Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
On Saturday, I went to the first-ever Chicago State University football game. But before I can talk about that event, or why it was even happening in the first place, I want to talk about geography.
Here’s a map of Chicago’s major neighborhoods:
Via Wikipedia Creative Commons
It’s a big city. It’s about 25 miles from the northern tip of Rodgers Park down to the bottom of Hegewisch, a journey that would usually take more than an hour by car and even longer by bus or train. Chicago is also a highly segregated city, even now, with each of those designated neighborhoods offering distinct architecture, demographics, culture, you name it.
There’s a saying among folks who cover or study the city: There is one map of Chicago. Whether you’re graphing educational attainment, violence, poverty, life expectancy or anything else, you’ll see a similar picture: The northern neighborhoods near the lakefront tend to be the wealthiest, while pockets along the west and southeast sides are among the poorest.
There are four universities with Division I athletic departments in Chicago. Loyola and DePaul operate in the downtown Loop area along the lake (in Rogers Park and Lincoln Park, respectively). A third, the University of Illinois-Chicago sits just west of the Loop. (The bulk of Chicago’s other well-known universities, from SAIC to Columbia College to Roosevelt, are also near the Loop.)
And despite what you might have heard from Northwestern’s public relations department, Evanston is not in Chicago. The fourth D-I school is Chicago State. Its campus, right off 95th Street, is in Roseland, near the very southern tip of the city. It’s far away from the other major universities, far away from the major newspaper offices, from Wrigleyville, from downtown and from most of the wealthiest neighborhoods in town.
This, in my humble opinion, is critical to understanding why Chicago State has decided to pursue football. No, it wasn’t to pursue big-money television contracts or lucrative postseason events. Yes, Chicago State expanded its athletic department as part of a schoolwide attempt to grow enrollment and improve student retention, just like many other smaller colleges across the country.
But it was also to expand the school’s reach and brand, to represent the city, to create a new entertainment option and cultural touchstone for the people in and around Chicago’s far South side. Yes, the bean counters care deeply about tuition discounting and travel budgets and making this program a sustainable enterprise. But “success” for Chicago State, as a school, isn’t just about beating Wagner or Long Island University or even making the FCS Playoffs one day.
It’s about making a dent in Chicago’s One Map.
The University of the Incarnate Word has launched a national search for its next director of athletics.
The University of the Incarnate Word is partnering with KC Smurthwaite and the Athletics Admin team to identify and evaluate qualified candidates for this important leadership position.
The Cardinals are proud members of the FCS Southland Conference and are seeking a mission-driven, student-athlete-centered leader who understands the important role athletics plays throughout the university and across the greater San Antonio community.
To learn more or apply, please visit UIWAD.com, or email here.
There’s another thing that’s important to remember before we talk about the actual football game. Chicago State football wasn’t built like other college football programs.
Last year, I flew to South Texas to watch another college football expansion team, UTRGV, play its first game. And UTRGV and Chicago State have some things in common. Each is a minority-serving institution sitting in a major population center often overlooked by the rest of its state. Both play football games in stadiums originally designed for soccer. Both were even (briefly) in the same athletic conference.
But UTRGV began laying the groundwork for funding a major college football program back in 2019, six years before its first game. It hired its head football coach in 2022 and started recruiting assistants and athletes multiple years in advance. Other institutions that recently started (or restarted) D-I football — like Charlotte, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, Lamar and Old Dominion — followed similar timelines.
Not Chicago State. After Saturday’s game, head coach Bobby Rome told us reporters he wasn’t sure anybody, at any level of college football, had built a team as quickly as Chicago State had. The university confirmed it was going to start a football team in February of this year. It hired Rome in April and announced the coaching staff in mid-June. The team played two days ago.
Now, those other college football teams didn’t have the advantage of the transfer portal or the ability to sign as many athletes in a single class that Chicago State did. But portal or no portal, the school went from not having a football field, coaching staff, uniforms or any players to playing a game in less than nine months. That is fast.
UTRGV played in front of a virtually sold-out crowd of more than 14,000 fans. It obliterated its opponent, a Sul Ross squad that had only recently reclassified to D-II, 66-0.
That is not what happened to Chicago State.
Before I finally get to what happened on the field, let me make this clear: Fans showed up. The “official attendance” figure for the game was 1,000, but I am quite confident more people than that were actually in the stadium. A few readers told me the game broadcast pegged the figure at closer to 3,000, and that feels more accurate to me. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson flipped the opening coin toss, there were fans tailgating outside and lining up at the gates before the stadium opened, and you could very much hear and feel the crowd. I know the players could.
Chicago State also started a marching band on the same ambitious schedule as its football team, and even though the Soul of Chicago was small in number, it sounded amazing. The students aren’t ready to challenge the Human Jukebox or anything, but I’m confident they’ll impress visiting fans for years to come. If you enjoy the great HBCU tradition of bands that know how to move, you won’t be disappointed in Chicago State’s.
“The support that we’re getting right now has been tremendous,” Rome said after the game. “We’ve been in here all the athletic games, those bleachers are empty. The support that we’re getting for football … we’re going to return the favor for all our athletic teams and our athletic department.”
I’ve seen out-of-town fans point to Chicago State’s terrible reported attendance for men’s basketball games and the struggles across the entire athletic department as proof that there couldn’t be enough fan support to justify launching a football team. That certainly wasn’t what I saw Saturday.
I can understand why a fan watching the game online might draw a different conclusion, though, and that’s because of the stadium.
