The Streak at 60
By Robert Husseman
Sports Editor of the McMinnville N-R/News-Register 10/20/2015
SALEM – Of course there would be a poster.
The clock had not yet struck zero on Linfield football’s contest against Willamette Saturday when the Wildcats unveiled the red and purple letters against the white background. 60 YEARS 1956-2015 LINFIELD FOOTBALL, it read, marking the continuation of the wonderful and seemingly improbable, and also business as usual.
The Bearcats had, to their credit, raised the specter of doubt, holding Linfield to seven points in the first half and a three-and-out on the Wildcats’ opening drive of the second half. Linfield’s 60th consecutive winning season of football might have to be marked another day.
Then Spencer Payne asserted himself, Sam Riddle launched another of his timely bombs, and the Linfield defense suffocated the barely aspirating Willamette offense to erase any further doubts.
Wildcats 49, Bearcats 7. Thanks for playing at McCulloch Stadium. It was enough to make the most ardent cardinal red-and-gold-clad fan feel a little blue.
“The Streak is not a primary concern,” said former Linfield defensive end Ryan Carlson, proprietor of the Catdome Alumni blog and highlight video producer for the football team. “The Streak takes care of itself while the program in its current state has one thing on its mind, and that’s trying to get back to Salem.”
That’s Virginia, not Oregon, the site of the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl, the NCAA Division III national championship game. Linfield, at 5-0 overall and ranked No. 2 nationally by d3football.com, is paving the way there. Three Northwest Conference teams and two Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference teams have already succumbed to the steamroller.
The Streak’s 60th birthday was marked with familiar postgame routine and new-age branding panache. Linfield players met near the south end zone of McCulloch Stadium for postgame remarks from head coach Joseph Smith, chanted, captured a postgame team selfie (the newest tradition unlike any other) and broke for position group meetings. Each position group posed with the 60 YEARS poster, from the stars to the freshmen not listed in the participation report. As it stands alone in a football-crazed nation, The Streak belongs to every Wildcat.
“I think they’ve done a really good job of creating a culture where football’s important,” said Ken Goe, the longtime college football reporter at The Oregonian. “The other thing they’ve done is they’ve just hired really good coaches. They’ve just done a really nice job of identifying people who could coach. They’ve hired good people, so why would you change.”
The Streak has a lineage but no birthright. From Paul Durham to Ad Rutschman to Ed Langsdorf to Jay Locey to Smith, The Streak has been nurtured by coaches brought up in the Linfield system, either as players (Durham, Rutschman and Smith) or assistant coaches. Of the 19 (!) assistant coaches affiliated with the Wildcats this season, 16 are Linfield graduates.
“It’s kind of a product in itself, a byproduct of what we’re doing,” said Doug Hire, the Wildcats’ offensive line coach and a former Linfield lineman himself. “The way I coach now is the way I’ve been coached.”
“A lot of that coaching is teaching,” Goe said. “One of the things I think makes a liberal arts education important is, teaching is emphasized there. At the liberal arts schools, they’re hiring faculty members who can teach first. I think that extends to football as well.”
Longtime sports journalist and former Linfield football player Dennis Anderson must, now and forever, be credited as the progenitor of the streak becoming The Streak. It was Anderson’s research in the 1980s, after all, that established that Harvard had posted 42 consecutive winning seasons between 1881 and 1923 and Notre Dame had repeated the feat from 1889 to 1931.
(Central College of Iowa had 42 consecutive winning seasons between 1961 and 2002.) The Wildcats were hot on the heels of the Crimson and the Fighting Irish, and The Streak was properly identified and categorized from there.
“What he ended up doing was saving all of his vacation days, coming over (from Hawaii, where he lived and worked,) and donating his time to me to work with our football program,” said former Linfield coach Ad Rutschman, who is responsible for 24 of those 60 winning seasons. “He would save up enough time to where he could be here for the majority of our football season.”
