KCAC welcomes Great Plains Athletic Conference football teams to Sunflower State

Give this to the KCAC’s football teams – they don’t back down from a fight.

Once again, the league is headed into an early-season series of games against teams from a higher-profile conference – this year the Great Plains Athletic Conference after two years of games against the Heart of America Athletic Conference in which the KCAC went 8-12.

On paper, the two conferences seem fairly evenly matched, both with three teams in the NAIA Top 25. History tells a different story. The GPAC has put a team in the national championship game in five of the last 10 years, with Sioux Falls winning three.

The KCAC has never had a team play for the national championship.

“I haven’t thought too much about the comparison between (the GPAC and the HAAC),” Sterling coach Andy Lambert said. “But, typically, you don’t have a top-five program in the country coming to town to start the season with.”

Bethany is the lone KCAC team out of the series, traveling to play Houston Baptist, an NCAA Championship Subdivision team. Of the nine KCAC teams hosting GPAC schools, Lambert and the Warriors have the highest-ranked opponent to face in No. 3 Morningside, which has been to the NAIA playoffs 11 straight seasons, including a 30-27 loss to Marian in the 2012 championship game.

The GPAC lost a bit of its panache in 2011 when Sioux Falls moved to the NCAA Division II’s Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference.

“Without question, the loss of Sioux Falls hurt the conference as a whole,” said Morningside coach Steve Ryan, who is in his 13th season. “But that being said, it’s had a positive effect on us. We’ve won the conference four years in a row and we don’t have that school down the block, so to speak, to compete against in recruiting.

“But when Nebraska Wesleyan leaves for NCAA Division III next season, that will be three schools leaving the conference in a short amount of time … and that’s definitely a negative for the conference.”

Ryan was an assistant coach at Ottawa from 1997 to 2000 and has known Lambert for 20 years – since the two played football at neighboring colleges in the Chicago area, with Lambert at Trinity International and Ryan at Wheaton.

“I love the idea of them coming here, of the challenge of it,” Lambert said. “Steve is somebody I’ve know forever and have a ton of respect for.”

“I think the world of Andy and how his teams play,” Ryan said. “Sometimes, on paper, you don’t know how they could ever find a way to win and they just do it. That’s coaching.”

Ryan also understands the uphill battle the KCAC faces on the national level.

“The league, in my opinion, is much, much better than it was six or seven years ago, and definitely better than when I was coaching,” Ryan said. “In Kansas, with four Division II schools and the junior colleges … that makes it tough.”

No. 12 Tabor hosts No. 22 Northwestern in the only matchup between ranked teams. No. 21 Friends hosts Nebraska Wesleyan, while No. 14 Ottawa hosts Dakota Wesleyan.

This story was originally published September 4, 2015 at 2:31 PM with the headline "KCAC welcomes Great Plains Athletic Conference football teams to Sunflower State."