Chicago State does not have a football stadium. It barely has a practice facility (it’s playing on an old baseball field), and it’s still working on expanding other facility projects. While the school could build a temporary facility on campus (there is plenty of undeveloped real estate), or renovate one of the larger Chicago high school stadiums nearby, for now, the team is playing at SeatGeek Stadium, the former home of the Chicago Fire.
SeatGeek isn’t in Chicago. It’s in Bridgeview, roughly a 40 minute drive from CSU’s campus, assuming traffic isn’t too bad. Originally built for professional soccer, the venue seats roughly 20,000 people, way too many for an expansion FCS football program. Chicago State’s future Northeast Conference peers mostly play in stadiums with capacities between 2,500 and 5,000. Had the Cougars played at a venue like that, nobody would have said anything about attendance.
It’s not uncommon for college programs to rent their stadiums, but it can create some problems. Mike Ginocchio over at Fourth & Print got ahold of the rental agreement, which calls for Chicago State to pay $20,000, plus a cut of ticket revenue and control of concessions and parking. That might explain why tickets to the game were surprisingly expensive online.
It can also be challenging to figure out who is exactly responsible for what on game day. I heard players from both teams complaining about the quality of the playing surface, which looked pretty torn up after the game. The press box had no live stats, no in-stadium PA system (so I have no idea what anybody said on the broadcast), no physical credentials (just armbands) and little signage to communicate where to go or what to do during or after the game. It’s unclear if that was a first-game bug, a failure from SeatGeek or something else.
And then there was the actual game.
On paper, Roosevelt was not a very good college football team.
Sure, it returned the bulk of its offense from last season, and it plays in an exceptionally competitive D-II league, but the Lakers had only recently reclassified to D-II from the NAIA, and they went 2-8 last season, giving up more than 50 points in five of those eight losses.
This is the sort of game that an FCS football team, even one playing its first game ever, could expect to win. UTRGV smoking Sul Ross by 66 points was a bit of an outlier, but lots of teams win their first games. FIU beat Saint Peter’s. Georgia State beat Shorter. Old Dominion beat Chowan. Charlotte obliterated Campbell, 52-7. The list goes on.
Roosevelt won, 44-28, earning the program’s first win over a D-I football team, and only its second double-digit win since 2023. Even though many of the box score counting stats were similar between the two teams, I think it would be fair to say that Roosevelt comfortably controlled the game by the late second quarter.
Why? Well, for starters, Chicago State turned the ball over four times, including a 27-yard pick six halfway through the second quarter that stretched Roosevelt’s lead to 17. It’s difficult to win any football game with a minus-four turnover margin.
That didn’t surprise me too much. First game jitters happen to almost everybody, and the pressure for a completely new team playing for the first time ever would create an environment tough for any competitor. But what surprised me was Chicago State’s inability to get off the field, which stemmed in part from the Cougars getting physically pushed around.
In the first five minutes of the UTRGV debut, you could tell it was going to absolutely smoke Sul Ross. UTRGV’s players looked bigger, stronger and faster at every level. That would make sense, since many of those players were D-I recruits and had been in D-I weight rooms and nutrition programs. That was never the case for Chicago State, and even though Rome pointed to his offensive and defensive lines as where the program “spent the most money,” they struggled the entire game.
If you can’t protect long enough for downfield passing to develop, you force your quarterback to constantly throw screens or take unnecessary risks down the field. It’s how you end up with multiple interceptions.
There are talented football players on Chicago State. Some came from D-I programs, others from JUCO, NAIA or straight from high school. But I worry that if the team wasn’t able to physically compete against an experienced but athletically limited (at least compared to good FCS teams) Roosevelt program, then things could get out of hand against opponents like UT-Martin or Tarleton State.
Thousands of fans drove out to the ’burbs on Chicago State’s opening day, when the weather was perfect and the opponent was local. Will that same energy continue into late October, when the Cougars face NAIA opponents, perhaps after getting plastered by more established FCS teams? If the lights were too bright and the adversity too strong after Week 1, can the team really get ready for the gauntlet ahead?
Waypoint is helping universities earn money from the travel spend of their fans and alumni with a free white label travel portal. Waypoint will launch and manage the site, at no cost to the schools, in a matter of weeks.
Schools like BYU, West Virginia and Georgia Southern are using Waypoint to drive new revenue for their athletic department.
There’s a saying my business partner Dennis likes to remind me, from former LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” It’s a good reminder that in the fast-moving world of business, you can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Sometimes you just need to build quickly and fix the problems as they come up, rather than wait until the situation is perfect.
I’m not sure if that mindset is a perfect analogy for college athletics, but I understand the principle. Chicago State, for a variety of reasons, didn’t have the luxury of building slowly and methodically. It had to move fast, which meant uncommon roster construction mechanics, less-than-ideal stadium situations and a culture that is still developing.
If the program continues to mature and grow, none of that stuff will matter. It can clean up game-day operations. Players can gain a greater mastery of the playbook. Recruiting can improve. Just because the Cougars lost to a D-II team doesn’t mean that they won’t win a game this season or won’t be better in the future.
It just needs to continue to grow. After the game, when asked how he felt, even though we’d all heard him ripping into the team in the locker room just a few minutes earlier, Rome smiled and said he felt “relief.” I completely believe him.
The product shipped. Chicago State football exists. Now Rome, his players, his staff and the athletic department can work on the next steps. If everybody sticks together, there’s a lot of room to grow.
The desire is there. The need is there. There’s plenty of room on that map for a vibrant and successful FCS football team.
They just need to execute.
