FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Brick]

It was brought up ealier that the QC doesn't seem to follow Augie football, as much as the suburbs seem to do for their colleges, but I think we need to take into accout the fact that there are not exactly "good" relations between Augustana College and the QCA.  One has to think that demographics play a huge role in this...upper middle class suburban kids, going to a white collar Private Liberal Arts college in the middle of a lower class blue collar city....

[Gregory Sager]

I too was there pre and post Rucks and the pre Rucks made  North Park look like Michigan.

That's a whopping bit of hyperbole, but Carthage was indeed pretty awful before Rucks got there. In the three years that his predecessor Mike Larry ran the Redmen program, Carthage finished 0-9, 0-7 (CCIW eighth) in '92; 1-8, 1-6 (CCIW eighth) in '93; and 1-8, 1-6 (CCIW seventh, tied w/ North Park) in '94.

At this point, NPU would kill to have won even a couple of CCIW games over the past three years. But, yeah, the Carthage program was a wreck prior to the arrival of Rucks.

[Gregory Sager]

we are trying to take positives from yesterday's shelacking ........Brandon Watts 8 receptions for 164 yards and a score and 5 kick returns for 150 yards including a 95 yard return in the 1st quarter.  From my evals there is not a better receiver/return man in the CCIW.  Again baby steps for our Vikes!!!!

lakeshore,

I completely agree that Brandon Watts is incredible and is a very positive aspect of NPU football (one of the very few). 

However, how many of the receptions were against the #2, #3 or #4 team defense of Wheaton?  After the first series or two of the 2nd half, he was going up against Wheaton subs, while North Park continued to play many of their starters. 

I don't mean to take away from his accomplishments and his ability, but I don't think you can look at the final stats only - IMO.

Minus his 95 yard return, he then averaged 14 yards a kickoff return, which is not very good at all.

His big 75-yard TD catch was against the Wheaton reserves. I strongly doubt that Wheaton ever got down to a 4th-team defense, though. They didn't suit up that many players. Third-teamers, maybe -- although I'm willing to bet that there were guys who are as high as second on the Wheaton depth chart who were in the ballgame at the end. The game stats list only 22 Wheaton defensive players as having registered tackles, assists, sacks, turnovers, etc. I recognized most of the same uniform numbers playing defense on the Wheaton side throughout the second half. Of the starters, I followed Studebaker and Ittersagen in particular (since they're the two Wheatie defensive players who get the most mentions here). Studebaker played the first couple of series in the third quarter, as Mugsy mentioned, and then sat out. Ittersagen played the entire third quarter and into the fourth.

This is picking nits, though. Brandon Watts is a tremendous player, and I think that he impressed even the Wheaties on Saturday. But he won't be a part of Scott Pethtel's rebuilding effort, or contribute much longer to the "baby steps", because he's a senior and has only three games left in his NPU football career. The bottom line is this: Wheaton embarrassed NPU on Saturday. I never in my life thought I'd be typing or saying these words, but ... thank God for soccer. 

It was brought up ealier that the QC doesn't seem to follow Augie football, as much as the suburbs seem to do for their colleges, but I think we need to take into accout the fact that there are not exactly "good" relations between Augustana College and the QCA.  One has to think that demographics play a huge role in this...upper middle class suburban kids, going to a white collar Private Liberal Arts college in the middle of a lower class blue collar city....

I think that that's a huge part of it. But the other huge part has to do with what Augiedogie mentioned earlier, and that is that Augustana has to some degree a Chicagoland-centered student population. Only a dozen or so players out of the 120 or so listed on the Augie roster are from the Quad Cities area. Somewhere around two-thirds of them are from the Chicago suburbs. The men's soccer team is even more intensively Chicagoland-oriented, as only three of Augie's booters are from outside Cook and the collar counties. No wonder the townies have no interest in rooting for Augustana ... and no wonder that Augie always draws well at sporting events at NPU, Elmhurst, Wheaton, and North Central. It's a heckuva lot easier for the parents of an Augustana student-athlete to go to Augie road games at those four schools (and even Augie road games at Carthage!) than it is to drive 2 1/2 or 3 hours across the state to the QC.

