Mundelein's Santiago ready to play for national title

Traveling to Rome the one that wasn't built in a day might have been quicker.

No matter, Sean Santiago and his University of Sioux Falls football teammates safely arrived in Rome, Ga., Thursday, about half a day after they departed snowy, icy Sioux Falls (S.D.) Airport and landed in Atlanta.

Once on the ground, the team's charter bus got stuck in a 20-car pileup on a slick highway, Santiago said. The team eventually arrived at its hotel about five hours later.

“One bump in the road,” Santiago said. “But we got the end goal in mind.”

Go ahead, toss another winter storm at USF's unflappable football fellas. They don't fluster.

It's mid-December with a blanket of bad weather pestering the right half of the country. But travel problems surely won't faze Sioux Falls' Cougars, since nothing seemingly does. They play Carroll College in the NAIA national championship game Saturday (3:30 p.m., CBS television) at Barron Stadium in Rome, in a battle of 13-0 teams.

USF, which is seeking its third straight national title and fourth since 2006, owns the longest winning streak in college football at 42 games.

Santiago, a sophomore nose tackle who celebrated 8 wins in three varsity seasons for Mundelein, has never been on the losing end of a football game since he stepped foot on Sioux Falls' Bob Young Field in the fall of 2008.

“We have a saying, ‘Protect the Bob,' ” Santiago says of the field named after USF's former head coach and NAIA hall-of-famer, who still follows the team religiously. “We've never lost a game there since the field opened (in 2007).”

Sioux Falls doesn't lose anywhere.

“There's no possibility of losing,” Santiago says of the Cougars' mentality going into games.

That mind-set was “definitely a major change,” Santiago says, compared to his playing days at Mundelein. As a high school freshman in 2004, Santiago started Mundelein's first-round playoff game against undefeated Libertyville at left defensive tackle. The Mustangs and star Jake Gaebler nearly stunned Libertyville, which never struggled again en route to a 14-0 season and Class 7A state title.

But Mundelein followed by sandwiching a 2-7 season with a pair of 3-6 campaigns, and when the undersized Santiago was playing his senior year, major college programs weren't seeking him out. And schools such as Illinois State and Eastern Illinois were only offering him to walk on.

One day while he was at home after the football season, Santiago heeded the suggestion of his dad, Mike, and checked out the NAIA national championship game between Sioux Falls and Carroll, which won.

Within a few days, Santiago sent a tape to Sioux Falls. The coaches liked him, and he liked them back. Santiago was headed USF, a Christian liberal arts university in South Dakota.

Two years later, Santiago, a criminal justice major, feels at home in Sioux Falls. The 5-foot-10, 300-pounder has been slowed by injuries, including one to his shoulder that necessitated surgery, but is making an impact for a defense that has yielded just 109 points in 13 games this season.

He has 2 sacks and 4 tackles for loss. A sprained left ankle means he won't be starting Saturday, he says, but he figures to get his share of snaps. He suffered a right ankle sprain in the team's season opener, causing him to miss several games, before starting three straight games in the playoffs.

“It's been kind of a rough year so far,” Santiago says.

He was talking about solely his injuries. The winning part is fantastic for the former Mundelein Mustang all-conference player.

So what allows Sioux Falls to never falter on the football field? “Brotherhood” and “tradition,” Santiago says.

“It's a big thing here,” Santiago says of the Cougars' tradition of winning. “We've built that into how we work in the season and out of the season.”

Finally at the team hotel Thursday night, a travel-weary Santiago could relax.

“Oh, yeah, I'm tired,” he acknowledges with a laugh.

The journey has been well worth it.