RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from Chicago Sun-Times — the article as it was filed.
Linebacker Mark Pullman followed a tight end into the flat, slipped in front of him for an interception and took it back for a house call.
All the way across the left-field foul line.
Wait, what?
This was football practice at Chicago State University less than 48 hours before the first game in school history, which is at noon Saturday against Division II Roosevelt at SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview. Chicago State — debuting as an independent in the Division I FCS ranks — will be the home team.
Why Bridgeview? Because Chicago State doesn’t have a stadium.
Why the left-field foul line? Because the Cougars don’t have a football practice facility.
Instead, they’re putting in daily work on the school’s baseball field. Did I mention Chicago State doesn’t have a baseball team?
After Pullman’s practice pick, his defensive teammates joined him for a celebration in the end zone, which is to say a strip of turf between the foul line and a chain-link fence. Snatching up the ball and spiking it to players’ delight was assistant head coach and defensive line coach Kentwan Balmer, one man on the field whose name resonates in football circles. Balmer was a first-round NFL draft pick in 2008 and played for the 49ers and Seahawks.
While the offense and defense went at it in the outfield, specialists worked where they could. Punters Donovan Blair and Jordan Zimmerman — who double as the team’s placekickers — booted balls from deep in the hole at shortstop toward a teammate waiting near where home plate would be if bases were in the dirt. Practice culminated with the offense in the two-minute drill, leading to a Blair field-goal try on the final play that either split the proverbial uprights or drifted a bit wide right. Had there been goal posts anywhere in sight — no, the Cougars don’t have those, either — I’d have been able to tell you.
This, folks, is what’s known as starting at the very bottom.
“Everyone has to start from somewhere, you know what I mean?” head coach Bobby Rome said.
I wrote about Rome after interviewing him on his first official day on the job, in April of last year. He had no clue where the Cougars would practice or play games. He had no staff and hadn’t begun looking for players. At best, he was in for a more challenging task than the average coach could even imagine.
A football team out of thin air at Chicago State? I had to see it with my own eyes just to wrap my brain around it. Most of the school’s other sports teams struggle mightily just to keep their heads above water in the Northeast Conference, which the football team will join in 2027. The Cougars’ men’s and women’s basketball teams were a combined 16-48 last season. The women’s volleyball team was 1-25. The men’s and women’s soccer teams are a combined 0-7 this season. You get the picture.
Bobby Rome addresses his team @chicagostatefb . The Cougars play Saturday for the first time ever. My column soon. pic.twitter.com/BgNHpXUwb9
— Steve Greenberg (@SLGreenberg) August 28, 2026
Chicago State’s enrollment of approximately 2,500 is well below the average in the Northeast — and across the FCS — but the good news is 92 students at the predominantly Black public school in Roseland on the Far South Side spend much of their time wearing shoulder pads and helmets. Somehow, Rome and his cast of eager assistant coaches found them all.
I asked Rome, 40, how many eight-hour nights of sleep he has had over the past 17 months.
“None,” he said. “Not even gonna lie to you.”
Rome, who played with Balmer — not to mention Bears coach Ben Johnson — at North Carolina, is no average coach. His first coaching job was in Vladivostok, Russia, the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, close to the borders of China and North Korea. Back stateside, he served as head coach at three HBCUs. At the first, he inherited a 44-game losing streak. At the next, things shut down almost immediately due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And at the one after that, the football program was fresh off a 62-year hiatus.
“I’m battle-tested, man,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a while.”
How much resolve can one man have?
I tip my helmet to Rome for having whatever it is inside him that leads him to these opportunities and urges him to keep saying yes. Most coaches wouldn’t dare.
A lot of players would turn the other way, too, rather than commit to play on a team that might have a lot of growing to do before it can realistically think about winning games at a level one notch below the big-bopper FBS.
“We’re building it brick by brick,” said wide receiver Arshawn Powell, who redshirted at Southern Illinois last season after scoring 13 touchdowns as a senior at Evergreen Park. “It’s not about us. It’s for Chicago.”
The roster includes 20 players from Chicago and five others from Illinois, part of a mash-up of hopefuls who are new to college football or have experienced it for various lengths of time — some seeing game action, others not — elsewhere.
One of them is wide receiver Kayman Coleman, who’s a handful of college stops, two broken collarbones and one job as a security guard removed from his standout days at Von Steuben. But he’s back in the game and fired up about it.
“It’s a great opportunity,” Coleman said. “You can’t beat being at home with the people you love, who’ve been supporting you your whole life, and getting to build something from the ground up. It’s like a dream come true.”
What’s it going to look like on game days?
“Like a bunch of competitive young men who understand we’re fighting for something bigger than us,” Rome said.
Here's to ’em, then. Onward and upward.
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