Northern Illinois is Impossible
NIU found victory where defeat seemed certain, cementing its legacy as the MAC’s most dominant team of the decade.
Immediately after taking a knee to seal NIU’s 30–29 victory over Buffalo in the 2018 MAC Championship Game, Marcus Childers fell to two knees in tears, overcome with the type of emotion that keeps people coming back to this silly, wild and sometimes incredibly dumb sport. Childers played the best game of his Huskie career when it mattered the most, in a manner that, if you watched him play all season, feels like it shouldn’t have been possible.
Fitting. Everything NIU does is impossible.
The MAC is a chaotic place for most programs. That chaos is fueled by the coaching turnover that is painful for the schools that endure departure and cute to the folks who call this place “The Cradle of Coaches.” The biggest indicator of upcoming disappointment in this league is, largely, any success at all. The big, rich schools will come and steal dream coaches using their lucrative TV deal money at the first sign of progress, and that’s just the way things are.
NIU thrives in the chaos. The Huskies win consistently when the environment is better designed for them to fail, so of course they won another MAC title on Friday night when all signs deep into the game pointed to an imminent Buffalo victory. Of course they stepped up on defense. Of course Childers, a quarterback averaging barely over five yards per attempt on the season, completed 21 of 33 passes for 300 yards and four touchdowns against the MAC’s third best scoring defense. Of course they came back from 19 down to win. Of course they did it “the hard way.”
In the last decade the Huskies have lost two coaches to bigger jobs and had to regroup after losing a Jordan Lynch, a finalist for the Heisman Trophy, to graduation. Where so many others failed, the Huskies continued winning. Central Michigan, Kent State and Bowling Green have all played for or won a MAC championship in the last 10 years. All three of those programs are in the midst of their worst stretches of football in school history. NIU hasn’t stopped winning.
Since 2009, the combination of Jerry Kill, Dave Doeren and Rod Carey has won seven division titles and four MAC championships. No other team in the MAC has more than three division titles, and only Bowling Green manged to win multiple conference championships.
Its closest contemporaries are Toledo and Ohio, two schools on unprecedented runs of success of their own that can’t begin to sport any accomplishments that could reasonably be considered to be better than anything NIU has done. The Rockets and Bobcats have a combined four division titles and just one conference championship between them. That’s three fewer division titles and three fewer conference championships than NIU.
What NIU is doing as a whole is impossible. It competes in what is considered the better division in the MAC each season (by S&P+ ranking the West is, on average, about 12 spots better than the East since 2005) and still manages to slip up so infrequently that it feels as though it never did in the first place. At times on Friday night the climb to victory looked impossible to accomplish against a team that had been dominant all season long, but NIU proved it’s not ready to relinquish its throne as the MAC’s top program.
The Huskies capped off this season the way their fans expected them to. It wasn’t the team everyone wanted it to be throughout the entire season, but it was exactly what it had to be when the title was on the line. Childers won the offensive player of the game, closing out a season where he earned plenty of criticism for his inability to make this team into something bigger than it was. In the second half of Friday night’s game, Childers was the best player on the field and did not allow his team to lose. He wasn’t the quarterback everyone wanted him to be this season, but he was exactly what he needed to be when it counted.
There’s no way to know how much longer this run of dominance will last in DeKalb. Eventually everything comes to an end, but one thing became very clear on Friday night: If this does ever end, the Huskies are never going quietly.
