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Northern Illinois running back Garrett Wolfe, left, and tackle Doug Free. “In the MAC, we don’t worry about our knees,” Wolfe said.
Northern Illinois Is Moving From Down Home to the Big Time
By LEE JENKINS
Published: August 30, 2006
At Northern Illinois, there are cornstalks taller than the tailback, barns bigger than the football office, and games of enormous consequence played on Tuesdays.
The MAC is made up of 13 universities, most of them spread across the heartland, in towns like Ypsilanti, Mich.; Oxford, Ohio; and Muncie, Ind. Despite fertile soil, the teams are traditionally undersized and underfinanced. They play in whatever time slot ESPN gives them, even if it means rescheduling homecoming.
And yet, when a major upset happens early in the season, a MAC team is often the one pulling it — Toledo over Penn State, Northern Illinois over Alabama, Bowling Green over Purdue, Miami of Ohio over North Carolina, all on the road and all in this century.
The MAC is to college football what the Missouri Valley Conference is to college basketball, and if the bowl season were traded for a 65-team N.C.A.A. tournament, Northern Illinois would be that pesky team seeded No. 12 that no one wants to play.
On Saturday, the Huskies will go to Ohio State with a tailback who is 5 feet 7 inches tall, a coach who once lost 23 consecutive games, and a group of tight ends who meet on a racquetball court. Sandbagging is part of their strategy.
“Those guys from the Big Ten are out there thinking about the N.F.L. and worrying about their knees,” said Garrett Wolfe, the Northern Illinois tailback who measures 5-7, 177 pounds. “In the MAC, we don’t worry about our knees.”
By throwing himself at defensive linemen who are twice his weight, Wolfe has become a MAC ambassador and a trendy Heisman Trophy candidate. But he still remembers when Northern Illinois coaches sat in his living room in Chicago, and he thought, “No way will I ever go there.”
The MAC is full of players who convinced themselves they were headed to Michigan or Wisconsin, only to learn that their 40 times were a couple of ticks slow or their test scores a few points off. They missed out on scholarships supposedly earmarked for them, and they are still a little salty about it.
The first time Wolfe drove to DeKalb, Ill., in daylight, he cried. All those cornfields, stretched across the plains, seemed to be taunting him.
“Everybody in the MAC is the same,” Wolfe said during a recent interview on campus. “All the players, all the schools — we have an enormous chip on our shoulder.”
The chip still hangs on the right arm of Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers’ quarterback who went to Miami of Ohio. It covers Randy Moss, the Raiders’ receiver who went to Marshall. It can even be spotted sometimes on Joe Novak.
Novak’s office smells of stale coffee. The carpet is torn and the paint is peeling. When he was hired as the Northern Illinois head coach in 1995, Novak remembers waking up from a dream: The Huskies were beating a ranked opponent on national television and their stadium was sold out.
Sweet dreams aside, Novak lost 31 of 32 games from the middle of his first season to the middle of his fourth. Recruits would call and ask if Northern Illinois was really in Division I. Reporters would call and ask Novak how he managed to keep his job. He made only one request in return: “Call me back when we win.”
During those long winters, Novak made players work out in the snow. He made them run the stadium steps, carrying teammates in their arms. When the Huskies finally won a game in 1998, snapping a two-year losing streak, 15,102 people were in the stands. Among them was a high school tailback from Indiana named Thomas Hammock.
“That was enough for me,” Hammock said. “I was sold.”
While other MAC teams moved to the pass-happy spread offense, Northern Illinois maintained its smash-mouth Midwestern roots, cultivating a string of 1,000-yard rushers. First came Hammock (now the Huskies’ running backs coach), then Michael Turner (known as the Burner, he is now with the San Diego Chargers) and finally Wolfe.
They entered the mainstream in the fall of 1999, when two teams asked out of a Thursday night game on ESPN, and Rick Chryst asked in. Chryst had been MAC commissioner for only three months, but he yearned to see the conference on national television, and this was his chance.
When Toledo and Marshall filled in that Thursday night, the MAC had its first nationally televised regular-season game in 12 years, and ESPN had a flexible new broadcasting partner. This season, the MAC will play on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday, all to accommodate television.
“I don’t think we’ve crossed the line,” Chryst said. “But we can probably see the line.”
Novak, sounding every bit 61 years old, rails against any game on a school night. He bemoans the loss of tradition, class time and fan support. For one Wednesday night game last year, Novak swears there were only 8,000 people in a stadium that usually draws at least 30,000. “It feels a little like we’re prostituting our kids,” he said.
But then again, during a recent recruiting trip to Texas, Novak asked a high school quarterback from Houston why he would ever be interested in Northern Illinois. “Coach,” the quarterback said, “I saw you on TV six times last year.”
At the photo shoot for Playboy all-Americans this summer, at a posh resort in Phoenix, Wolfe could have easily been confused for a hotel bellman. Instead, Southern California’s Dwayne Jarrett rushed up to him and said, “I watch you all the time.”
The notion of a Northern Illinois football player appearing in Playboy magazine prompts giggles around DeKalb. It is the kind of place where an offensive lineman apologizes to anyone who may have overheard him curse during practice. The star receiver Britt Davis goes by Brittski and writes MOM on his wrist tape.
Wolfe is known for the custom greetings he leaves on his cellphone voice mail. Anyone who calls him in August hears this message: “It’s that time of year again. Unlucky me is in camp. Right now I’m close to the edge. So be careful what you leave on my voice mail because you might push me over.”
Northern Illinois, like the rest of the MAC, is on the brink that separates down home from big time. A $7 million athletic center will open at Husky Stadium next season, meaning the tight ends can finally move out of their racquetball court.
Novak is not used to any star treatment. He recently joked in a speech to the Kiwanis Club that he was planning to resign and start a music career. The next morning, he got a worried phone call from Jim Phillips, the Northern Illinois athletic director.
“I thought you should know,” Phillips said, “the student newspaper has two sources saying you’re resigning.”
Phillips, who came from Notre Dame, is more accustomed to such craziness. He grew up the youngest of 10 children in Chicago and believes he can sell Northern Illinois to his sports-saturated hometown. This season, the Huskies can be heard on the Chicago White Sox’ flagship radio station, and next season, they will play Iowa at Soldier Field.
First, however, Northern Illinois had to kick off the DeKalb Corn Festival, held at the end of every August to celebrate the harvest and the school year. Ten thousand ears of sweet corn are given away, and no hungry football player goes unfed.
“I actually think I’d like to live out here someday,” Wolfe said. “The corn is all right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/sports/ncaafootball/30mac.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin
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