Winningest Indiana football team is St. Francis in Ft. Wayne

INDIANAPOLIS -- The winningest Indiana college football team in recent years? It's not Notre Dame. It's certainly not Indiana or Purdue or even Wabash.\nWith a 41-game regular-season winning streak heading into its opener Saturday, the state's most consistently good football program has been tiny St. Francis.\nThe Cougars, national NAIA runners-up to Carroll College of Montana the past two years, have not dropped a game in the regular season since 2001. They lost 19 seniors from last year's 13-1 team, but coach Kevin Donley is ready to try again.\n"Most coaches would take 13-1 every year," he said Wednesday. "Sure, it's frustrating (to lose in the playoffs). You never want to lose. The most important game's the next one. Whether it's the opening game of the year or the final national title game, you're striving to win every time you line up."\nThe Fort Wayne school of about 2,000 students was Indiana's most recent college to launch a football program in 1998, when Donley was hired and struggled to a 2-8 record in the Cougars' first season. With quarterback Jeremy Hibbeln -- who went on to pass for more than 11,000 career yards, third among all Indiana passers in any college division -- St. Francis began its remarkable surge the next year.\nSince 1999, when Donley was the Mid-States Football Association Coach of the Year, the Cougars have won 76 games and lost just 11. The next-best record among Indiana's 20 football-playing colleges over that span is Wabash's 55-20, followed by Hanover's 51-24, DePauw's 43-26, Notre Dame's 49-35 and Purdue's 49-36.\n"We're able to recruit good football players," Donley said of his team's success. "This is a great football area; we're the only college football in Fort Wayne. And we ventured out to a new region in Indianapolis to pick up more. Success breeds success, and we're able to recruit better players with the success we've had."\nSt. Francis, ranked No. 2 behind Carroll in the preseason NAIA poll this year, opens the season Saturday at William Penn (Iowa).\n"We've gone through two-a-days and all that. We're ready to play somebody with a different color helmet," Donley said.\nThe Cougars have nine new starters on offense, including quarterback Eric Hooks, a senior who was a backup to Chris Bramell last year. The top player back on defense is All-American linebacker Brian Kurtz.\n"We're going to do what we have to do. A lot of that is predicated on how people play us," the coach said. "We try to mold what we like to do around the ability levels that we have, and I think we've got some kids that can catch it. We've got some decent speed on the perimeter, we've got a couple quarterbacks that can throw it and we've got some backs that can catch the ball out of the backfield as well as run over you, around you, through you."\nThe playoff losses and the departure of some key players will help keep the team from becoming overconfident, he said.\n"We may have had to deal with that the last couple years, but now we're hungry," Donley said. "We have a lot of guys here that have something to prove, that they can keep the tradition going"