The fact that the QC townies hold Augie at arm's length is an interesting contrast to the situation at Illinois Wesleyan, at least for basketball. I don't know if the B-N townies support any other Titans teams, but they're famous for turning out in great numbers to support the Titans men's basketball team. And I would suspect that there are probably the same upper-middle-class-vs.-working-class issues (although the more service-industry-oriented B-N area isn't quite as much of a Rust Belt basket case as is the QC region) and out-of-the-neighborhood differences between townies and Wesleyan students in B-N as there are with Augie students in the QC. I sat with a Wesleyan grad at the Wheaton @ NPU game on Saturday (her boyfriend is one of the NPU coaches), and she told me that in B-N they refer to Illinois Wesleyan as "the Bubble".

I suspect that town vs. gown issues with regard to economic class exist at several CCIW schools. For instance, I'll never forget the time I was at a Kenosha watering hole called the Boathouse with a bunch of Carthage coaches, and the waitress (who attended a local community college) told us that Carthage people were "uppity" (to the great credit of Rucks, Bosko, et. al., they still gave her a good tip  ). The well-heeled and very conservative bedroom community of Wheaton, Illinois is no doubt an exception, and I suspect that North Central and Elmhurst pretty accurately mirror their surrounding communities as well. I think that Augiedogie might be right about Augustana's larger problem being the fact that such a sizeable percentage of its student population comes from the opposite side of the state. Has the school ever considered moving its campus closer to its constituency?

[dansand]

I think that Augiedogie might be right about Augustana's larger problem being the fact that such a sizeable percentage of its student population comes from the opposite side of the state. Has the school ever considered moving its campus closer to its constituency?

Ironically, they moved it to Rock Island from Chicago, although I think there was a short stop somewhere in between.

As a townie myself (I started following the program when my future brother-in-law played hoops there in the mid '70's), I think that there's probably a little truth in all these theories. Augie2000 hit on an interesting sociological point with wealthy kids going to school in a blue collar neighborhood angle. I don't really know if it has much effect on their sports attendance, but I know the whole class envy thing exists--I've heard it personally.

But let's face it, at a small school the vast majority of your supporters are going to be students and alumni and I know there are plenty of alumni still in the area to turn out good crowds. As to why they don't, I'm not really sure. In the late '70's and early '80s they had people literally hanging from the walkways at Carver Center basketball games, but other than that, I don't really ever remember either sport drawing exceptionally big crowds.

[Gregory Sager]

i]to[/i] Rock Island from Chicago, although I think there was a short stop somewhere in between.

Wasn't it in Keokuk, Iowa at some point? I'm pretty sure that there was a Swedish Lutheran college there. I know that there was one in Galesburg as well. But we're talking horse-and-buggy era.

As a townie myself (I started following the program when my future brother-in-law played hoops there in the mid '70's), I think that there's probably a little truth in all these theories. Augie2000 hit on an interesting sociological point with wealthy kids going to school in a blue collar neighborhood angle. I don't really know if it has much effect on their sports attendance, but I know the whole class envy thing exists--I've heard it personally.

But let's face it, at a small school the vast majority of your supporters are going to be students and alumni and I know there are plenty of alumni still in the area to turn out good crowds. As to why they don't, I'm not really sure. In the late '70's and early '80s they had people literally hanging from the walkways at Carver Center basketball games, but other than that, I don't really ever remember either sport drawing exceptionally big crowds.

I remember those days as well. When I was a student in the early 1980s, Augustana brought more visitors to our gym at North Park to cheer on the likes of Rapier, Finch, Peden, Economos, Battle, Wenzel, etc., than any other school in the CCIW, including Illinois Wesleyan.

