FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[CardinalAlum]

My top 5 would be like this:

1. St Johns
2. UWW
3. UMHB
4. NCC
5. Mt Union


That's what the results are telling me.

So a 56-12 win wasn't enough for a first game? That would drop NCC two spots in your eyes?

[USee]

My top 5 would be like this:

1. St Johns
2. UWW
3. UMHB
4. NCC
5. Mt Union


That's what the results are telling me.

So a 56-12 win wasn't enough for a first game? That would drop NCC two spots in your eyes?

I didn't drop them at all. That was my first ballot. If 56-12 is the yardstick then NCC should be below Hardin-Simmons too right?

[USee]

Other than the result, I am pretty pleased and surprised with Wheaton's performance at Trinity. I thought a majority of the differences in the game were attributable to the fact that it was Wheaton's first game and Trinity's second. That's really a huge advantage, in addition to the major experience edge Trinity had. The stats were nearly identical and neither team could get much going on the ground. Will Bowers was very impressive, completing 74% of his passes with no interceptions.

I thought Trinity was much faster than Wheaton overall on both sides but Wheaton handled it well for the most part. The biggest surprise was the Thunder defense holding Trinity to 10 points during regulation and picking off Horn 2x (he threw 3 picks ALL of last year). Pretty impressive performance from a group that played only 3 guys that were among the top 15 tacklers on last years team (and two of those guys got most of their stats on special teams).

I think Trinity is a legit top 10 team and the Thunder proved me wrong, playing Trinity equal.

The game looms large as the Thunder now likely have to win out, including a game in Naperville, and win the AQ to get to the playoffs.

[USee]

The CCIW finished their non conference schedule at 6-4, as I predicted and were a low extra point away from a chance at 7-3. While the competition overall was weaker this year than last years 4-6, given all the returning starters, I do think the conference is overall stronger than they were a year ago.

[USee]

Really unfortunate for IWU to lose their QB early, especially after their 3 year starter quit the team last week. Sage Shindler must be kicking himself this week. Tough duty for Ryan Saxe as they come to Wheaton Saturday night in a huge game for both teams. I think IWU has the firepower to win and Wheaton will have to improve their offensive production if they want to have a chance to get back in the win column.

[CardinalAlum]

My top 5 would be like this:

1. St Johns
2. UWW
3. UMHB
4. NCC
5. Mt Union


That's what the results are telling me.

So a 56-12 win wasn't enough for a first game? That would drop NCC two spots in your eyes?

I didn't drop them at all. That was my first ballot. If 56-12 is the yardstick then NCC should be below Hardin-Simmons too right?

Fair enough.

[Gregory Sager]

The CCIW finished their non conference schedule at 6-4, as I predicted and were a low extra point away from a chance at 7-3. While the competition overall was weaker this year than last years 4-6, given all the returning starters, I do think the conference is overall stronger than they were a year ago.

I still disagree. On Saturday the CCIW beat up a couple of nonentities; the one traditionally impressive name the CCIW bested was Wabash, and fans of the Diminutive Colossi would be the first to tell you that their program has slipped, especially on the defensive side of the ball (I mean, come on ... 48 points given up to Hampden-Sydney?!). Illinois Wesleyan's decisive win was fairly respectable, granted, given the instability of the Titans at QB and Ohio Wesleyan's 8-2 record last season, but the Bishops team that they beat was already 0-1 going into Saturday after losing to middling Otterbein, and the Bishops returned only eight starters from that 8-2 squad.

North Central is a national championship contender, and Wheaton is an outstanding football team that's probably on the next tier down but may grow into national championship contention. But we all knew those things going into this season. The formidability of North Central and Wheaton on an annual basis has been unquestioned for many years now. The question is what the rest of the league looks like each season, and what I saw in Weeks One and Two was some inconclusive empty-the-bench-'cause-we're-playing-Cupcake-College routs and some serious slippage in several of the league's teams.

[WUPHF]

Otterbein was a one-win team last season so maybe not even middling.  I am not sure that we know much at all about the CCIW after the end of non-conference play.  Looking forward to next weekend...

[iwu70]

Ryan Saxe played very well on Saturday, in a tough spot, vs. OWU.  Not sure what IWU has behind him now on the QB depth chart . . . and how serious the knee injury is to the #1.  It looked pretty bad . . .  likely out a number of weeks, minimum.  If surgery, then longer. . . 

