GRR: NCR
It will be Northern Iowa and IUP in the final of NCR Men's D2 championship after both won semifinals Friday night in Houston, but it wasn't an easy run, especially for the defending champs.
Earlier in the evening, UNI held off Cinderalla team Towson 41-26.
Saturday's NCR Finals action gives us Kentucky looking for a repeat and Bowling Green trying to get back to the heights they hit in 2018.
Kentucky has been the #1 team in the SCRC all season and there didn't seem to be much doubt about that ... until the conference final.
Goff Rugby Report's recent obsession has been whether iron actually sharpens iron or not.
For the most part we at GRR World Headquarters believe it does—teams that have to struggle and that have to work their way through difficult conferences are better prepared for playoff rugby than those who have an easy time of it. There are exceptions, of course, but generally the adage holds.
The roots of NCR are in the small colleges, and it’s there that the entity-previously-known-as-NSCRO set out its shingle.
And while we at GRR end up talking a lot more about the D1, D1AA, and D2 brackets, for NCR really it’s D3 (what used to be Small Colleges) that made the organization.
Wheeling University defeated Southern Nazarene 58-17 Saturday to win the NCR Women's D1 championship.