Quote from: Captain_Joe08 on Yesterday at 08:24:41 PMThey have struggled in most if not all sports in the NACC for a while now forever. That and constant turnover in the coaching staffs hasn't helped.

FTFY

Alverno has finished either in last place or next-to-last in the NACC all-sports standings (women's division) every year since the league began back in 2006-07, with the exceptions of 2012-13, when they finished 11th of 13, and 2016-17, when they finished 10th of 12. Since that magical 10th-place finish nine years ago, Alverno has finished last every school year. This year will be no exception.

This inability to -- well, quite frankly, be competitive -- also held true for the Inferno before the NACC formed. Alverno first started sponsoring sports in 2000 as a D3 provisional member, and it joined the old Lake Michigan Conference in 2003-04, moving with it when that league merged with the NIIC to become the NACC, and the Inferno weren't any more successful back in those pre-NACC days than they were afterwards.

This is not an indictment of Alverno as an institution by any means, mind you. Athletics is not a priority for them. There are lots of D3 institutions that can be described in that manner. It's a choice of mission, emphasis, and resource allotment, and it's just as legitimate an institutional policy as the choice to push athletics and strive for as much success on the field and on the court as the school's resources can bear.

Logan sez:

Augustana 28, Carroll 24	(AC 60%, CU 40%)
Wheaton 50, Carthage 7	(WC 100%, CC 0%)
Washington MO 52, Elmhurst 5	(WUSTL 100%, EU 0%)
Illinois Wesleyan 37, Millikin 15	(IWU 93%, MU 7%)
North Central 54, North Park 0	(NCC 100%, NPU 0%)

Home teams in bold.

Welcome to Slaughter Week (supersized edition).

Meanwhile, two more blowouts:

Augustana 48, Elmhurst 7
North Central 59, Millikin 10

Carroll 24
North Park 10

Not a good performance at all by NPU on the road today. Some bad mistakes on defense and special teams in the first half, and the Pioneers adroitly jumped on them for touchdowns. NPU never really got it going on offense, although the defense more or less shut down CU in the second half.

A confusing day at QB for the Vikings. Caillix Dillon, ineffective in the first quarter, disappeared from the game; not sure if he was hurt or hooked. Freshman Paul Palmer took over for him and was equally ineffective, leading at last to the original starter this season, Justen Green, who threw a TD pass in the final two minutes for North Park's lone touchdown.

Quote from: Cardinal773 on October 10, 2025, 12:55:15 PM

Quote from: Gregory Sager on October 10, 2025, 01:00:48 AM

Quote from: Cardinal773 on October 09, 2025, 05:40:45 PM

Quote from: Jbothe on October 09, 2025, 02:51:51 PMI spend way more time watching their schools and teams than anyone else and I would guess a lot of other alums do also.

If that's the case, I hope my kid doesn't go to IWU.  I... I don't know what I would do.  The idea of it is just...

That's a common feeling around the league. I've heard it expressed by representatives of a number of different CCIW schools and their fan bases, across several sports over the years. IWU just seems to be the love-'em-or-hate-'em outfit of this league.

I honestly don't think that for the most part it's because of Titans student-athletes, nor is it the coaches (especially now that Norm Eash has retired; IWU coaches such as Mia Smith, Ron Rose, and Kim Nelson-Brown actually seem to be pretty well-respected by everyone around the league) that evoke such acrimony. And it's not envy, because Augustana used to be the CCIW school that won the most across all sports and now it's North Central. I think it's a fan-base thing. That's my impression, at least.

Honestly I'm just being a smartass.  IWU has a great academic reputation and a lot of great people through and through.  Ripping on the Titans is kind of the thing to do if they kicked the crap out of you for four years.

IWU is like the broccoli of the CCIW salad.  It's green, not everybody likes it, but it's good for you and you can use the fiber.

It's probably a default thing more than anything else. There's definitely some YMMV at work here as well; everybody probably has his or her own CCIW rival that rubs her or him the wrong way more than anybody else. I've just noticed that for an unusual number and variety of people it's IWU, that's all.