I would think Wheaton favored by at least 2 TDs this Saturday evening up at Wheaton.

IWU'70

[Next Man Up]

Otterbein was a one-win team last season so maybe not even middling.  I am not sure that we know much at all about the CCIW after the end of non-conference play.  Looking forward to next weekend...

One game does not a season make? 

[WUPHF]

As an aside, I wish one of you would take on the persona of the Ice Bear, though we do not have a lot of ice or bears in CCIW country and that name is taken regardless so it would have to be the Angry White-Tailed Deer or something.

[Next Man Up]

CCIW PLAYERS OF THE WEEK

Offense —- Josh Raby/Carroll QB
Defense —- BJ Adamchik/NCC LB
Special Teams —- Anthony Wachal Jr./IWU DB

[Gregory Sager]

As an aside, I wish one of you would take on the persona of the Ice Bear, though we do not have a lot of ice or bears in CCIW country and that name is taken regardless so it would have to be the Angry White-Tailed Deer or something.

There's only one Ice Bear ... and he's a gift to the D3 football boards. Long live the frozen bruin of Schenectady!

[USee]

According to HansenRatings The CCIW's rankings has improved over last year. Here are the rankings for this year's CCIW teams as compared to last year (similar stage of the season):

Team/2022/2021/Diff

NCC. #3 vs #1 -2
Wheaton # 12 vs #4 -8
WashU. #28 vs 40 +12
Augie #34 vs #66 +32
IWU #62 vs #66  +4
Millikin #96 vs #115 +19
Carroll #98 vs #138  +40
Carthage #128  vs #47  -81
Elmhurst #178 vs #188  +10
NPU. #179 vs #176  -3


This kind of confirms for me what I am seeing on paper and in the games which is the middle of the conference isn't nearly as soft as it had been. NCC and Wheaton are slightly off where they were, WashU, Augie, Millikin and Carroll are all dramatically better than last year at this point and the "bad look" is really being driven by Carthage, whose shut out loss to Albion was a surprise. Elmhurst and NPU are basically static from last year. I expect(ed) NPU to be better and the loss to Manchester was disappointing.

The 6-4 non conference record (improving on 4-6 a year ago) is a data point for me but I still believe the conference is stronger than it was a year ago and HansenRatings has data to support that.

[Gregory Sager]

According to HansenRatings The CCIW's rankings has improved over last year. Here are the rankings for this year's CCIW teams as compared to last year (similar stage of the season):

Team/2022/2021/Diff

NCC. #3 vs #1 -2
Wheaton # 12 vs #4 -8
WashU. #28 vs 40 +12
Augie #34 vs #66 +32
IWU #62 vs #66  +4
Millikin #96 vs #115 +19
Carroll #98 vs #138  +40
Carthage #128  vs #47  -81
Elmhurst #178 vs #188  +10
NPU. #179 vs #176  -3


This kind of confirms for me what I am seeing on paper and in the games which is the middle of the conference isn't nearly as soft as it had been. NCC and Wheaton are slightly off where they were, WashU, Augie, Millikin and Carroll are all dramatically better than last year at this point and the "bad look" is really being driven by Carthage, whose shut out loss to Albion was a surprise. Elmhurst and NPU are basically static from last year. I expect(ed) NPU to be better and the loss to Manchester was disappointing.

The 6-4 non conference record (improving on 4-6 a year ago) is a data point for me but I still believe the conference is stronger than it was a year ago and HansenRatings has data to support that.

Nope. Gonna keep disagreeing with you. The HansenRatings don't really tell us anything at this point, as far as I'm concerned.

Augustana, whom you consider "dramatically better," looked very iffy against a Rhodes squad that would've been walloped by what we've all come to expect from a middle-of-the-pack CCIW team. The Lynx nearly came back and stole the game from Augie in the fourth quarter at Lindberg, and they actually dominated Augie in most statistical categories. I watched quite a bit of that game, and while certain players did stand out I was not impressed by the Rock Islanders as a whole.

Millikin is a big unknown at this point, especially since both the livestream and the live stats from Lindsay ten days ago were on the fritz. The Big Blue are loaded with new players, and the win over Greenville looks good in light of the Panthers having nipped MU last season. Still, though, this is a UMAC team we're talking about. Granted, Greenville's the best of that lot, but this is, again, a team that a halfway-decent CCIW team ought to beat. I'm not dismissing what the Big Blue did, all things considered, but I'm not willing to go with "dramatically better" for them yet, either. That's too much to ask based solely on a game that nobody saw outside of Decatur.

