It’s a pretty heady day today for those of us who are alums of the Harvard of the Midwest, Northern Illinois University. For, you see, the mighty fighting Huskies of NIU have crashed the BCS party in the first week of the poll. Stuck right there between number nine Washington State and number 11 Nebraska is the 10th ranked football power house that is Northern Illinois.

As our buddy Shooter from “Hoosiers” might say, “No school this small has ever played for the (national) championship!”

That’d be a lie of course, because with more than 25,000 students and 18,000 undergrads, NIU is hardly a “small” school.

They’ve done it the hard way. When I was in attendance from 1991-1995, NIU had decent if not good teams. We even had a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate in 1994 named LeShon Johnson. Johnson ran for almost 2,000 yards in 1993 and my girlfriend drove out to Iowa City to visit her friend and take in the NIU-Iowa football game that year. She wore her NIU sweatshirt (actually it was mine, which she stole and I think still has–bitch) to the game and was the source of much Iowa student section mocking. Until LeShon hung 306 yards and three TDs on the Hawkeyes in a near upset.

Football excellence is not exactly new to NIU. In 1989 NIU was 9-2 and the only nine win team in the nation to not get invited to a bowl game. The reason? They’d left the Mid American Conference a few years before, in an effort to become a Division I-A independent power. That sounds funny now, and it was ludicrous then, but at the time they made the decision Notre Dame, Miami, Penn State and Florida State were all independents, too. NIU thought if they went independent, had a few strong years, that maybe when the Big Ten expanded they’d take in a school like Penn State or Missouri and maybe bring along Northern to be the twelfth team. I mean, no conference can have eleven teams in it, right?

In 1983 the Huskies were 10-2 and went to the now defunct California Bowl. The head coach was Bill Mallory (who had gotten in some trouble at Colorado and hid out at NIU for a few years) and his defensive coordinator was a guy named Joe Novak. Mallory and his staff took off for Indiana the next year and guess who came to DeKalb to inherit the 10 win Huskies? Was it Jerry Pettibone?

Not so fast, my friend.

It was none other than Lee Corso. Corso went 4-6-1 that season and then was off to the USFL. Pettibone replaced him and had some good teams, including that 1989 team before heading to Oregon State and setting his coaching career on fire.

Charlie Sadler came to DeKalb from Barry Switzer’s staff at Oklahoma in 1991. Charlie was a world class dope. He started recruiting the fertile football recruiting ground of Canada. Canada! He ignored the Chicago suburbs and tried to get Chicago Public League kids instead. Brilliant.

In 1993, NIU finally admitted that independence was not all it was cracked up to be and they joined…the Big West! Well, of course they did. Nothing says rivalry game like NIU-Pacific does it?

Sadler was shown the door the year I left, and Joe Novak came into town. NIU had begged their way back into the MAC starting in 1997, so they had to be an independent in 1996 again. They went 1-10. Then in 1997 they went 0-11. That’s right, in his first two seasons in DeKalb, Novak was 1-21. It got better. Sort of, in 1998 NIU was a whopping 2-9. Three seasons, three wins. Nobody keeps their job with three wins in three years, right?

Joe did.

And for good reason. In 1999 the Huskies were 5-6 overall, but had a winning record in the MAC at 5-3. In 2000 they had a winning record overall. In 2001 they were MAC West co-champs. In 2002 they beat Wake Forest in overtime, lost to Wisconsin 24-21 on a terrible pass interference call and were less than :30 seconds from the MAC title game. And now, in 2003 they’re 7-0, ranked 12th in the land and 10th in the BCS.

And now they’re dealing with the problems of success. When I was a student there, all we heard was that a higher percentage of our student fees went to the athletic department than any other school in the state. In exchange, we got to go to all sporting events for free. That’s still the case, only now that they’re regularly filling the 30,000 seat stadium, students have to wait in line and use their student ID’s to get a ticket to the game. That may not sound like much, but we used to have a few beers, stumble over for a little bit of the game, leave, go have a few more beers and then stumble back to the game. You can’t do that anymore. We also used to throw marshmallows at each other and the cheerleaders and you can’t do that anymore either. You can’t even tear the goalposts down, march them down Annie Glidden Road and throw them in the lagoon either. But you can still go to Lukulo’s and eat a pound of beer nuggets whenever you want. Get the combo with marinara and cheese dipping sauces, though. And you can still get a burrito as big as your head at 3 a.m. So some things are still sacred.

Did you know that Michigan “invented” homecoming in 1897, but that NIU started ours in 1903, making this year not only the 100th Homecoming in school history (we won last week, too) but it’s the second longest running Homecoming celebration in the world?

Did you know that the guy who wrote the NIU Huskie fight song also wrote Hail to the Victors for Michigan and that in an annual ranking of best fight songs, NIU’s regularly finishes in the top five in the nation?

The most famous alums from NIU are, of course, Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson), three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen, former NIU football player and star of ABC’s The Practice Steve Harris, curmudgeon radio host Terry Boers and hilarious, world reknown sports columnist Andy Dolan? Didn’t know that either? Well, you do now.

