FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

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Gregory Sager

#37065
The only Wheaton starter that I saw get hurt today was Luke Anthony, and he stayed in uniform on the sidelines for the entire game in spite of the fact that he left the contest for good after getting hit by NPU's Joey McIntyre just as Anthony was releasing a long pass downfield early in the second quarter. One would think that he wouldn't have stood on the sidelines all day in pads if he was that seriously hurt, but stranger things have happened, I guess. Dave Beamer also went down late in the game, but he appeared to be OK after he went back to the sidelines.

Pardon me if I don't cry a river for Mike Swider. NPU is so decimated by injuries that I think Kyle Rooker's on the verge of kidnapping the pep band next week and putting them on the buses to Rock Island to help fill out the roster. The Vikings are the only college football team I've ever seen for whom the backup QB and the backup RB are one and the same person.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

izzy stradlin

Thanks, Greg.  Sorry to hear about NPU's injuries. 

Just to clarify Swider wasn't at all lamenting for his team, he said he just felt bad for the kids who went down as it sounded like something career ending to a senior similar to Spencer Peterson.

Gregory Sager

Spencer Peterson, I genuinely feel badly for. That poor guy not only saw his football career come to an end last week, but his basketball career ended at the exact same moment without his being able to lace up his sneakers even once in 2019-20.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Titan Q

Sounds like Brandon Bauer's hand injury is pretty serious -- Drew Brees type thing where he cannot grip the ball.

Word is he is probably done for the season/career.

markerickson

Why was Wheaton throwing the ball in the third qtr while leading NPU 49-0?  Two more TD passes against the worst team in D3 football to expand the lead.  Final:  63-0 in Chicago.  Time for NPU to drop football.  If the CCIW made an exemption for WashU to join with football only, why can't NPU remain in the conference w/o football.  The CCIW does not need NPU for scheduling purposes as it has very recently added two teams:  Carroll and WashU.

I have endured so many absolutely uncompetitive NPU teams in four decades and this year's team is beyond horrific.
Once a metalhead, always a metalhead.  Matthew 5:13.

Gregory Sager

Quote from: markerickson on October 14, 2019, 10:29:58 PM
Why was Wheaton throwing the ball in the third qtr while leading NPU 49-0?  Two more TD passes against the worst team in D3 football to expand the lead.  Final:  63-0 in Chicago.

It's actually worse than that, inasmuch as on the first play of the fourth quarter Wheaton threw a ball over the top on a long sideline route while already up by a score of 56-0, with that long pass resulting in the game's final touchdown.

I had to pause for a moment before I made the call of that play on the air, because that long pass made me angry and I didn't want to say something impulsively that I would regret. But I ultimately didn't make an issue of it then, nor do I moan and groan about it now. That's because to some degree I understand Mike Swider's desire to get his minimally-experienced QB -- a former third-stringer who might now be first string, in the wake of the loss of Spencer Peterson and the potential loss of Luke Anthony -- as much of a varied menu of plays under his belt as possible. More to the point, though, I've grown tired of being the guy who gripes about an opposing coach's unsportsmanlike behavior when his team rubs it in while delivering a beatdown to NPU. I mean, I certainly won't be upset if you want to keep doing that on behalf of the Vikings, Mark, but, personally, I'm sick of doing it myself.

Quote from: markerickson on October 14, 2019, 10:29:58 PMTime for NPU to drop football.

No, it isn't. NPU needs the male students. North Park's undergrad female:male ratio is already heavily imbalanced at 63:37 as it is. Plus, football brings students on campus, and that is no small consideration for a tuition-driven school that needs to keep meeting its admissions targets in order to pay the bills in a downturning environment for U.S. college enrollment as a whole. And that's not even getting into the whole CCIW-required-sport issue.

Maybe it's just time for you to step away from caring about North Park football. I'm not being snarky or critical, Mark, because I'm in the same situation as you. It hurts to be Sisyphus. I'm tired of pushing the boulder up the hill when I know full well that it's going to roll right back down. It's not like being a Cubs fan, where for generations we endured one season after another of falling short. The problems that bedeviled the Cubs -- the benign refusal of the Wrigley family for three and a half decades to put money into signing good ballplayers rather than putting money into the ballpark, followed by 37 years of mismanagement by the clueless suits from the Tribune -- were correctible. The problems that bedevil North Park football really aren't correctible, for reasons with which everybody is familiar. Given all that, why keep stressing yourself out over something that can't ever be fixed?