Quote from: Cardinal773 on October 09, 2025, 05:40:45 PM

Quote from: Jbothe on October 09, 2025, 02:51:51 PMI spend way more time watching their schools and teams than anyone else and I would guess a lot of other alums do also.

If that's the case, I hope my kid doesn't go to IWU.  I... I don't know what I would do.  The idea of it is just...

That's a common feeling around the league. I've heard it expressed by representatives of a number of different CCIW schools and their fan bases, across several sports over the years. IWU just seems to be the love-'em-or-hate-'em outfit of this league.

I honestly don't think that for the most part it's because of Titans student-athletes, nor is it the coaches (especially now that Norm Eash has retired; IWU coaches such as Mia Smith, Ron Rose, and Kim Nelson-Brown actually seem to be pretty well-respected by everyone around the league) that evoke such acrimony. And it's not envy, because Augustana used to be the CCIW school that won the most across all sports and now it's North Central. I think it's a fan-base thing. That's my impression, at least.

Quote from: washdupcard on October 08, 2025, 03:11:29 PMit does not seem likely that any school outside of Wheaton has the ability recruit at a level even close as there is no comparable draw, and Wheaton's recruiting is really an outlier as there's a strong religious component that isn't comparable to any other CCIW school.

... and let's just say that there are issues there as well. Wheaton's not the same school it was even in the not-too-distant past when my old buddy (and D3boards regular) the late Dave Lawrenz was on staff there. I'm not so sure that it's the easy sell to parents in the evangelical world that it used to be.

And before USee or any other Wheaton alum raises his hackles, let me point out that the other CCIW school with a strong religious component -- North Park -- isn't the same school it was, either. Last weekend being Homecoming reminded me of how common a topic that is among my fellow alumni, especially those that identify as "NPC alumni" rather than "NPU alumni" (that's an age thing, not a nomenclature thing; nobody complains about the Park being a university anymore).

Change is inevitable in life. Some of it is good; some of it is bad; some of it is a mixed bag. For more information, consult your alma mater's admissions department.

Quote from: CarollFan on October 08, 2025, 02:18:41 PMWait a minute. You went to Augie and I had to build a case for Augie finishing over IWU?
What is it with you Augie guys underestimating Augie? In the beginning of the season they are predicting 4-6 and they are going 4-1 this weekend.

You have to understand that '80s Augustana football alumni regard themselves as the Roman legionaries who carried the eagle standard into every conquered town when the Roman Empire ruled the world ... and now it's the Middle Ages. Rome has fallen. The barbarians won. The d3 football world has turned into a great big dismal heap of disease, starvation, putrescence, random cruelty, and petty bickering among small men. And Rome itself? Alas, the she-wolf suckles no more heroes-to-be. Mother Rome is a shabby heap of broken stone where ragged peasants haul off one piece of cracked ancient marble after another to form rude shelters.

Some people call it the Middle Ages, and some people call it the Dark Ages, and you see that some people are not like some other people, but those some other people have a reason for their glass-half-empty view of things. You and I look at Steve Bell's 2025 team and we see a pretty good CCIW outfit that has a realistic shot at a top-three finish. The old Augie alumni look at it and see mice nesting in the ruins of Bob Reade's temple.

Logan sez:

Augustana 36, Elmhurst 13	(AC 93%, EU 7%)
Carroll 29, North Park 20	(CU 72%, NPU 28%)
Washington MO 42, Carthage 17	(WUSTL 95%, CC 5%)
Wheaton 40, Illinois Wesleyan 21	(WC 89%, IWU 11%)
North Central 61, Millikin 0	(NCC 100%, MU 0%)

Home teams in bold.