Of course, Linfield had long since cultivated its reputation on the gridiron. Goe recalled attending a University of Oregon football practice not long after Oregonian sports columnist Steve Duin had written “that it looked like the best team in the state might be OSU, and it definitely wasn’t Oregon, and Oregon might struggle to beat Linfield.”
“The next day at practice, (then-head coach) Rich Brooks was walking between players (during stretching) at practice screaming: ‘The Oregonian thinks you guys are (expletives)! The Oregonian thinks you guys couldn’t beat OSU! The Oregonian thinks you guys couldn’t beat Linfield!’” Goe recalled.
“I could see the players turn and look at me and I thought, this is not a real comfortable place to be.”
Terry Durham, the Linfield Athletic Hall of Famer and son of the late coach Paul Durham, remembers discussion of the Wildcats’ winning run after nine seasons, or in 1964. (“For Linfield to keep the streak alive in winning more games than they lose every season is unbelievable,” Durham said. “It just doesn’t happen.”)
“We were 1-4 in 1987. That’s really the first year I ever heard about a streak,” said Locey, now the head football coach at Lewis & Clark. “We ended up finishing 5-4.
“It’s quite a tradition, quite a heritage.”
As soon as The Streak was identified, it was used as a recruiting tool. Smith, a member of the Grants Pass High School class of 1989, remembers it as part of Linfield’s pitch to him. “It was 37 when I was a senior,” said Smith, who became an All-America defensive back for the Wildcats. “That’s the number that we would break to.”
Recruiting is an individual sport, but The Streak plays its role as called upon. It was there for a diminutive running back from Cosumnes Oaks High School in Elk Grove, California, named Tavon Willis, who is now the Wildcats’ third-leading rusher in 2015. (“Just to look at Division I programs and then to see Linfield College up there, I was like, this is my opportunity right here,” Willis said.) Tight end Levi Altringer was born in McMinnville and attended games at Maxwell Field as a toddler. “I got the little Linfield jersey to prove it, the one my little sister wears,” Altringer said. “It was super old-school – the arms go to the elbows, with the two stripes.
“The winning streak, it was always there for me. I knew the tradition of excellence at Linfield.”
“My parents aren’t 60. My grandparents are just over 70,” said Linfield wide receiver Brian Balsiger, a Portland State transfer who encountered The Streak in recruiting. “We’re talking about when they were born, in high school, middle school. That’s a long time. You think, how young was Coach (Rutschman) when that whole thing started?”
Streaks, Carlson noted, are made to be broken, but Linfield’s 57-7 record over the past six seasons hardly portends danger for The Streak. It is more ideal than idol, more omnipresent than factual. The Wildcats live it and breathe it in the midst of a football season but scarcely acknowledge it among themselves.
“It’s always fun to educate those who ask about it,” Balsiger said, in reference to The Streak.
He could have, just as easily, been speaking about the program.
Great moments in ‘The Streak’
1956--Hey, The Streak had to start somewhere, right? Linfield began the ’56 season 0-1-1, falling 19-17 to Lewis & Clark, but went 5-0-1 the rest of the way. The Wildcats’ season culminated in a 27-13 victory over Southern Oregon in which Linfield’s defensive line – led by All-American Vic Fox – allowed 37 rushing yards. The Wildcats’ destiny in the Northwest Conference was largely out of their hands until Pacific upset Lewis & Clark in the final week of the season. That give Linfield its second NWC title in school history – head coach Paul Durham had won the first one as a player, in 1935.
1965--What would become Linfield’s 10th winning season began with another milestone event: the Wildcats’ season-opening 17-0 blanking of Pacific Lutheran was the 100th victory in Paul Durham’s tenure atop the program. Linfield defeated Willamette, 26-6, to conclude a 7-1 regular season and clinch an NAIA playoff berth, where they eventually played St. John’s of Minnesota in the Champion Bowl in Augusta, Georgia. (The Johnnies claimed the championship, 33-0.) Wildcats players Bob Haack, Bob Wisti, Bob Ferguson, Jack Ostlund and Denny Schweitzer comprised a tough defensive line, and the offensive backfield – quarterback Terry Durham, halfback Rogers Ishizu, tailback Leroy Fails and fullback Odis Avritt – was equally formidable.
