Northern Exposure: Inside Northern Illinois’s Bold Mountain West Football Gamble

DEKALB, Ill. — To hear those around Northern Illinois’s football program tell it, the clock striking midnight on July 1 and formally heralding the Huskies’ entry into the Mountain West was a bit of an anticlimax.

“We’re grateful to be in the Mountain West,” wide receiver DeAree Rogers said, donning a Mountain West logo sweatshirt and matching purple durag during this interview. “Bigger conference, better opponents. But July 1 rolled around, and we all went to sleep the same way. We all came to work the same way.”

During the last academic year, Northern Illinois surprised the college sports world by announcing its departure from the MAC—long thought of as a uniquely stable mid-major league. The Huskies will play football and women’s gymnastics in the Mountain West, wrestle in the Pac-12, and play all other sports (including basketball) in the Horizon League.

On paper, no FBS-to-FBS conference shift this offseason was weirder. DeKalb, Ill., is more than 4,000 miles from Honolulu, and more than 6,000 feet lower in elevation than Wyoming’s War Memorial Stadium. It is, however, the kind of move that can easily be sold as sensible in this era of college athletics—though whether the fans will buy is an open question.

“It really wasn’t about leaving the MAC as much as self-preservation and sustainability for us,” athletic director Sean Frazier said. “[We’re] trying to skate to where the puck is going to be, using a [Wayne] Gretzky term.”

In the recent past, what did Auburn, Florida, Michigan, USC and Washington’s football teams all have in common?

All—every single program—posted worse winning percentages than Northern Illinois’s 91–44 (.674) mark in the 2010s.

The decade before this one saw the Huskies, previously a decent program in the outer western reaches of the Chicago media market, make a quantum leap to mid-major royalty. In the period from 2010 to ‘14 specifically, Northern Illinois won 11 or more games every year. The Huskies reached the Orange Bowl in 2012 and came up just short of reaching another BCS bowl game in 2013. All of their three coaches in that span—Jerry Kill (Minnesota), Dave Doeren (NC State), and Rod Carey (Temple)—went on to jobs in more prominent conferences. One quarterback (Chandler Harnish) became an NFL draft pick; another (Jordan Lynch) finished in the top 10 of the Heisman voting twice.

From a Chicago-area visibility standpoint, Northern Illinois’s timing couldn’t have been better—Illinois, Northwestern and Notre Dame posted two combined 10-win seasons in the first half of the 2010s. Suddenly, the Huskies had a capital-B Brand to maintain—a concern that has only grown as the program has regressed a bit in recent years.

Once UCLA and USC jumped from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten for the 2024 season—thereby obliterating geographic considerations in college sports—Northern Illinois had its opening. The Huskies, in Frazier’s telling, could thread a delicate needle: trading daunting all-sport road trips to MAC foes Buffalo and Massachusetts for the more compact Horizon League, while defraying exorbitant Mountain West football travel costs with a more lucrative television deal.

“I was talking to a couple ADs and so forth right after the news about UCLA and USC,” Frazier said. “[One] said, ‘I think you need to get your ducks in order because I think what’s the status quo is not going to be the status quo.’”

While Northern Illinois is “scaling up,” the moves it’s making aren’t wholly unfamiliar to its fans. The Huskies played football in the Big West from 1993 to ‘95, putting them in conversation with future league foes like San José State and UNLV. They played basketball in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference (today’s Horizon League) from ‘95 to ‘97, making an NCAA tournament apiece in men’s and women’s basketball.

The problem: the Big West stint was a complete failure, with coach Charlie Sadler—an assistant on Oklahoma’s 1985 national title team—leading Northern Illinois to 11 total wins in three seasons.

“Because of that [Big West tenure], it was even more scrutiny to make sure … you saw the methodology behind the madness, right?” Frazier said. “Did they just throw a dart in the middle of the dark and say, ‘This was a good idea?’ Or did they go through a comprehensive process of review to make sure that we don’t put ourselves in a situation that we cannot support?”

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Adjusting to a new cultural milieu is challenge No. 1 for the Huskies in 2026. Rebounding from a 3–9 record a year ago is challenge No. 2.

Challenge No. 3: starting from scratch after the loss of their head coach.

On Feb. 18, the defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks hired Thomas Hammock—the architect of Northern Illinois’s signature moment of this decade, their 16–14 upset of the No. 5 Fighting Irish in ‘24—as their running backs coach. Into the void on an interim basis stepped Rob Harley, a former Ohio State defensive back born in nearby Elmhurst, Ill., who served as the Huskies’ defensive coordinator last season after coming over from Arkansas State in 2025.

“By Monday night [Feb. 16], it was like, O.K., this is what’s going down,” Harley said, recounting his replacing Hammock. “Tuesday morning-ish, this whole thing ended up kind of going into play. And Wednesday, I’m introduced to the team.”

Northern Illinois Huskies head coach Thomas Hammock watches his team warm up before a game against the Maryland Terrapins. — Thomas Hammock, who famously led Northern Illinois to a win over Notre Dame in 2024, departed late in the offseason for a position coaching job with the NFL’s Seahawks. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Harley—a descendant of Hall of Fame Buckeyes halfback Chic Harley, a three-time All-American and one of the best players of the World War I era—has traveled a unique path by college football coaching standards. After playing for Ohio State, he entered television and worked there for several years. Feeling more at home in coaching, he parlayed a gig at Division II Ohio Dominican into a graduate assistant job at Michigan State, where he won a Rose Bowl in 2013, and hasn’t looked back.

He is no stranger to conference shifts, having worked for Ohio Dominican in its inaugural D-II season, Florida International in its second Conference USA campaign, and Pittsburgh as it was finding its ACC footing.

For guidance, he leans on wisdom from a murderer’s row of mentors: ex-Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel, ex-Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio and current Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi.

“We are operating 2013 Michigan State. That is who we are right now,” Harley said. “That Rose Bowl year, how we operated, the way we trained … that’s who we are right now.”

“Bringing in Coach Harley, promoting him to head coach—that was probably the best thing we could have did. Didn’t lose a lot of guys when that happened,” Rogers said. “And Harley’s all about the team. He took time to meet one on one with each guy, and he really cares about us outside of football. So that’s probably the best thing that could happen.”

This slate of road trips will welcome Northern Illinois to its new home: Iowa, Arizona, Georgia State, Wyoming, UNLV, San José State and fellow midwestern Mountain West rookie North Dakota State. That is five separate crossings of the Mississippi River, which the Huskies haven’t done in the regular season since 2023.

Such, however, is the world of college football today. Northern Illinois exits the MAC for the Mountain West, the MAC makes an even more preposterous move—the football-only addition of Sacramento State, which moves up from FCS—and the world keeps turning.

“We fit right in with the Mountain West. We feel comfortable,” Frazier said. “We are still nested in the Midwest, with that tough, Midwest chip on your shoulder … but now we get a chance to take that out to the West and new markets and really say, ‘Hey, we’re here.’”

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