As many of you may recall, I wrote this crazed fever dream of a piece about the Horizon League possibly being an option for Toledo should the school accept an invitation to the Mountain West and it subsequently be kicked out of the MAC.
However, Toledo wasn’t the only MAC school that the Mountain West was eying. Northern Illinois was also kicked around as a potential suitor for the MWC, and per Brett McMurphy, things are getting a bit more serious. And like Toledo, should NIU accept an invitation to play football, would likely need to find a new conference home, as the MAC doesn’t generally dig schools taking their football teams and leaving.
So, here we are, staring at Northern Illinois and a potential return to the Horizon League. Technically, you could consider this an arrival, as NIU was part of the so-called “Mid-Con 6,” a group of Mid-Continent Conference (Now the Summit League) that collectively bailed to what was then the Midwestern Collegiate Conference, starting in the 1994-95 season.
At the time, Northern Illinois’ football team was playing, of all places, in the Big West. Think Chicago State in the WAC or, most recently, the NEC, except with just one team. NIU’s time in the MCC was short, and it wasn’t long before the MAC came courting with an invitation for all its teams. And by 1997, Northern Illinois was gone.
From a geographical standpoint, you won’t get a better match for the Horizon League than NIU. At the same time, Northern Illinois may also have suitors in the Missouri Valley Conference (where its will have natural rivals in UIC, Illinois State and Valpo) and the Ohio Valley Conference, which has been collecting directional Illinois schools (Western, Eastern and SIU-Edwardsville) recently.
Taking all that into account, would the HL take a look at bringing an old MCC school into the mix?
Probably.
However, the geography aside (we’ll leave out how the conference could possibly integrate Northern Illinois into its Major Cities push for now), the question must center around how competitive NIU’s teams, specifically men’s and women’s basketball, would be in the Horizon League.
While Toledo’s track record in this area is rather impressive, Northern Illinois’ is significantly less so. for men’s basketball, the days of TJ Lux, who led the Huskies to an NCAA Tournament appearance in 1996, are long gone. And going into the third season of Rashon Burno area, the coach who replaced now-Detroit Mercy coach Mark Montgomery, NIU has only amassed a single D1 win. And, as of this publication, the Huskies are sporting a dismal NET ranking of 352, which would put them…in last place in the HL.
The women’s basketball team, on the other hand, fare better than the men under the tutelage of Lisa Carlsen. That includes this current campaign, in which NIU has already dispatched of one Horizon League team, Milwaukee, during its non-conference slate. Since 2015, the Huskies have, for the most part, been a middle-of-the-pack team in the MAC, and one can surmise that would likely carry over into the HL.
But it’s hard to deny the anchor the NIU men’s basketball team has been on the MAC in recent years, and there’s no evidence that it wouldn’t be in the Horizon League as well. It’s a reminder of then-IUPUI, which was rushed into the HL to replace Valpo and started in the middle of the pack before hitting bottom in recent years.
That said, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that the Horizon League could make a move to bring Northern Illinois into the conference mix, as it would bring the total number of teams back to 12. And perhaps there might be a little nostalgia at play, although I think the only people who remember that NIU was even in this conference before are me and Jeff Nordgaard.
We’ll find out soon enough it Northern Illinois makes a return or the school seeks life elsewhere.