I find it interesting that the Hansen Ratings have Millikin's odds for victory at Benedetti-Wehrli Stadium on Saturday set at 0.0%. In other words, there's not even a fragment of a percentage point upon which Millikin fans can hang their hopes. There's no space for a Lloyd Christmas Dumb and Dumber meme in this instance. The Big Blue have just as much of a chance to win Saturday's game if they don't pack their gear and board the buses for Naperville than if they do ... or, to belabor my earlier point, they have just as much of a chance to beat the Illini, the Badgers, or the Hawkeyes on Saturday as they do the Cardinals.

Quote from: USee on October 08, 2025, 09:33:34 AMGreg describes the disparity accurately. Put succinctly, similarly to Augie in the 1980's, NCC enjoys a unique alignment of Administration, admissions, financial aid and athletics. For example, they have 7 full time assistants whose only job is football. Wheaton has 4, Whitewater has 4, Mt Union has 5. Each of these teams has part time assistants and/or graduate assistants in addition tot he full time roles. For NCC, that's a massive advantage in number and quality of recruits and in detailed coaching during the week. Wheaton is never closing that gap.

One more point I forgot to make:

* The first CCIW teams to have 100+ players on the roster were Bob Reade's Augustana teams in the 1980s. Reade actively cultivated the concept of a supersized roster. This was partly because he had that old-school mentality that his role in life was to mold young men into positive and productive members of society, and if they happened to win a few football games along the way while growing into their potential as men, well, so much the better. (Reade was a very big advocate for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at Augie.) The more young men he could positively influence, the more successful he was at his life's calling. It was also partly because he felt an obligation to his employer to help it out by boosting enrollment. This felt obligation would, of course, later be flipped onto the shoulders of CCIW coaches as an actual obligation when they were informed by their bosses that they were, in effect, adjunct members of the admissions staff who were expected to achieve assigned recruitment quotas.

Quote from: Cardinal773 on October 08, 2025, 09:47:34 AMThere have been a few blips over the years since Reade's departure that, when they were happening, had some people thinking we were all witnessing the birth of a new dynasty.  I'm thinking of IWU in the mid 90s and then the big years from Carthage and Elmhurst.  In Carthage and Elmhurst's case, they seemed to rely heavily on a few key players rather than a system, but they did have success.  I think with the transfer situation we have, there's a better chance to see a breakout season from someone else out there in the CCIW.  Admittedly the bar is kind of high to do that, but there is talent out there that could easily join the league.  Perhaps a breakout season would make some local kids consider an alternative to NC and building the foundation for a new power to emerge.  Then again, NCC football has that cross-country mentality, so this could take a while!

I'm not sure that you're seeing my point here. The point I'm making is that there are two completely separate types of dynasties in CCIW football annals. First, there's the standard type of dynasty in which a program reels off a string of consecutive CCIW titles -- the Eisenhower-era Wheaton teams under Chrouser, the Nixon-era Carthage teams under Keller, and the 2006-13 Thorne years for North Central. They're comparable to similar dynasties in other leagues: they lose a conference game once in a great while, they play at least a couple of close games every year while still winning titles. They're dominant, but they have to work at dominating.

You're talking about speculation that "we were all witnessing the birth of a new dynasty." This is the kind of dynasty that you were talking about (and that none of the programs you mentioned ever came close to achieving, of course). Winning the league was an end in itself for those teams, the dream that their players shared along with all of the other players in the CCIW, and getting to that end was a struggle that came with pains that in retrospect made the reward taste sweeter.

But the essay I sorta dumped on this page last night is about a different sort of dynasty entirely. Let me requote myself:

QuoteThe difference is invulnerability.

The Augie teams of Bob Reade's glory days could not be beaten by a CCIW opponent. It was impossible. Other CCIW schools would have had just as much luck playing the Illini or the Badgers or the Hawkeyes as they had against Augie. The same conditions currently apply to North Central, and when the next-best team in the CCIW takes a 35-0 licking at that hands of the current dynast -- and that next-best team is itself currently one of the premier teams in all of D3 -- and it's coming on the back of a lengthy ongoing string of Stagg Bowl appearances, then you're looking at Bob Reade Augustana v. 2.0. See the difference? There really are no other parallels to the Reade dynasty and the current NCC dynasty that exist, aside from the one in Alliance, Ohio.

