This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Honestly_ on 2024-05-03 16:55:51.

by Bobak Ha’Eri

This Saturday (5/4) is the Mills Bowl, a unique exhibition game between Japan’s top college football program, Kwansei Gakuin Fighters, and NAIA’s Southern Oregon Raiders in Ashland, OR (6pm PT / 9pm ET, details on how to watch down below).

I’ve dropped into town to cover the game and talk to coaches, players, and locals.

There’s a lot of history to this game, and lot of backstory for those unfamiliar with the international visitors. I know a lot about college football in Japan, so let me put it in light context before explaining the history of the game and its namesake.

College Football in Japan

There are presently over 200 college football teams in Japan at multiple divisions. Kwansei Gakuin (kwan-say GAH-koo-ween) is the far-and-away premiere program.

How did the sport take root there?

College football took off in other parts of the world earlier than most people realized. Canada developed football almost in parallel with the United States, with McGill (1874) and UToronto (1877) being two of the earliest programs in history; a fight over field dimensions and rules led to the split that created Canadian football (Harvard forced the point by making Harvard Stadium (1903) to the size they wanted the field to be).

Next came Mexico in 1920s. It makes sense given the proximity; the sport has only increased in popularity as the NFL’s popularity exploded.

Japan started playing college football in the 1930s… what happened?

It comes down to one man: Paul Rusch (1897–1979), a lay missionary of the Anglican Church in Japan, considered the “Father of American Football in Japan” [Chuck Mills is the “Father of Modern American Football in Japan” – I’ll get to that below]. Rusch arrived in Japan in the 1920s to help YMCA reconstruction efforts after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake and opted to stay and teach economics at Rikkyo University, a private, Anglican university in Tokyo. Some of his former students went on the study in the United States, where they experienced football, and returned to teach at other private universities in Tokyo. In 1934, Rusch and his former students started football programs at 3 private universities in Tokyo: Rikkyo, Waseda, and Meiji (all still play). After being forced to leave during WW2, Rusch came back to help rebuild and reestablish football, he died in Japan; Rikkyo’s team name, the Rushers, is a reference to their founder’s name.

The sport started to spread, and here it’s helpful to note common names for the two major metropolitan regions: Tokyo-Yokohama is commonly called Kanto (literally “east”; it has 40M people) and the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area which is Kansai (literally “west”, with 20M people). Most major universities and college football programs ended up in those two urban regions.

Kwansei Gakuin University was founded in 1889 as a private, Christian university by an American Methodist bishop, Walter Russell Lambuth (1854-1921) (there was also a Lambuth University in Jackson, TN that shut down a decade ago). The school has a peculiar spelling of the Japanese word Kansai: They chose to keep what was considered a fancy, progressive way of pronouncing the word in the 1880s when it was founded. “Gakuin” just means college. A handful of Japanese universities have that seemingly redundant “College University” name combo. The colloquial nickname is “Kangaku” which just takes bits of each word’s pronunciation: Kansai Gakuin Daigaku (University).

The school is located in Nishinomiya, a city sandwiched by Kobe & Osaka. The city has Koshien Stadium (built in 1924), a professional baseball stadium (Hanshin Tigers) that’s also used to host the college football national championship. The city’s placement reminds me a bit of Arlington, TX.

KG added a football program in 1941, it took a break from 1943-45 due to WW2 (it was seen as an “enemy sport”), and returned in 1946 to become part of the growing major football conference in the Kansai region. Early on, KG made a pivotal decision by not keeping football to just it’s college, but also introducing to its own KG junior and senior high school programs in the 1950s (the closest example I can think of is Boston College High School, which also has athletes who’ve gone onto BC).

The arrangement at KG allowed student to build experience with American football over a then-unprecedented 10-year progression through the institutions at a time when no one else did anything similar; it established a competitive level that easily overwhelmed its peers. From 1949-1981, the KG Fighters were the West’s participant in the Koshien Bowl (national championship) an incredible 33-consecutive times!

Since their first title game appearance in 1949, the school as accumulated 60 conference titles and 34 national championships in the Koshien Bowl. They are presently on an unprecedented streak of 6-consecutive national championships (the previous longest streak was 5, held by KG and one other program). Their most recent national championship, last December, was a 61-21 rout of Tokyo’s Hosei University Orange.

