FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Gregory Sager]

Second, 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:

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.

(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.

How 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.