There were a few "wait, what?" moments in the Great Midwest this week.
One of those was on Sunday when UW-Whitewater, which had looked shaky in the early going, hammered UW-Milwaukee 62-5. That bonus-point victory vaulted Whitewater into the Great Midwest North conversation. That is especially true since Marquette not only beat Northern Michigan (who had started 1-0), but did so by a shocking 96 points.
"We just played heads-up rugby," said club president Pat Cooney. "We had minimal mistakes and our forward pods were fantastic with our offloads."
With all of that moving nicely the backs were able to get the ball to the wing fairly easily and accurate passing gave the outside backs time and space to elude tacklers.
"Overall we just sucked in their defense with our forward pods and then swung the ball out to the backs and they capitalized on the overloads that they had," said Cooney.
Basically their attack worked the way it was supposed to.
Sean Hipskind scored twice and was huge active all over the field for the now 2-0 Golden Eagles.
Like those other two games, the other surprise wasn't so much about who won as it was about by how much. Northern Iowa and Illinois State are good rivals, but UNI, which had lost to ISU in the 2021 conference final, won 65-5. Having come off a big loss to Principia, Northern Iowa bounced back in impressive fashion. Nick Marker remains a major strike runner for UNI and keeps racking up the tries. Ian Hibbert was outstanding on the wing and always seems to come up with a big play. Garett Getz helped drive the UNI win also.
Coming off that 72-20 loss to Principia, UNI would have been forgiven for being down.
"The Principia match really showed us that we have to play our game and do the little things right to turn them into big wins," said Northern Iowa flyhalf Jentry Staack. "We didn't necessarily change much, but going into the Illinois State match we were very confident that we just had to oplay our game."
As a result, UNI leads the Great Midwest South with a 2-0 record. Three one-win teams follow them. Northwestern is 1-0 after opening their season with a 17-14 victory over winless UIC. It's kind of hard to envision anyone catching Northern Iowa in the South.