The interesting part is they only made the 2023 championship game by luck! At this moment in Japan’s college football, the toughest teams are all in their conference (full name: Kansai Collegiate American Football League). At the end of the Fall 2023 season, there was a three-way tie between KG and main competitive rivals Kansai University Kaisers and Ritsumeikan University Panthers. All three were 6-1 with Kansai Kaisers pulling off a 16-13 upset of KG in the final game of the season, creating the circle of Kansai beating KG, KG beating Ritsumeiken (31-10), and Ritsumeikan beating Kansai (38-27). So how do you resolve the tie-breaker? Point differential? Committee of overpaid administrators? Computer? Nope: It’s luck of the draw! Immediately after the game finished, with players still on the field, the still-uniformed captains of Kansai and KG were joined by a captain of Ritsumeikan and proceeded to play rock-papers-scissors to determine the selection order of sealed envelopes (Kansai also won that battle to pick first). Then, after all 3 captains picked a sealed envelope, they pulled out the sheets of paper inside… KG won! The Fighters went into the playoff (which includes tiny conferences that always get squished when they play the Kansai and Kanto teams, they are the only two conferences that have ever made the Koshien Bowl) and blew-out the Kanto representative.

What’s the “Mills Bowl” and how does Chuck Mills work into this?

Chuck Mills (1928-2021) graduated from Illinois State and started coaching – he started as head coach of smaller colleges like Pomona–Pitzer Sagehens (D3), IUP (D2), and Merchant Marine (D3) before jumping into higher profile assistant jobs. By 1966 he was an assistant on the Kansas City Chiefs that won the first Super Bowl. In 1967 he took the head coaching job at Utah State—that’s where Japan comes in.

Mills went to the popular Expo '70 in Osaka, on his way he was encouraged to connect with the then-coach of KG, Ken Takeda. They ended up missing each other, but that missed meeting bothered Mills who felt he should do his part to help football grow – so Mills made sure to write Takeda once he got back. The Japanese coach was impressed by Mills, and their collaboration led to the plan of having Utah State go and play a series of exhibition games in Japan. The trip required the intervention of the Nixon administration, who nudged the NCAA to allow the Aggies to make otherwise prohibited trip.

Utah State cakewalked through a series of games with all-star teams from Kansai and Kanto, showing sophisticated techniques, strategies, and even things like taping ankles that the Japanese were not doing. The immediate reaction in Japan was “We need to get better” and rapid modernization of the sport (encouraged by United State programs in the lead up to the bicentennial).

Mills wasn’t done. In a desire to help keep the sport growing, he invited Japanese coaches to come learn on his subsequent staffs at Wake Forest (1973-1977) and SOU (1980-1988). Three of the coaches who took advantage of this ended up being 3 of KG’s most successful head coaches, including recently-retired Hideaki Toriuchi, who served on SOU’s staff (and UCLA) and went on to win 12 national championships at his alma mater from 1992-2019. I should note that present head coach, Kazuki Omura, continued a 2-game streak started by Coach Toriuchi and has since won 4 national championships in 4 seasons. Japan’s coaches often say the things they learned from working on American teams was how to give players their independence to make more of their own decisions and use their talent.

The respect for Mills is so great in Japan that they named their Heisman Trophy after him and, until the final few years of his life, Mills himself went to Japan to present it to the winner each year. The 2021 Koshien Bowl had a moment of silence and played a halftime video tribute to Coach Mills.

Hence, Mills is the "father of modern American football in Japan."

Mills Bowl past:

Mills brought Southern Oregon to Kobe in 1985 for its first matchup with KG, a 49-24 Raiders victory. KG visited Ashland a year later, a 21-17 SOU win. In the most recent matchup as part of the 1987 season, KG defeated SOU 27-9 in Osaka, Japan, on Jan. 10, 1988. All these years later we finally have Mills Bowl IV.

Mills Bowl IV

KG arrived late Wednesday ni…

Content cut off. Read original on old.reddit.com/…/rcfb_reporting_mills_bowl_iv_is_…