It’s game week as the IHSA football season begins, and 20 teams from the Rockford area will kick things off on Friday night, Aug. 21, with three more hitting the gridiron for the first time this year on Saturday, Aug. 22.
As we get ready for the season, it’s good to see if some of the bigger preseason questions got answered.
Most, however, will not get answered until at least Week 1.
“I’m super excited to get this thing going,” Hononegah head coach Brian Zimmerman said. Zimmerman is stepping down at the end of this year, his 34th as a football coach and 11th as Hononegah’s head coach. “I’m tremendously excited for our seniors, and well, just looking forward to it for obvious reasons, too.”
So as Coach Zimmerman — and the rest of us — get set for the first round of regular-season football games, here are five burning questions that need to get answered quickly as we kickstart the season:
1) How will Byron rebuild on the fly this time?
The Byron Tigers not only lost 13 seniors from last year’s dominant Class 3A state championship squad, but they also lost All State linebacker and running back Caden Considine, who is now suiting up at the University of Illinois. They also lost their starting quarterback, Andrew Talbert, who will forgo football his senior year to focus on baseball.
If the past has taught us anything, Byron should be just fine.
“We’re still trying to figure it all out,” Byron head coach Jeff Boyer said early on, “but this has been a great group to work with. … And I like the way this group is working. We’ll have kids step up and play well.”
The Tigers always have kids step in there and play well while filling shoes, but they have some big shoes to fill this year. Considine was the team’s leader on both sides of the ball much of the past four years, and the star quarterback from the past three years, Talbert, just recently decided to bow out of football.
Can Byron, which went 14-0 and pulled out a dramatic 56-50 win over Tolono Unity in the 3A state championship game, retool and do it again with a bunch of new faces?
Probably. It’s done it before, having won three state titles in the past five years, and four 3A state crowns since 1999.
2) How good will Harlem QB Braxton Fausett be now?
Fausett was insanely good last year, completing 67% of his passes for 1,758 yards as a sophomore while throwing 22 touchdown passes and just one interception. He broke the all-time, single-season Huskie completion percentage record.
The star QB and the Huskies earned the biggest playoff win in school history with a 62-0 whipping of Chicago Mather in the first-round Class 6A game, as well. Harlem even returned two interceptions for touchdowns in that game, one by returning star linebacker LeBron McClelland.
But the Huskies bowed out unceremoniously the next round. Can they sustain the run this season?
“Braxton is a different player now; he’s going to be even better,” Harlem head coach Jim Morrow said of his junior QB. “We’re going to go out and win as many games as we can this year and see what we can do. … It’s going to be a fun one.”
3) Can Belvidere North rise to the top again
The Blue Thunder not only held off Fausett and the Huskies late in the season to clinch the NIC-10 title, but they advanced all the way to the 5A state semifinals for the first time in program history. A vast majority of that team — including all of its skill position players — graduated, however.
Still, North, which went a school-record 12-1 last year, appears to be one of several teams that could win the NIC-10 this year, and it could go on a postseason run.
“We don’t really talk about last year with this group; it’s a new group,” Belvidere North head coach Jeff Beck said. “This is their time to shine. They get the limelight now. Let’s see what they can do.”
4) Who will rule the NIC-10 this year?
Last year’s kings, Belvidere North? Fausett and Harlem? Or could there be a surprise champion?
Heck yeah. The NIC-10 appears to be a wide-open race this year as the top dogs from the last couple of years are re-tooling.
Hononegah, in Zimmerman’s swan song of a season, should be one of several teams in contention. They were still figuring out who would start at quarterback midweek last week but expect to be in contention throughout.
“We’ve got a great group, and we believe in them,” Zimmerman said of this year’s Hononegah squad, “but there are a lot of strong teams out there this year. Harlem is the No. 1 team in my mind, and they destroyed us last year. Guilford has a lot back, North is a system that is just hard to stop, and that’s not it. … We hope to be in the top three, and battling.”
5) Is Lena-Winslow still the best in 1A?
The Panthers of Lena-Winslow were 6-0 in 1A state-title games until they placed second twice in a row in 2023 and 2024. But last year, they avenged those with their most dominant title of them all, pounding Brown County 58-13.
It was Le-Win’s seventh 1A state championship since 2010.
Last year, Le-Win outscored its 14 opponents 582-207, tops in 1A on both ends. The Panthers fell 38-14 to Stockton in Week 2, but they returned the favor with a 30-16 victory over Stockton in the 1A state semifinals. Le-Win lost 17 seniors from that team, but a lot of players are back.
And this is a team that reloads fast.
“We’ll be ready,” Le-Win head coach Ric Arand said. “We’re Le-Win; that’s what we do.”
The Panthers have four of their five starting offensive linemen returning, and three of the team’s starting defensive linemen are back well, so don’t worry; they’ll be ready, all right. And they’ll be led by one of the state’s top linemen, Gannon Dunker, and another star up front in Preston Shultz.
Jay Taft is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at jtaft@rrstar.com and sign up for the Rockford High School Sports Newsletter here at rrstar.com. Jay has covered a variety of sports, from the Chicago Bears and Blackhawks to local youth sports, since the turn of the century at the Register Star.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Top 5 burning questions headed into Rockford-area football season
Reporting by Jay Taft, Rockford Register Star / Rockford Register Star
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By Jay Taft, Rockford Register Star | USA TODAY Network