Again, the difference between Reade's Augie teams and the current North Central string of teams, versus the other three CCIW dynasties of the first type, is invulnerability. And because the Cardinals are invulnerable to CCIW opponents, the league is therefore irrelevant to them. These Cardinals were already physically and mentally preparing for the final three rounds of the 2025 D3 playoffs when they held their first practice in August, as they should be. The rest of this league is a series of speed bumps to them, the games mere rehearsals for honing performances and for sorting out O-line combinations, trying out different formations and personnel, etc. This was never the case for Chrouser's Crusaders, Keller's Redmen, or emergent-era Thorne Cardinals. So let's not confuse dynasties, nor speculate as to who's going to form the next one that's like the two I've discussed. If we've only seen two of these rockets manage to break the CCIW's gravity well and soar beyond the league in the three-quarters of a century that there has been postseason play made available to CCIW teams, the odds are not high that many of us will live to see another one.

Quote from: USee on October 08, 2025, 09:33:34 AMGreg describes the disparity accurately. Put succinctly, similarly to Augie in the 1980's, NCC enjoys a unique alignment of Administration, admissions, financial aid and athletics. For example, they have 7 full time assistants whose only job is football. Wheaton has 4, Whitewater has 4, Mt Union has 5. Each of these teams has part time assistants and/or graduate assistants in addition tot he full time roles. For NCC, that's a massive advantage in number and quality of recruits and in detailed coaching during the week. Wheaton is never closing that gap.

Yes, this is a pretty relevant example of my statement that:

QuoteMost schools aren't set up to push a football program through the roof that way

There are a lot of other ways in which North Central has geared itself for football success that other CCIW schools can't or won't emulate (and it should be pointed out that the austere outlook for American small liberal arts colleges in the near future makes it even less likely that a CCIW school will try to run the NCC football program operating manual through the copier), but the disparity in full-time coaching assistants (and staff size in general; I swear that NCC football has GAs whose assigned job is to tell players when and where to stand on the sidelines) is a directly obvious one.

Quote from: robertgoulet on October 08, 2025, 10:39:37 AMI will also add that I think NCC caught lightning in a bottle with Thorne's hire. Hiring a HC who was an Chicago suburban legend coach from a nearby HS, who also happened to have a kid who would turn into a great coach and a former player who also happened to turn into a great coach (with VERY strong ties to the school)...something we likely won't see for a long time.

There's a strong parallel between Thorne and Bob Reade, in that Reade had won the Illinois 3A title three straight years at Geneseo when Augie hired him.

Quote from: UWO Titan 78 on October 07, 2025, 05:42:44 PM

Quote from: Gregory Sager on October 05, 2025, 11:26:07 AM

Quote from: USee on October 05, 2025, 09:27:05 AMSecond, I wasn't wrong. This is a Wheaton team that can beat almost any team outside of the top 2-3. That's just how good North Central is.

We have to acknowledge the fact that, for the second time in CCIW football history, we are in a period in which the reigning dominant program is so far beyond the rest of the league that its CCIW schedule is really nothing more than incidental. It's basically prep work for the playoffs.

I just began following the CCIW very closely when my son joined the conference a few years ago. How does the league close the gap on NCC? When I played in the WIAC in the early/mid 1990s, UWLAX was the dominant team. They won 2 national titles in the 90s, but the conference was able to compete with them. They had a tie and a one-point win one of those title years, and a couple close calls the other title year. When UWW was going to 6 straight Stagg Bowls, the conference still provided competitive games. Whitewater even lost conference games during that stretch. The WIAC is better top-to-bottom than the CCIW, but how does the conference catch up? Is it solely about recruiting, facilities, commitment to winning? Is it about waiting for a regime change at NCC? How can the rest of the league close the gap?