Carroll's definitely better. Wisconsin Lutheran is a pushover, but Carroll did what a good CCIW team ought to do to a pushover. I'll go along with "dramatically better" for the Pios. Wash U? The Bears did the same thing to hapless Hendrix that Carroll did to WLC, but our 2021 Isthmus Bowl rep starts from a higher perch in the pecking order than Carroll does, so I'm much more guarded about the "dramatically better" appellation in Wash U's case. I'd like to hear from WUPHF or anybody else who follows the Bears on this matter.

The "bad look" is being driven by more than Carthage. But let's stay with the Firebirds for a moment. Yes, Albion is a very solid program that is likely to repeat as the annual cannon fodder the MIAA's playoff representative in 2022. But I watched a lot of that game at euphoniously-named Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium back on the 3rd, and it was a complete cover-your-eyes nightmare if you're a Carthage fan. The Firebirds looked terrible. The Britons were up by seven touchdowns with over half of the third quarter remaining, and held nearly a 4-to-1 advantage in total yardage at that point. Carthage got nearly half of its total yards in the remaining 23 minutes or so against the Albion reserves. The Firebirds looked like a team that would finish rock-bottom in the CCIW most seasons.

... which brings us to the other two teams picked lower than the Firebirds in the preseason coaches poll. There's no disguising the disappointment around the North Park football program in the wake of the loss to Manchester, and Kyle Rooker made no bones about that in our postgame interview. Everybody fully expected NPU to clean up on the Spartans. What we saw, instead, was Manchester dominating both sides of the line of scrimmage, especially against NPU's very green defensive line. Spartans ballcarriers were frequently untouched until they got to the second level, and there were arm-tackle attempts aplenty on the part of the Vikings (Kyle made note of that on the air afterwards as well). What really galls me, though, is the fact that the Spartans -- who have never been anybody's idea of a high-octane D3 football program -- turned around last weekend and got vaporized by Alma to the tune of 49-7. Talk about adding insult to injury for Vikings fans! I'm certainly not giving up hope this early in the campaign that the Vikings can turn it around, but right now NPU fans are entitled to wonder if this year's edition will reach even the very modest achievements of last season.

And then there's Elmhurst. You described them as "basically static from last year." Nope. Last year the Bluejays were bad. This year -- and I'm sorry, 'jays fans, as I take no delight whatsoever in saying this -- EU is nothing short of pathetic. You can look at their 45-7 loss to UW-River Falls in last season's opener up in far western Wisconsin, and their 63-0 loss to the Falcons in the return game at Langhorst on the 3rd and say, "Same thing. A rout's a rout, never mind the actual final score." But you'd be missing the point, which is that if you watched the game (as I did) you'd know that the Falcons did not play very well. I'm not just talking about the truckload of PATs that the UWRF kicker ganked; their offensive execution was not particularly sharp at all, and defensively it was apparent that there were all kinds of missed assignments on the part of the visitors all day. A big part of the reason why the score nevertheless ended up 63-0 despite all that is the depth and ability of the Falcons; that's a team that went eyeball-to-eyeball with the mighty Johnnies for sixty minutes last Saturday, so their credentials as a high-quality D3 football squad are unassailable. But I'm certain that any Falcons fan would tell you that the team's performance in Collegeville showed that they'd tightened up a lot of loose ends from the week before. The other big part of the reason behind that 63-0 beatdown is that the Bluejays roster simply doesn't have very many CCIW-caliber players. At. All. I could envision about a half-dozen or so of them getting on the field and participating if they were wearing NCC or Wheaton unis -- Julian Cavallo and Winston Brown on offense; Bryce Gable, certainly, and also Antonio Carillo and Colton Kraus on D, and not much else. I know bad CCIW football when I see it, since I've seen more of it than anybody else who posts here, so hear me out: the Bluejays aren't "basically static" from 2021. They are actually worse than they were a year ago. It's essentially a mid-pack UMAC team that got lost on its way to Finlandia and somehow alighted between the Elmhurst Public Library and St. Mary Cemetery.

I'm not saying that some or most of these teams won't get better from this point, although the catch is that if they do so it will be at the expense of their CCIW peers. League play means live-crabs-in-a-bucket as far as improvement is concerned. But right now, on September 13, I am simply not buying what you're selling with regard to the 2022 CCIW being better than it was a year ago.