Relocating a school can be a very tricky thing. It's not something to be taken lightly. North Park moved once as well, from downtown Minneapolis to rural Jefferson Township north of Chicago in 1894. Of course, the city eventually annexed Jefferson Township and surrounded the campus. A lot of people in the 1960s and 1970s felt that the surrounding neighborhood was on the decline, and that since North Park mostly catered to middle-class suburban white kids, anyway, why not move it out to the suburbs? After all, that's what Trinity College (now Trinity International University) did in moving from Chicago's North Side to Deerfield in 1961. That very nearly came to pass for North Park in the late '70s and early '80s, and A. Harold Anderson (the benefactor for whom NPU's chapel and Wheaton's dining hall is named) was even going to donate the land in the north suburbs for the new campus. When I was a freshman, North Park's Board of Directors made the final decision to spurn A. Harold's offer and to stay in the city.

It was the best thing that the board ever did. Yes, the resident student population doesn't look all that much like the surrounding community either racially or economically, and there isn't much of a townie presence at NPU sporting or cultural events. (That's not due to animosity, though; with a school this small in a city this huge, the "townies", if you can call Chicagoans that, barely even know that NPU exists.) But in terms of encouraging diversity and giving students access to the incomparable learning laboratory that is the country's third-largest city, it was a very sound decision.

On Saturday, NPU hosted a hundred or so children from Cabrini-Green who are connected to the school's tutoring program there. They sat in the stands with the NPU student volunteers, and had a great time. (They were too young to understand that their hosts' football team was getting its doors blown off on the football field.  ) It was a total blast to see those kids running all over the field at halftime, having fun and getting the chance to have at least one carefree day away from their troubled home environment. That, to me, is what North Park is all about as a Christian school that has a commitment to a hurting world that lies right at its doorstep -- and that kind of thing would not be possible if the school had abandoned the city and moved to the 'burbs.

It doesn't seem to me as though Augie's in the same boat. How much does the school take advantage of its location in Rock Island? Is there anything there to take advantage of? Is there any groundswell of sentiment that Augustana would be better off somewhere else, or, on the other hand, that it can make more of an effort to integrate itself into the surrounding community?

[Redmen96]

Sager
   Yes on paper we were tied in 94 but North Park was our only win that year so we put ourselves ahead of you in our hearts.

[CardinalAlum]

CardAlum,
You don't have to lie, really. We all know you're just trying to get your post count up!

I'm a long ways away from all-conference status.  Maybe 2008 or so! 

[Mugsy]

His big 75-yard TD catch was against the Wheaton reserves. I strongly doubt that Wheaton ever got down to a 4th-team defense, though. They didn't suit up that many players. Third-teamers, maybe -- although I'm willing to bet that there were guys who are as high as second on the Wheaton depth chart who were in the ballgame at the end. The game stats list only 22 Wheaton defensive players as having registered tackles, assists, sacks, turnovers, etc. I recognized most of the same uniform numbers playing defense on the Wheaton side throughout the second half. Of the starters, I followed Studebaker and Ittersagen in particular (since they're the two Wheatie defensive players who get the most mentions here). Studebaker played the first couple of series in the third quarter, as Mugsy mentioned, and then sat out. Ittersagen played the entire third quarter and into the fourth.

This is picking nits, though. Brandon Watts is a tremendous player, and I think that he impressed even the Wheaties on Saturday. But he won't be a part of Scott Pethtel's rebuilding effort, or contribute much longer to the "baby steps", because he's a senior and has only three games left in his NPU football career. The bottom line is this: Wheaton embarrassed NPU on Saturday. I never in my life thought I'd be typing or saying these words, but ... thank God for soccer. 

Greg,

Yeah... in reflecting on this post I exaggerated a bit with the #4's.  All I wanted to do was point out that some of Watts stats were due to playing against the subs when the game was already way out of reach.  I got a bit careless with my words.  My apologies on the exaggeration.  

The last thing I wanted to do was take anything away from Brandon Watts because he is an exceptional player.  I did want to point out that some of his stats were a bit inflated due to the outcome of the game.

I was aware that Watts is a senior, unfortunately for the Vikings.  I believe the notion of building on Watts was mentioned by lakeshore.

[CardinalAlum]

Mugsy,

You were merely exaggerating to argue my surprise that Wheaton was still throwing the football up by 50 points!   

