North Central Cardinals

We had the matchup this weekend.

Number two Wheaton College Thunder out of Wheaton, Illinois, travels to Naperville, Illinois, to take on the number one North Central Cardinals in the matchup that everybody was looking forward t- to in Division III.

Wheaton s- scored on a safety on a bad snap on a punt, uh, just 1:50 into the game, 2-0 lead for Wheaton.

It stayed that way all the way until the end of the third quarter.

[laughs] North Central did get a field goal with three minutes left in the quarter to take a 3-2 lead going into the fourth.

[laughs]

Oh my God.

Wheaton tied it back up with a touchdown, two-point conversion, 10-10.

What do we got here, bud?

The CCIW is a nine-team conference featuring Milliken, North Park, Augustan, Illinois, North Central Illinois, Carroll, Illinois, Wesleyan, Carthage, Wheaton, Illinois, and Elmhurst.

Milliken won the auto bid in 2026 out of the NPI number 22 slot, and the next closest team was in the low 100s in terms of NPI.

So it's a clean sweep.

expected.

No, it jumped out at me too.

Now from there, there was a big drop to North Park all the way down at 130, Augustana at 138, and North Central at 150.

So unlike some of the powerhouse conferences we talked about in Region 6 last week, this wasn't a conference loaded with nationally ranked teams.

[whistle blows] But we had a, uh, a classic.

If you haven't known this already, we're just gonna say it at the top, number two Wheaton defeated number one North Central on Saturday night, and there was a, uh, little trophy involved called the Little Brass Bell.

Greg, literally as I was writing this intro on the plane on Sunday morning, a passenger gets my attention and just says, you know, kind of blurting out, no preamble, "Wasn't that an awesome game last night?" I'm not, like, wearing DIII football garb or anything on the plane.

And her nephew goes to Wheaton, and this woman was on my flight back to Minneapolis at 5:50 in the morning.

Fantastic crowd, beautiful night.

This game, though, was just odd from the get-go.

We, we talked about the youth up front for North Central on the offensive line.

This is a place where they've had four All-Americans at time during this run of Stagg Bowls, but also a long snapper.

They look like the real deal.

I know that there have been some voters now that are putting them number one over North Central.

Time will tell if they get that rematch in January.

We'll have to wait and see on that.

Illinois Wesleyan is quietly 3-0.

They beat Augustana and off to a strong start there.

And then speaking of starts, a couple of people I think were kind of wondering what was going on with North Central because they fell behind 7-0 to North Park.

And they only led 14 to 10 with about eight minutes left in the second quarter.