First, the CCIW isn't the WIAC, so those comparisons aren't helpful in understanding the issue. So much of the CCIW's current situation has to do with North Central having recruiting hegemony over the arc of suburbs that bracket Chicago on three sides that it can't be analyzed through the lens of another conference. The only useful comparison goes back to my earlier statement:

Quote from: Gregory Sager on October 05, 2025, 11:26:07 AMWe have to acknowledge the fact that, for the second time in CCIW football history, we are in a period in which the reigning dominant program is so far beyond the rest of the league that its CCIW schedule is really nothing more than incidental. It's basically prep work for the playoffs.

(Emphasis added.)

There is a saying, often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Well, CCIW football history may not exactly be repeating itself in this era in terms of North Central's so-big-the-league-doesn't-really-matter-anymore-for-them total eclipse of the circuit, but it has certainly turned into a limerick that starts, "There once was a team from Naperville ...".

You see, from 1983 to 1986 Augustana won four straight Stagg Bowls. Notice I didn't lead my point with CCIW titles, I led with national championships. That's because it was understood by one and all around the CCIW in that era that Augustana had bigger fish to fry when football season rolled around.

There have been other lengthy dynasties in CCIW football. Wheaton under Harve Chrouser went 40-2-2 in a seven-season span from 1953 until the school was not-so-gently invited to leave the league by everybody else after the 1959-60 school year (because of football and especially basketball dominance). Wheaton won all seven of those CCI (no "W" in those days) titles, sharing one with Millikin and one with then-member Lake Forest. Carthage, under the great Art Keller, commanded the heights of the league when Nixon was in the White House, going 37-1-1 and winning all five CCIW titles from 1969 through 1973. And North Central itself won eight straight CCIW football titles (three of them shared) from 2006-13, going 52-4 in the league during that span. The difference is invulnerability. All of those dynasties could be beaten and on rare occasions were beaten, and they played plenty of competitive games against their CCIW peers.

Not so the case with this current North Central team ... and not so the case with Bob Reade's Augustana teams of most of the '80s. Their utter mastery of the league really came out of nowhere; the team was a good-but-hardly-dominant 6-3 in 1980, Reade's second season in charge. But in 1981 it all changed. With one exception, Augie won all of its CCIW games by three touchdowns or more. The one exception (Wheaton, which lost to Augie by 10) was likely irrelevant, because not a single CCIW team managed to reach double digits on the scoreboard against Augustana. Scoring-wise, it was the most ferociously proficient defense in CCIW history.

That set the stage. From that point onward, Augustana not only kept winning CCIW games -- 40 straight CCIW wins, 58 straight CCIW games without a loss -- but it was extraordinarily difficult to even stay close. After that shutdown-defense season of 1981, Augie would only have five CCIW games over the next four years in which the final margin was a touchdown or less. Now, a touchdown or less seems like a low bar, especially since North Central routinely posts final scores more reminiscent of a high-school girls basketball rout than a college football final score. But Reade's Augustana teams were a very different beast; rather than having a strong passing game that could either move the team rapidly down the field underneath and at medium depth or go over the top for a quick strike multiple times in a game -- which in turn opens up lots of big rushes because no one dares to put an extra defender in the box -- Augustana almost never passed the ball. Reade used his wing-T offense to wear down opponents with bulldozer linemen and hard-running ballcarriers (always at least three good ones on the field at any time) at 4-to-8-yards a tote. You couldn't get them off the field, because you couldn't come up with three straight plays in which you tackled them three yards or less upfield from the line of scrimmage. And yet they didn't necessarily reel off huge chunks of yardage in one play, at least not all at first. That's where the "wear you down" part comes in. So they didn't score the gaudy numbers NCC does today, and the scores look like the games were closer ... but, honestly, they really weren't. Add in Augie defenses that featured the cream of the crop of what northern Illinois and eastern Iowa had to offer once the scholarship schools had had their pick, and it was clear that if you were down by two touchdowns to Augie by the third quarter in the heyday of Reade's wing-T, you were already out of the game.

