Reade and Augustana Are Streaking to Records

NEW ORLEANS —  Almost no team wins 37 football games in a row these days.

Augustana College of Rock Island, Ill., has.

Almost no team wins 61 of 63 games any more.

Augustana College has.

No team ever won three consecutive national collegiate football championships at any level--until Augustana College did in 1985.

Almost no team compiles a seven-year record of 69-8.

Bob Reade has--at Augustana College--and for his accomplishments he was voted national Coach of the Year in College Division II last week by his colleagues in the American Football Coaches Assn.

It also marked the first time in any division that a coach has been so honored three years in a row. And Reade won even though he wasn’t one of the five regional winners.

Why wasn’t he? Maybe Augustana’s unparalleled success--the Vikings haven’t lost since West Georgia beat them in the 1982 NCAA Division III title game and haven’t lost a regular-season game since October 1980--is becoming commonplace to the voters.

It’s nothing new to Reade, whose record at J.D. Darnall High School in Geneseo, Ill., before coming to Augustana, was 146-21-4, including six years in a row without losing. His winning percentage of .896 at Augustana is the best in college football history.

“It’s an attitude thing,” said Reade, who was once an embarrassing 8-6 at Augustana. “It’s an amazing thing even to us, that attitude change. We had a plan, we felt, and we had the players that believed in us, I guess, and believed in that (plan), and from then on we kept establishing and building their confidence and the attitude.

“And that confidence keeps building and therefore we were able to accomplish what we have, which is unreal to us, and people today say it can’t be done, 37 in a row, but our players think the opposite way.”

Of course, Reade expects that the winning streak--only Oklahoma (47 straight, 1953-57), Missouri Valley (41 in a row, 1941-48) and Washington (39 straight, 1908-14) have done better--will end. Or will it?

“I made a mistake as a high school coach when we went six years in a row without losing and we kept saying, ‘Well, it’s got to end some time,’ ” Reade said. “So this time when people ask me, I take a more positive approach. It doesn’t have to end, but every one always has.”

At 53, Reade is content in a small-college atmosphere. He has 11 children--”My main concern is that I provide for my family the best way I can possibly do it”--and still lives in Geneseo because it is just 25 miles to Augustana’s football field.