Me, I'm in it for the long haul, because I call the games on the air, and that tends to emotionally bind me to the program. D3 broadcasting is an up-close-and-personal gig, and it's hard to not care about the on-the-field fortunes of student-athletes that you've come to know. Plus, as was the case with his two immediate predecessors, I find myself liking Kyle Rooker and the way that he's going about his job, and I want to see him gain at least enough success so that this job doesn't force his career to spin off the highway and into the ditch like it has so many other NPU head football coaches. But you personally don't have anything that really forces you to keep caring. You could simply join the rest of the 95% or more of North Park's alumni base that is indifferent to the football program.

Embrace the dark side, Mark. I know that you have at least a mild interest in the NPU soccer program. Soccer's not that bad of a spectator sport when the game is played well -- and as a Swedish-American you can take pleasure in celebrating the success of your distant cousins from Scandinavia who continue year after year to kick the crap out of Augustana, Illinois Wesleyan, North Central, and the rest of 'em on Hedstrand Field while wearing the North Park Vikings soccer kit. ;)

Quote from: markerickson on October 14, 2019, 10:29:58 PMIf the CCIW made an exemption for WashU to join with football only, why can't NPU remain in the conference w/o football.

I'm not sure that you're tracking with how and why Wash U was invited into the league, Mark. It was to create an even number of teams and to reduce the number of non-conference dates needed from two to one. That balanced the league schedule in a sport that, due to its scheduling circumstances, is extremely hard to operate if one team has to have a bye each week. Those unique circumstances include a calendar that provides only eleven weeks to play ten games, with games by necessity scheduled only on weekends and almost always on Saturdays exclusively, in a sport that only has 247 teams on the D3 level and for which travel costs are extremely high.

And Wash U wasn't brought into the fold for football-only purposes as an "exemption", either; it was done as part of a long-standing league policy. The CCIW has for many years now brought in associate members on a sport-by-sport basis, mostly to fill out the league's ranks in sports that fall short of the seven-team minimum necessary to get an automatic bid to that sport's national tournament, playoff, or meet. For instance, you're aware that NPU added men's volleyball as a varsity sport last year. Well, this year is the first year that the CCIW is sponsoring the sport of men's volleyball, and the league has added Loras and Greenville as associate members for that sport in order to get the number of participating teams up to that minimum of seven. The addition of Wash U for football is a little different in that regard, since the CCIW didn't need to add the Bears for that purpose. But your argument still remains a non sequitur, since the addition of the Bears to the CCIW football lineup as an associate member really has nothing to do with the constitutional provision that each full member of the CCIW field teams in football, basketball, and baseball on the men's side, and volleyball, basketball, and softball on the women's side.

Quote from: markerickson on October 14, 2019, 10:29:58 PMThe CCIW does not need NPU for scheduling purposes as it has very recently added two teams:  Carroll and WashU.

See my point above. This has nothing to do with the CCIW needing NPU to field a football team. It has to do with the league holding fast to its constitution, specifically this part of it:

QuoteSection 2: Core Sports. In the men's program, every member of the Conference must play every other Conference member in football, basketball and baseball and must participate in the Conference (meet) program of at least five other sports. In the women's program, every member of the Conference must play every other Conference member in volleyball, basketball and softball and must participate in the Conference (meet) program of at least five other sports.

Wheaton tried years ago to get an exemption to the core-sports rule so that it could drop baseball, as back then Wheaton wouldn't or couldn't devote the resources necessary to be competent in that sport, and the CCIW spurned the request. If the league said no to Wheaton, why would it say yes to North Park?

But that's all a meaningless hypothetical, anyway, since North Park is most definitely not going to discontinue its football program. I know that both you and I want to see the Vikings become at least competent on the gridiron. But, looked at dispassionately, NPU football has been a lost cause on the field for a half-century now ... so why is the current state of affairs any different?

