FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Cardinal773]

I absolutely love watching Sullivan and Ohle and co. "wreck house" on the d-line, but my favorite player right now has to be Roby.  He's our Roy Kent.  He's here.  He's there.  He's every f-ing where.

[Jbothe]

10/25 WashU @ Wheaton for second place. To me Wheaton looks better.

If WashU loses to Wheaton I'm not sure they are automatic for 3rd place.
They play Augie @Augie last game of the season. It's possible that game could be for 3rd place.

Interesting to see how these games play out first. Wesleyan looks to me like next in line after WashU.

Wesleyan/Augie
Augie/Carroll
Carroll/Wesleyan.

[CarollFan]

10/25 WashU @ Wheaton for second place. To me Wheaton looks better.

If WashU loses to Wheaton I'm not sure they are automatic for 3rd place.
They play Augie @Augie last game of the season. It's possible that game could be for 3rd place.

Interesting to see how these games play out first. Wesleyan looks to me like next in line after WashU.

Wesleyan/Augie
Augie/Carroll
Carroll/Wesleyan.

Those are key games. I would add NPU/Carroll,  NPU/IWU.
One advantage Augie has for better overall record is they won their nonconference game. Both Carroll and IWU lost their nonconference game. Also Carroll and IWU already lost to WashU.

IWU is 2-2. They still have to play Wheaton and NCC. Let's assume those are losses.
That means to end up 6-4 they have to beat Millikin, NPU, Carroll and Augie.

Augie is 3-1. Augie plays WashU in the last game. Before that they have NCC, assume a loss. They also have Elmhurst, Carroll, IWU, Carthage.

Augie looks to me to be in better position. I'm not saying they're necessarily the better team.

Last year after WashU in 3rd, we had 3 teams at 5-5.

[CarollFan]

Logan's predictions

https://hansenratings.github.io/2025%20Week%206.html

Today on ATN Logan said it's tough for 8-2 teams to make playoffs except some WIAC teams and Wheaton who will still be almost guaranteed locks at 8-2.
One reason it's tough is over 90% of 9-1 teams who don't get AQ get in the playoffs.

[USee]

I am not sure what any of this means but I was very surprised by how well North Central dominated Wheaton at the LOS. I was expecting a mismatch, but not as bad as it played out. Particularly considering how well Wheaton competed at the LOS vs Mt Union and how effective (relatively) WashU was on the LOS vs NCC.

I watched all these games but here is some stats to highlight my point:

NCC v Wheaton
Wheaton total offense: 148 yds
Wheaton rush yds: -2 (-0.1 ypc)
NCC sacks: 6

NCC total offense: 451 yds
NCC rush yds: 279 (5.9 ypc)
Wheaton sacks: 0

NCC vs WashU:
WashU total offense: 297 yds
WashU rush yds: 137 (3.6 ypc)

NCC total offense: 456
NCC rush yds: 237 (7 ypc)

Wheaton v UMU:
Wheaton total offense: 383 yds
Wheaton rush yds: 110 (5 ypc)

Mt Union total offense: 462 yds
Mt Union rush yds: 155 (4 ypc)

Again, I am not sure what this all means. It could be just early season variance, it could mean NCC is (again) way above the pack, it could mean WashU is a lot better than they have been (which is trouble for the Thunder). I think the strongest observations is that NCC's rush defense is elite. They held UWO to 50 yds rushing (UWO has 150 yd average otherwise), and WashU is very good at running the ball. In addition to the NCC yds they had 168yds rushing vs Carroll and 421 yds Saturday vs IWU.

In terms of NCC's rushing attack, they will face better DLine's than they have so far once in the playoffs, but to date they aren't really slowing down much on the production of the rushing attack. 6.6 yds per rush (vs 7.1 last year).

[CarollFan]

WashU has put up over 40 points in all the games except NCC. They have dual threat QB, multiple RB's and WR's that can make plays. Their offense is good.

Their D though has not look dominate.
They gave up 29 points to Carroll and 391 total yards.
They gave up 40 points (1 TD KO return) to IWU and 418 total yards.
IWU was in that game until the last play. Actually had a chance to get the ball back if not for a penalty.
Final score 42-40 and IWU missed 2 xtra points.

[CarollFan]

https://cciw.org/news/2025/10/6/washu-north-central-highlight-cciw-football-weekly-awards.aspx

[Jbothe]

It sounds like WashU moved some players from defense to offense during the off season. That wouid help explain the strengths of this years team.