1975--The 20th consecutive winning season came and went with little fanfare but occurred in the midst of an historic stretch, as Linfield won at least a share of eight Northwest Conference championships in a nine-season span under head coach Ad Rutschman. The Wildcats knocked off College of Idaho, 34-6, on Nov. 2, 1975, as Drake Conti scored rushing touchdowns of 78 and 6 yards and Linfield held the Coyotes to 33 yards rushing. Don Rutschman – yeah, that one – caught an 18-yard touchdown pass to aid the Wildcats offensively. Linfield, 5-2 after defeating College of Idaho, would go 1-1 in its next two games to claim a share of the NWC championship.
1987--Linfield’s 32nd consecutive winning season was also the one most fraught with peril, as the Wildcats started the year 1-4. In the season finale against Pacific on Nov. 14, 1987, the Boxers held a 12-7 lead in the third quarter before Linfield quarterback Randy Hare connected with Dave Erickson on a touchdown pass. A 39-yard field goal by Greg Gulliford brought the Wildcats ahead 17-12 late, but the winning season would not be secured until defensive end Steve Reimann intercepted Pacific quarterback Brett Smith in the final.
1998--When Linfield football secured the longest winning-season streak in the history of college football, students and fans tore down the goalposts at Maxwell Field. The Wildcats, in the third year of Jay Locey’s tenure, had had its hands full with Willamette on Oct. 17, 1998. The Bearcats outgained Linfield 375-289 for the game; the Wildcats had 10 penalties and converted on six of 17 third downs. With 44 seconds remaining, Linfield quarterback Brian Higgins found Nick Forsey on a three-yard touchdown pass to take a 20-19 lead. Willamette responded with a drive and a 50-yard field goal attempt in the final seconds that ultimately missed.
2005--One year removed from the fourth national championship in program history (and the first as a member of NCAA Division III), Brett Elliott had one of the best individual seasons in Linfield history. Elliott posted the second-best passing season in school history with 277 completions, 4,019 passing yards and 49 touchdowns in winning the Gagliardi Trophy and Melberger Award (best player in Division III) following the season; only his 2004 season was greater. The Wildcats went 8-0 in the regular season (clinching the 50th consecutive winning season with a 49-14 victory over Southern Oregon and racing into the D-III national championship game, where Linfield fell to Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Linfield 49, Willamette 7
SALEM – Spencer Payne rushed for a season-high 135 yards and two touchdowns on 12 carries and Sam Riddle threw for 212 yards, including a 65-yard touchdown pass to Eric Igbinoba, as the Wildcats secured their 60th consecutive winning season of football at the expense of the host Bearcats.
Willamette (1-4, 1-2 Northwest Conference) kept itself in the game against Linfield (5-0, 3-0 NWC) in the first half, trailing 7-0 at intermission despite being outgained 268-58. The Wildcats uncharacteristically struggled on special teams; kicker Michael Metter missed field goals from 48 and 50 yards, a bad punt snap resulted in a blocked kick for Kevin McClean, and a fake field goal on the final play of the half resulted in an interception.
As the Linfield offense warmed up in the second half, the defense suffocated the Bearcats. Linebacker Mitchell Kekel intercepted a pass and returned it 26 yards for a touchdown; on Willamette’s next possession, Asa Schwartz returned a fumble 23 yards for a touchdown.
Sutter Choisser rushed for 39 yards and a touchdown, and Bryan Cassill added a touchdown in the fourth quarter. Erick Douglas III caught four passes for 37 yards.
Eli Biondine led the Wildcats defensively with nine tackles, and Alex Hoff had four tackles for loss and two sacks on a six-tackle day. Mikey Arkans intercepted a pass for Linfield.
The Wildcats, ranked No. 2 nationally by d3football.com, host Whitworth Saturday, Oct. 24, at 1:30 p.m.
