Roundtable: What Are You Most Excited About Entering The 2022 Season? PT 1

Cole Jacobson: While it’s an extremely obvious cop-out answer, it has to be the debut season of the Midwest Sprint Football League (MSFL). If you had asked me or any of my teammates when I was in college if we thought sprint football would ever exist outside of its niche northeastern U.S. market, you probably would’ve gotten nearly unanimous “no’s.” In fact, I wrote for this website in 2019 that “sprint football is likely never going to be a nationwide sport, with dozens of teams taking flights every week to compete across the country.” So even though we’re not quite at the point of an FBS-style, truly nationwide league, it’s still very exciting to see expansion of this magnitude. 

If we’re calling a spade a spade, odds are the MSFL will look pretty rough in Year 1. No matter what level of football competition you’re at, it’s tough to put together a high-caliber operation in your first year of existence. By no means am I saying freshmen are incapable of being great players on an individual basis – look at the absurd stats from 2021 CSFL leading rusher Cahsid Raymond of Mansfield, for example. But when your roster only has one class of recruited players, along with perhaps a few walk-ons or transfers sprinkled in among your upperclassmen, it’s a tall order to have success in a sport that demands roster depth the way that football does. Even if only one or two teams in a league were in that situation, that can already be ugly. From personal experience, I remember being up 48-0 at Caldwell in their first-ever sprint football game in September 2017. But when it’s an entire league simultaneously in that state, we should expect the quality of play to be noticeably below what we’ve seen in the CSFL in recent years. 

Still, in the bigger picture, that’s not what’s particularly important. Sure, maybe the CSFL champion will smoke the MSFL champion in the inter-league championship game for the first year or two. But similar to how Caldwell and Chestnut Hill clawed their way from CSFL bottom-feeders to having winning records, the MSFL should and will collectively improve over time. And when that happens, an entirely new portion of the country will be exposed to some high-quality, albeit relatively unknown, football.

As for the CSFL specifically, an exciting concept is one that I also discussed in my 2021 season recap for this website: increased balance of the North division. As a brief refresher, while the 2021 CSFL title game ended up being Army-Navy as most people expected, Army’s path there was very turbulent. In October, the Black Knights eked by Mansfield in an 19-11 dogfight despite Mansfield missing sensation QB Cahsid Raymond for the 2nd half. Two weeks later, they edged Caldwell in a preposterous 4-2, 5-OT game in which neither team scored a point until the 4th OT, a result that was only made possible because of how asinine the new college football overtime rules are. 

This might sound insignificant to a typical reader – they won the games, so who cares? But a deeper look at the historical context shows that those results should be raising some eyebrows. The CSFL began its North-South divisional format at the start of the 2017 season. Prior to October 2021, Army’s closest divisional game ever was a 34-7 win over St. Thomas Aquinas in 2019 – a vastly different outcome than the thrillers the Black Knights ran into last season. If we scrap any context about divisions and instead look at Army’s general program history, the numbers jump off the page even more. 2021 was the first season in which Army had two games that were either losses or one-possession wins, against CSFL teams not named Navy or Penn, since way back in 1989 (when they beat Cornell by five points and tied Princeton). That last sentence might be a handful, but the point is simple: Army usually dominates almost everybody, and this was not the case last season.

Does this guarantee that 2022 will bring more of the same? Of course not, each year is different, and when all is said and done, Army is still the only team in the history of the CSFL’s two-division format that has never lost a divisional game. But it does signify something that’s worth keeping an eye on. Just like any other sport, football is at its best when the results aren’t a given before the game actually begins, and if 2021 was any indication, we’ll be in for a fun season this time around.