Besides, the dark cloud looming on the horizon that nobody on the football portion of d3boards.com likes to talk about is that this sport is in very serious trouble, anyway. Football participation on the youth level continues to plummet every year at alarming rates, and high school programs outside of Friday-Night-Lights strongholds such as Texas are beginning to feel the pinch in terms of numbers as well. The attrition caused by the culture-wide aversion of parents to allow their sons to play a sport in which they may suffer permanent brain damage is starting to take hold, and the future for this sport on the D3 level can't be considered to be a rosy one. In other words, the day may come when the CCIW views the decline of football participation as reason enough to amend the constitutional requirement for all full-member schools to field teams in this sport.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

USee

Greg, I think you are correct in assessing Wheatons decisions to throw late in the game bs NPU. Luke Anthony was done for the day and it was not known how seriously he may be hurt.  To have Jeremiah Tucker run the offense for as long as possible was the prudent thing to do for the Thunder. 

Fortunately it appears Luke is fine and won't miss any time.  Unfortunately the same can't be said about senior LB Daniel Herber who hurt his knee and is likely done for the year. That's a big blow to the Thunder D. 

WashU and Johnny Davidson visit McCully this weekend in the highlight game for the league.

Gregory Sager

Quote from: USee on October 15, 2019, 05:22:33 AM
Greg, I think you are correct in assessing Wheatons decisions to throw late in the game bs NPU. Luke Anthony was done for the day and it was not known how seriously he may be hurt.  To have Jeremiah Tucker run the offense for as long as possible was the prudent thing to do for the Thunder. 

Fortunately it appears Luke is fine and won't miss any time.  Unfortunately the same can't be said about senior LB Daniel Herber who hurt his knee and is likely done for the year. That's a big blow to the Thunder D.

Yes, and I owe Izzy an apology. As soon as I read the name "Daniel Herber" in your post I remembered that he, too, went down and stayed on the turf in the second half and had to be helped off. Herber should've stuck out in my mind because he delivered a stinging open-field (and totally legal) tackle to NPU WR Malik Powell in the first quarter that forced Powell himself to have to be helped off the field. Worse for me, I actually brought up Herber's tackle in my postgame interview of Kyle Rooker, as we talked about what a tough kid Powell is to have not only re-entered the game a few minutes later after that nasty hit but to have actually held onto the pass, albeit for no gain. (The PBP in the box score incorrectly attributes the tackle to Stephen Watson, but it was definitely Herber who applied the stick.)

One wonders, though, why Herber was still in the game when he got hurt. His injury came with about six minutes left in the third quarter when Wheaton was already ahead by 49-0.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

cciw83

Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program. 

USee

Quote from: Gregory Sager on October 15, 2019, 12:10:25 PM

One wonders, though, why Herber was still in the game when he got hurt. His injury came with about six minutes left in the third quarter when Wheaton was already ahead by 49-0.

I am sure Swider and CJ Nightingale are sick about it. Swider usually plays his starters 1 or 2 series into the 3rd quarter in games like this just to practice coming out from halftime with the requisite intensity. I suspect the drive on which Herber was hurt was likely his last action for the day.

Mugsy

#37075
Quote from: cciw83 on October 15, 2019, 04:23:51 PM
Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program.

Here comes the annual answer to this question... Greg probably has it saved away so he can cut and paste it.

Actually I may have it copied out somewhere and I'm not affiliated with NPU.  ;)
Wheaton Football: CCIW Champs: 1950, 1953-1959, 1995, 2000, 2002-2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019

Mr. Ypsi

Quote from: Mugsy on October 15, 2019, 05:03:34 PM
Quote from: cciw83 on October 15, 2019, 04:23:51 PM
Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program.

Here comes the annual answer to this question... Greg probably has it saved away so he can cut and paste it.

Actually I may have it copied out somewhere and I'm not affiliated with NPU.  ;)

That could come off as quite snippy and snarky to a newbie.  It's not really reasonable to expect someone new to the boards to read almost 2500 pages of posts to see what has or hasn't been already talked about.  As old-timers, let's be more welcoming to new blood!

A link to one of Greg's earlier explanations would have been much more helpful than "oh, here we go again."

Gregory Sager

Quote from: Mugsy on October 15, 2019, 05:03:34 PM
Quote from: cciw83 on October 15, 2019, 04:23:51 PM
Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program.

Here comes the annual answer to this question... Greg probably has it saved away so he can cut and paste it.