Like the current situation with NCC, Augustana in that era was playing for November already once summer camp began.

The two national-power dynasties had different styles, but they had something in common: mastery of the common footprint of CCIW football, the Chicagoland suburbs. Augustana, of course, also had the farming-community schools of northern Illinois and eastern Iowa to draw upon (this was before someone in the Augustana administration discovered that Colorado was more than just another one of those big rectangles located somewhere on the other side of the river). But it was almost as though they had first dibs on CCIW-level Chicagoland kids as well, just as North Central currently does.

Quote from: UWO Titan 78 on October 07, 2025, 05:42:44 PMHow does the league close the gap on NCC?

It doesn't. It can't. Most schools aren't set up to push a football program through the roof that way, so the league isn't going to catch up en masse with North Central. That's why I said that any comparison to the WIAC, where that more or less happened with regard to the Warhawks, is irrelevant.

But one or two can. That's how it happened when the Reade juggernaut in Rock Island suddenly stopped running over the rest of the league at will. Two programs caught up with Augustana all of a sudden: Millikin under Carl Poelker, which began playing Augustana close and would continue playing Augustana close for the next several seasons, and Carroll under Merle Masonholder, which went Millikin one better and beat the Rock Island juggernaut on October 8, 1988 and thereby set the league on its ear. Carroll finished in a tie for first with Augustana that season, although Augie went on to the playoffs and Carroll didn't (Reade's boys had won their non-conference game; the Pioneers had lost theirs).

Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall. Carroll couldn't sustain its success beyond that magical season and was back in the middle of the pack by the time the Pioneers decamped for the MWC following the 1991 season, but Millikin could and did continue to go toe-to-toe with Augustana in terms of recruiting and developing top-notch teams, as Poelker's Big Blue went undefeated and won the league in '89 (smashing Augie, by the way, 33-8) and sharing the title with Reade's Augie team the next season. While Reade would continue to have success right up until his retirement following the '94 season, with co-championships in '90 and '94 and outright titles in '91 and '93, the tail end of his career was spent coaching a very good program that was no longer head and shoulders above its peers; in fact, the wing-T began to look very much like a dinosaur as the rest of the league began adopting pro sets and favoring the passing game, and Chicagoland kids saw that and wanted to be a part of today-football rather than yesterday-football. In the wake of the Carroll/Millikin breakthrough came another hungry competitor for Chicagoland football players, Illinois Wesleyan, as well as an emerging Wheaton program that marched to the beat of its own drummer as far as recruiting was concerned and thus didn't have to worry about competing against Augustana for football players at all.

Winning the recruiting wars in the Chicago suburbs isn't the whole ball of wax, of course. If Wheaton could manage to parlay its prospect-lead sources across the nation well enough, Wheaton could be the giant-killer. It's also possible that a team with a more conventional recruiting methodology could engineer a dominant couple, three recruiting classes focused heavily upon southern- and southwestern-state players and thus bypass the 'burbs in terms of creating a team core. But in order to make North Central just another annual competitor rather than the team that gets put at the top of every preseason poll ballot in ink rather than pencil, it'll likely take some coach and his staff cracking the Chicagoland code to do it.

I don't know when it will happen, and I don't know which school or schools it will be, but someone will finally put together a team that will break the stranglehold and go toe-to-toe with NCC on the field and, more importantly, divert at least part of the stream of local talent away from Naperville. Wouldn't surprise me if, like the late '80s, it'll be two teams rather than one, one that's competitive and one that actually does the breaking-through part. Nobody stays king of the hill forever, you know. This is football, not cross-country.

Quote from: USee on October 05, 2025, 09:27:05 AMSecond, I wasn't wrong. This is a Wheaton team that can beat almost any team outside of the top 2-3. That's just how good North Central is.

We have to acknowledge the fact that, for the second time in CCIW football history, we are in a period in which the reigning dominant program is so far beyond the rest of the league that its CCIW schedule is really nothing more than incidental. It's basically prep work for the playoffs.