With 8 straight wins, NIU believes in Doeren
A rookie coach and a depleted defense left Northern Illinois with uncertain prospects entering the season.
Yet the Huskies barely missed a beat.
Entering the GoDaddy.com Bowl on Sunday against Arkansas State (10-2) in Mobile, Ala., , the Mid-American Conference champion Huskies (10-3) have won eight straight and are looking for back-to-back bowl wins.
“It's been a very fun season, a long season,” said coach Dave Doeren, the 40-year-old former Wisconsin defensive coordinator. “The team overcame a lot of things internally going through a lot of changes, a lot more than people than people on the outside understand.”
Doeren succeeded Jerry Kill, who had rebuilt the program and led the Huskies to 10 wins and a MAC title game appearance in 2010 along with three straight bowl berths. The popular Kill moved to Minnesota after the season and his successor was initially met with some skepticism.
“At first when Coach Doeren came in I thought, ‘Man this guy is real serious' and not real talkative, the exact opposite of Coach Kill,” senior quarterback Chandler Harnish said. “I was real close to Coach Kill ... and I wasn't real sure (about Doeren) at first.”
But the new coach quickly won over Harnish and the team. He also put together a respectable defense that is ranked just 87th in the country in total yards allowed (417.85 per game) but tends to hold up when needed.
“A lot of the pieces were in place on offense,” Doeren said. “None of the pieces were in place on defense and special teams. We had to find all that stuff.”
Harnish and the offense were unleashed under new coordinator Matt Canada. The Huskies ended 10th in the nation in average yards (481.77) and Harnish was eighth with 332.62 yards total offense per game.
Northern Illinois started 1-2 with losses at Kansas and then to Wisconsin at Soldier Field. The Huskies went 9-1 the rest of the way, including a 23-20 conference championship win over Ohio.
The Huskies joined the MAC in 1975, won a championship in 1983 and left after 1985 in a bid for national recognition as an independent.
Over the next 11 seasons, Northern Illinois had a mostly unsuccessful run against schools small and large, including majors like West Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Florida and Iowa State. Northern Illinois rejoined the MAC in 1997, snapped a 23-game losing streak in 1998 and went on to seven straight winning seasons.
This time the Huskies have firmly linked their fortunes to the MAC, which routinely schedules, is competitive with and sometimes beats larger BCS programs.
With a new indoor training facility promised and bright recruiting prospects, Doeren wants to step beyond that.
“I'd like to be the team that everyone wants to be and nobody wants to play,” Doeren said.