Actually I may have it copied out somewhere and I'm not affiliated with NPU.  ;)

LOL! I keep meaning to save it, but something always comes up to distract me. ;)

I did a search of the past umpteen times I've cited the reasons for NPU's non-competitiveness in football, which led to some interesting trips down memory lane. My favorite was in October 2008, a particularly fertile period for this board both in terms of quantity and quality of posters that featured such quips as Mugsy posting red footnotes on a post in order to appease CardinalAlum, USee coining the term "Okturnoverfest", and Chuck predicting that NPU would snap its long CCIW losing streak by beating Millikin, leading me to retort, "The only thing worse than a gypsy curse is a Ypsi curse."

Okay, cciw83, here's my latest version:

North Park suffers from a lot of deficiencies in terms of its football program -- f'rinstance, a lack of financial and facilities resources as compared to many of its CCIW peers; a 50-year-old losing tradition that turns off prospects and keeps high-school coaches from encouraging their kids to look into NPU; and a terrible retention rate whose biggest cause is the refusal of players to return just to suffer another season's worth of punishing losses. They all contribute to the problem. But other schools face those same problems, or problems like them. So why can't NPU just do what North Central did when it addressed its own dismal gridiron history by hiring John Thorne, which is when the Cardinals "overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players"?

What makes North Park different is location. NPU is an urban school. High school football is a suburban sport. High school football in the city of Chicago has been dead for generations. Aside from some still-solid Catholic League programs such as Mt. Carmel and St. Rita, and an occasional stray player on a Public League team here or there, the city is 227.63 square miles of teenage wasteland as far as prep football players are concerned. It's not that the city lacks good high school athletes; on the contrary, half of the college basketball coaches in America spend time recruiting the gyms of the Windy City every year. That's just it, though; the good high school athletes play basketball, not football. Public League basketball teams get 200 kids to try out every season, football teams get 40 or so (if they're lucky) and will gladly take each and every one, no matter how unathletic the kid is. (In Hispanic-majority high schools, substitute the soccer team for the basketball team.)

Some of that is culture, but most if it is resources. Unless you have middle-class parents or a scholarship that will get you into a St. Ignatius or a St. Rita or a Mount Carmel, if you're a city kid who wants to play football, you're going to be practicing in a garbage- and glass-strewn public park, hitting ancient tackling dummies with the stuffing coming out of them while wearing uniforms and helmets that are a decade old. You will not have attended football skills camps during the summer, because your parent or parents cannot afford to send you to one. And, with youth football leagues practically nonexistent in the city, you've probably never played organized football before until you tried out for your high school team. Your team probably has three coaches, maybe four, and they have other responsibilities at school besides football -- or perhaps they're a local cab driver or construction worker or pastor who loves the game and loves kids and tries to fit in helping out as an assistant coach in between their other commitments.

And if, in spite of all of those obstacles, you still want to go to college to continue playing football, you're faced with the fact that your high school may not have prepared you for the academic rigor of a CCIW education. And that's not to mention the fact that your family clearly can't afford that CCIW education, which means incurring a bewildering amount of debt if you choose to go to a private college and play football. I get so excited when a North Park football player who hails from the city gets to his senior year, cciw83, because that kid has already overcome obstacles that you and I couldn't even begin to fathom just to get to that point.

Bottom line: You can't base a college football program on Chicago kids. You have to either go where most CCIW coaches go to find their players, which is the Chicagoland suburbs, or else go further afield than that. And that comes to the other problem NPU has, which is that most suburban 18-year-olds do not want to go to college in the big city. Ironically, a lot of suburban 23- and 24-year-olds want to live on the city's North Side, because it's exciting and stimulating and full of other young Michigan or Illinois or Ohio State or Wisconsin grads, and there's a much livelier social scene than there is back in their sleepy suburb -- but the typical suburban teen blanches at the thought of going someplace as strange and as dangerous as Chicago to attend school, and a lot of their moms and dads don't encourage them to look at North Park (or DePaul, or Loyola, or UIC, or Roosevelt), anyway.