[Mugsy]

As a townie myself (I started following the program when my future brother-in-law played hoops there in the mid '70's), I think that there's probably a little truth in all these theories. Augie2000 hit on an interesting sociological point with wealthy kids going to school in a blue collar neighborhood angle. I don't really know if it has much effect on their sports attendance, but I know the whole class envy thing exists--I've heard it personally.

But let's face it, at a small school the vast majority of your supporters are going to be students and alumni and I know there are plenty of alumni still in the area to turn out good crowds. As to why they don't, I'm not really sure. In the late '70's and early '80s they had people literally hanging from the walkways at Carver Center basketball games, but other than that, I don't really ever remember either sport drawing exceptionally big crowds.

I have vivid memories, both as a high school kid watching my brother play against Augie in Rock Island and then as a Wheaton player myself, of stands packed with fans and even lining the field, including the endzones.  I remember getting some serious heckling (most of it clean) everytime Augie was in the redzone - which happened far too often.  The fans in the endzone were right on top of you. 

I recall a large number of guys in their coveralls and farming boots looking like they just climbed off the combine.  Not what you are used to seeing from a Wheaton crowd...

[Mugsy]

Mugsy,

You were merely exaggerating to argue my surprise that Wheaton was still throwing the football up by 50 points!   

I have to exaggerate everything when responding to your posts.

[matblake]

Here are this week's Make or Break Games:

Elmhurst v Wheaton:  Elmhurst's potential turnaround season is on the line here.  Their defense has won them games v  Carthage and IWU.  Will they be able to stop Wheaton?  Will the offense be able to put points on the board versus the Wheaton defense?  Will Wheaton be able to come out firing on all cylanders right away?  Will the Elmhurst's defense be able to force turnovers, a problem that Wheaton seems to struggle with?  Will the dual quarterback situation with the Thunder lead to consistency issues?  An upset win by the Jays would continue to display that parity is attempting to make its way into the CCIW.  

North Central v Augie:  The premier game of the week this week.  North Central can keep itself in contention for the automatic playoff birth with a 22 point win.  Augie can further solidify itself for the CCIW crown with a victory.  Kniss can catch on fire at any time,  Sulo has shown he is a capable back.  If that Augie offense can control the clock, Kniss might not have enough time to work.  Will the Augie defense stand up to the Cardinal offense?  If the Vikings fall behind will another loss similar to BW or Platteville be on the horizon?

[matblake]

For those of you that might be wondering why I didn't include Carthage v Millikin in the make or break is that I pretty much view it as only make or break for one team, Carthage.  Millikin's fate has been decided and would take on the role of spoiler.  Carthage I'm sure is eager to prove they're a team to be contended with.  Of course, Millikin's players are competitive and want to win every game and beating Carthage could be the first step in re-establishing themselves in the CCIW.  It is an interesting match-up, but Carthage has much more to lose IMO.

[knarocky22]

I believe Augie was in Paxton, IL before the move to Rock Island, but I'm not 100% sure.  Moving is not an option for Augie.  The school is in the process of expanding.  They just built a brand new dorm/apt. living center that opened this year.  They are in the process of getting a new student union built.  They just built a brand new baseball field 3 years ago.  One of the things that draws students to Augie is the beautiful campus.  I don't think the school would consider a move just because attendance at their sporting events is not what it used to be.  I think part of the reason not as many students go to the football games is that they are just flat out kind of boring to watch.  There have only been a couple  home games in my four years at Augie that have even been close, and those games tend to be well attended.  Couple that with the fact that the offense they run is like watching paint dry, and the outcome has been lower attendance.

[CardinalAlum]

I recall a large number of guys in their coveralls and farming boots looking like they just climbed off the combine.  Not what you are used to seeing from a Wheaton crowd...

That's hilarious!!  That's one of the things I remember as well.  Also, the game in '89 when we played in RI in a complete downpour.  The weather was about 36 degrees and it was windy.  I can't believe it wasn't snow. After the game the Augie locker room provided nothing but ice cold water in the showers!  That sucked!