantom cousin.

https://d3football.com/columns/features/2024/north-park-finally-making-progress

[CarollFan]

WashU move announced by NCAC.


https://northcoast.org/news/2024/10/18/ncac-welcomes-washington-university-in-st-louis-football.aspx

[WUPHF]

I really liked CCIW football and thought it was the perfect home for Washington University. 

It was a natural fit given the geography and the number of non-conference match-ups between the Bears, department-wide, and CCIW programs.

But I am really happy about this move.

If the Bears beat both DePauw and Wabash in a season, do we get to bring the bell home, does anyone know?

[wally_wabash]

I really liked CCIW football and thought it was the perfect home for Washington University. 

It was a natural fit given the geography and the number of non-conference match-ups between the Bears, department-wide, and CCIW programs.

But I am really happy about this move.

If the Bears beat both DePauw and Wabash in a season, do we get to bring the bell home, does anyone know?

They do not.  Really excited to have WashU in the NCAC and that league is looking rather rugged in 2026 and beyond, but this party is very much BYOB- Bring Your Own Bell. 

[WUPHF]

They do not.  Really excited to have WashU in the NCAC and that league is looking rather rugged in 2026 and beyond, but this party is very much BYOB- Bring Your Own Bell. 

Thanks and fair, lol.