That's not an issue in other sports; good NPU coaches have been able to locate talent in the suburbs that's willing to go to a city school, as well as find talent elsewhere. But other NPU coaches don't have to bring in 40-50 new players every year the way that the football coach has to. And that, right there, is where the rubber hits the road -- if you can't bring in at least 30 guys every year who have definite CCIW potential, then you will fail to win in this league. It's as simple as that.

The last two NPU head coaches, to their credit, have tried some out-of-the-box thinking to get around this giant obstacle. Scott Pethtel adopted the triple-option offense, with the thought that he could thus tap into a talent pool (small-town and rural Illinois and Indiana, which is where most triple-option football is played in these parts on the high school level because of the lack of big kids in those tiny farming-community schools) that coaches of more conventional programs aren't recruiting. It was a great idea, but it didn't work; he simply couldn't bring in the critical mass of recruits on the offensive side of the ball that he needed, most likely because rural Illinois has been undergoing such hard times over the past twenty years. Downstate Illinois is suffering from a mass exodus, and most of the kids who still live down there can't afford a private-school education. His successor, Mike Conway, tried opening new out-of-state recruiting areas. He hit the Austin, TX and Miami, FL areas hard, but his most noteworthy success was in American Samoa and Hawaii, where he had real breakthroughs in terms of finding talent pools that were almost totally untapped by other D3 programs. But, again, there just wasn't enough of a critical mass there. NPU has brought some great Pacific Islander football players to campus in recent years; a few of them (George Tafua, Uluao Letuli, Uati Pati, etc.) are still there even though Mike's gone. But the new recruiting markets weren't a cure-all.

It's hard to envision how NPU could ever get away from the necessity to work the suburban high schools for the bulk of its roster like everybody else in the CCIW (except Wheaton and Wash U) does. If Kyle Rooker ever figures it out, he'll be on the fast track to a D1 head coaching job, because he will have done what none of his sixteen predecessors over the past 50 years have been able to do: Construct a Vikings roster that is both talented enough and deep enough to win more games than it loses.
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Gregory Sager

Quote from: Mr. Ypsi on October 15, 2019, 09:57:26 PM
Quote from: Mugsy on October 15, 2019, 05:03:34 PM
Quote from: cciw83 on October 15, 2019, 04:23:51 PM
Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program.

Here comes the annual answer to this question... Greg probably has it saved away so he can cut and paste it.

Actually I may have it copied out somewhere and I'm not affiliated with NPU.  ;)

That could come off as quite snippy and snarky to a newbie.  It's not really reasonable to expect someone new to the boards to read almost 2500 pages of posts to see what has or hasn't been already talked about.  As old-timers, let's be more welcoming to new blood!

A link to one of Greg's earlier explanations would have been much more helpful than "oh, here we go again."

I don't mind. I get a little better at it every time that I have to re-do it. ;)
"To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." -- George Orwell

Mugsy

#37079
Quote from: Mr. Ypsi on October 15, 2019, 09:57:26 PM
Quote from: Mugsy on October 15, 2019, 05:03:34 PM
Quote from: cciw83 on October 15, 2019, 04:23:51 PM
Greg, I am not trying to stir up the issue, but I can not understand why North Park can not at least be competitive. There were other schools like North Central based on their history that were bad in the 1960's through the early 1970's and had some mediocre stretches until their long run now. They overcame it with coaching and going out and finding players. Their facilities were not what they are like now.

There were other schools like Carthage and Millikin that had their cities economies hurt in downswings, but have seemed to recover and are competitive. Most small schools are actively trying to get football student-athletes in to keep enrollment from dwindling. I am surprised that North Park is not trying to strengthen the football program.

Here comes the annual answer to this question... Greg probably has it saved away so he can cut and paste it.

Actually I may have it copied out somewhere and I'm not affiliated with NPU.  ;)

That could come off as quite snippy and snarky to a newbie.  It's not really reasonable to expect someone new to the boards to read almost 2500 pages of posts to see what has or hasn't been already talked about.  As old-timers, let's be more welcoming to new blood!

A link to one of Greg's earlier explanations would have been much more helpful than "oh, here we go again."

And this is part of why I hadn't posted much anymore.  With 3 teenage kids I don't have time to look up  historical posts.  No snarkiness meant.  Even used emoji.  Later
Wheaton Football: CCIW Champs: 1950, 1953-1959, 1995, 2000, 2002-2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019