[GusD]

WashU @ Wheaton on 10/25 for 2nd place in the CCIW this year?

[CarollFan]

WashU @ Wheaton on 10/25 for 2nd place in the CCIW this year?

Yes, they play for second place. It's mentioned in previous message. Is that the question or you picking someone else?

[NCC2010]

I am not sure what any of this means but I was very surprised by how well North Central dominated Wheaton at the LOS. I was expecting a mismatch, but not as bad as it played out. Particularly considering how well Wheaton competed at the LOS vs Mt Union and how effective (relatively) WashU was on the LOS vs NCC.

I watched all these games but here is some stats to highlight my point:

NCC v Wheaton
Wheaton total offense: 148 yds
Wheaton rush yds: -2 (-0.1 ypc)
NCC sacks: 6

NCC total offense: 451 yds
NCC rush yds: 279 (5.9 ypc)
Wheaton sacks: 0

NCC vs WashU:
WashU total offense: 297 yds
WashU rush yds: 137 (3.6 ypc)

NCC total offense: 456
NCC rush yds: 237 (7 ypc)

Wheaton v UMU:
Wheaton total offense: 383 yds
Wheaton rush yds: 110 (5 ypc)

Mt Union total offense: 462 yds
Mt Union rush yds: 155 (4 ypc)

Again, I am not sure what this all means. It could be just early season variance, it could mean NCC is (again) way above the pack, it could mean WashU is a lot better than they have been (which is trouble for the Thunder). I think the strongest observations is that NCC's rush defense is elite. They held UWO to 50 yds rushing (UWO has 150 yd average otherwise), and WashU is very good at running the ball. In addition to the NCC yds they had 168yds rushing vs Carroll and 421 yds Saturday vs IWU.

In terms of NCC's rushing attack, they will face better DLine's than they have so far once in the playoffs, but to date they aren't really slowing down much on the production of the rushing attack. 6.6 yds per rush (vs 7.1 last year).

Can't take for granted how much the atmosphere was a factor in Saturday's game compared to being on the road at WashU. Not only was that the most people I've seen at an NCC game, it was by far the most football alumni on campus as well. With Jeff Thorne getting inducted into the Hall of Fame, plus his current health situation, it had a much bigger meaning and focus for the program. Not taking anything away from WashU, but NCC, like most teams, plays better at home and had those other added motivations.

The offensive line continues to improve, and Coach Spencer mentioned after the game that they are still figuring out what they're best at as far as which schemes and certain plays the guys block well on. Whereas in the previous four years, Pryor and Maples were locked into the lineup—with three of those years having Jarod Thornton in as well—so there wasn't much tweaking needed. The biggest change to the running game from Week 1 to now is more designed QB runs with Wilson, and McNeal is now getting the majority of the workload (he has double the carries of Allen each of the last two weeks).

As far as how WashU and Wheaton match up, I think Wheaton will be able to outscore them at the end of the day. While Wilson threw three INTs, there were guys open routinely, and I think Wheaton has the receivers and QB to take advantage.

Both Fred Ware and Makael Carter are really good playmakers for WashU, but I still give the edge in overall playmakers to Wheaton.

[CarollFan]

I may be late to this story. D3 school has 58 year old freshman.
Anybody have eligibility left?

[UWO Titan 78]

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?

[CarollFan]

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?

Good question. I'm interested to hear others perspectives.
I think each school has their own unique challenges. I too got involved thru a son playing at Carroll. At Carroll their roster is mostly from WI then IL then different states. When Carroll is recruiting in WI, they are not recruiting against NCC, they are recruiting against WIAC schools. You'll know better than me, they are bigger, tuition cheaper and good football programs. When Carroll dips into IL now they are competing with CCIW, Midwest, NACC. We are in the hotbed of D3 football. How many programs recruiting around here?
Some schools have created pipelines out West or different regions in U.S. where there are less D3 schools.

My kid started all 4 years at Carroll. What I noticed when he played NCC or Wheaton his freshman year is these other schools are loaded with seniors. The current Carroll coaching staff has done a good job with retention and now they have more seniors on their roster. If your a school constantly relying on freshman as starters, your not winning championships.

Some schools like Carroll and NPU have been able to move from bottom of league to middle of pack but just haven't been able to make that next step.

[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.