This might very well be the peak for NIU football right now. They have to go to 23rd ranked Bowling Green on Saturday (4 p.m., espn2) and a loss there not only knocks them out of the top 15, and the BCS poll, but might even keep them out of the MAC title game and a bowl game.

If they win, they face the possibility of winning the MAC, going to a bowl and losing Novak to a bigger program.

Personally, I don’t see that. He’s a great guy and obviously a good coach, but what Division I program is going to fire up their alumns by bringing in a 58 year old man with a 35-50 career record?

But then, Kentucky was dumb enough to hire Rich Brooks, so who knows?

What we do know is that the man’s done a great job, and the football facility is nearly unrecognizable from the one I used to live behind, and that we used to break into to play catch on the AstroTurf.

Who knows, if they throw me some free tickets, maybe the fifth most famous alum will show up for a game and throw marshmallows at somebody, too?

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The Boston Celtics traded All-Star forward Antoine Walker to Dallas yesterday for a package that includes 7’0 underachiever Raef LaFrentz and swingman Jiri Welsch. It also includes injured forward Chris Mills. Well, it gets better all the time, doesn’t it?

Is Danny Ainge insane? Perhaps. The Celtics were never going to win a championship with Walker and Paul Pierce and nothing else, so trading Walker is no shock. But for LaFrentz? Were they thin at skinny, lefthanded, soft guy? No, they already have Walter McCarty!

In fact, you can argue that the second best player in the trade was Tony Delk and he’s in Dallas now. When Tony Delk is the second best player in any trade…it’s a bad trade.

Sure, LaFrentz will likely put up decent numbers in the Eastern Conference. If you or I were 6’10 or taller we’d put up good numbers in the East. It’s what makes Eddy Curry such a potential force for the Bulls. But you have to think that somewhere, somebody would have offered more than Brad Lohaus, Jr. for LaFrentz. Is Matt Bullard still around?

How about Les Jepsen?

Jim Rowinski?

Steve Scheffler?

Anybody seen Marc Iavaroni lately?

—

In other news, we’re going to have a fantasy NBA league again this year. Only, even better news, it’s through Yahoo! so it’s free! You have to love that.

If you want to play, follow this link to the Yahoo! NBA home page our league is:

Desipio Basketball League
Yahoo id# 124445 (originally I had the wrong number–forgot a four, if you tried and failed, try again.)
And, the password you need to join is- yikes

Since we’re so close to the season I didn’t have time in my schedule to do a live draft. So you’ll be asked to rank your players and Yahoo! will run the draft for us. The deadline to sign up and rank your players is the end of business on Friday (5 p.m. CDT). Then I’ll give Yahoo! the go ahead to run our draft and we’ll have our teams in plenty of time to set our lineups for the open of the NBA season.

—

Dick Jauron can’t decide which loser quarterback to start.

Charles Tillman is tired of getting picked on by the refs. Honestly, if they want to see real pass interference, they should just watch RW McQuarters, he’ll show them.

David Huh is buying the company line about Bears “hidden gems.” Huh was bad enough when he was covering the Irish, I don’t need his crap about my favorite NFL team. Can’t he go to Green Bay or some other irrelevant place?

Jamal Crawford thinks that a point guard should score all the points. Hey, why not?

Tyson Chandler has “facet syndrome”, huh? Is that when one facet of your game, like making a jumper, goes away?

Bill Jauss poo poos NIU’s chances of getting to a BCS game. I’ll marry Julie Bowen before NIU plays in a New Year’s Day bowl game.

I do!

One of these things is not like the others.

Groucho wants the Bulls to trade for Michael Finley…again…even though Finley makes way too much money and is signed for too many years.

The Irish are looking to get back to basics. Hey, whatever it takes to get to 3-4. Woof.

David Stern says that unless Kobe is found guilty of rape he faces no penalty from the NBA. Hey, if they suspended every player who bent a 19-year old blonde over a hotel desk chair and yelled, “I loooove Vail, Colorado” half the teams wouldn’t be able to field teams on opening night. Right?

Bill Simmons is still mad about Game Seven. Hey, I’m still pissed about Games Six and Seven but you don’t hear me whining about it anymore.

David Aldrige can’t believe how bad the Celts got hosed in the Antoine Walker deal.

Could Donn Nelson, Jr. sound more white than when he ways, “I think at the end of games you’ll see some combination of the Big Three and Antoine squared,”? Shudder.

What would you do if you were locked in a room with Chad “The Shaved Possum” Ford and Tim Floyd. I’d start by trying to kill Tim Floyd by hitting him repeatedly with Chad Ford.

Marty Burns’ mullet draws up a pretty little table chart thingy to compare Antoine and Raef.

I can do it like this:
Antoine=pretty good
Raef=sucks big time

J. Lo is going to do her own version of The View. I can’t wait to not watch this. Ever.

Katie Couric is getting criticized for interviewing Elizabeth Smart. Uh, isn’t that kind of…her job?

Hey, a movie on the Reagans. Who’s gonna play Ron, Jr.? Liza Minelli?

Jessica Biel insists she’s not a good girl gone bad. Maybe she was never a good girl?

Clark Griswold?

You have to admire the French justice system. Or perhaps, not.

The world’s greatest newspaper with the story of a suicide bomber who went a little senile and blew up his own terror cell.