Wartburg vs. Coe, big winner vs. big winner. It’s the Game of the Week and more

Eastern Iowa’s best college football matchup Saturday will be in Cedar Rapids.

The Wartburg-Coe game at Coe’s Clark Field pits the two unbeatens in American Rivers Conference play. It’s 13th-ranked Wartburg against a 7-0 Coe squad that inexplicably is unranked considering it has won by an average of 30 points per game. The winner almost surely will go on to be the outright league champion.

Wartburg has been phenomenal the last two years, going to the NCAA Division III national semifinals both times. Coe reached the playoffs last year after going 9-1 in the regular season.

They are two winners, and have been for a long time. This will be Wartburg’s 31st-straight winning season. Only two other programs in all NCAA divisions have longer current streaks of winning seasons. Boise State leads the FBS with 25.

The Kohawks have been mighty good themselves, with seven playoff berths in the 21st century.

The two programs rely heavily on players from Eastern Iowa. Wartburg starts players from Solon, Dyersville, Decorah, Independence, Manchester and Edgewood. Coe has five starters from Cedar Rapids, and others from Mount Vernon, Atkins and Cascade.

“That’s been really important to us in creating this success, doing it with local kids,” Wartburg Coach Chris Winter said. “I don't think there's better football in our state than what we find in Eastern Iowa, specifically in our backyard.”

Those who don’t know the football is first-rate are those who haven’t attended games.

Coe, for instance, averages 236 rushing yards and 212 passing yards. Quarterback Clay Krousie of Montezuma has thrown eight touchdown passes to Jeron Senters, formerly of Cedar Rapids Kennedy.

The Kohawks are on a 12-game regular-season winning streak, with the last loss a 27-21 decision to Wartburg last year in Waverly. The Knights’ lone regular-season defeat in the last three seasons was last month at perennial national power St. John’s (Minn.), now ranked No. 3.

Winter is a 2004 Wartburg graduate who stayed to be a graduate assistant coach, a defensive backs coach, a defensive coordinator, and now the fourth-year head coach. Tyler Staker is a 2006 Coe grad who stayed to be a graduate assistant, an offensive line and wide receivers coach, an offensive coordinator, and now the ninth-year head coach.

They grew up in New Hampton and Fredericksburg, respectively, 12 miles apart.

Continuity and stability on the teams aren’t just with the coaches. Many players on both teams are fifth-year seniors, using their COVID-19 waiver season to play ball another year. The primary reason: They love it.

“We've been able to find guys in this area that choose Wartburg,” Winter said. “They believe in the value of what Wartburg gives them. Not only our football program, but the value of a great education at a place that really supports the student-athlete.

”That’s where they want to be, and they're going to be loyal to it. That's something you don't find very much right now in college football with guys leaving programs, trying to chase money and the transfer portal and NIL.”

You can say the same about the Kohawks. The two squads battle once again Saturday, and again, what a battle it should be.

“It’s a big one,” Winter said. “I think the game is going to match up two teams that have a lot in common, that both hang their hat on playing good defense, both hang their hat on running the football and being a physical football team.

“We’ve got guys who did special things the last couple years in taking our program to the national semifinals two years in a row. One of the teams that’s given us the hardest time during all that has been Coe.

“They’ve got some guys that are hungry. They’ve kind of been on that doorstep of being able to do some of the things that we’ve done, and I know they’re going to be ready to play.”

You and I know the contest will get only a sliver of the attention given the Northwestern-Iowa game farther down I-380. The Knights and Kohawks don’t care. They know what they are, and what they are is very good.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com