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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/lordeandtaylor on 2025-07-10 22:37:57+00:00.
I’m putting together a spreadsheet tracking conference realignment across all four levels of NCAA football since 1978, when it first split into four tiers. My two most helpful resources for doing this are Wikipedia and college-football-results.com, which extensively tracks historical records and schedule for basically every college that’s ever fielded a football team. I’ve been using this website and various other sources to add in information that Wikipedia is missing.
Illinois College first shows up on Wikipedia’s Division III standings list in 1980 when they joined the College Athletic Conference. They played three seasons in the CAC before joining their current conference, the Midwest, in 1983. According to their page on college-football-results.com, they had previously been in a conference called the Prairie College Conference, which they left no earlier than 1974. The Wikipedia page for the PCC says it was made up of schools in Illinois and Indiana and that it existed between 1953 and 1991. It does not, however, tell me whether it was affiliated with the NAIA, Division III, or something else. To add further confusion, the college-football-results page for Illinois College indicates that they were a member of the Midwest Conference in 1976 and 1977, which does not seem to be correct as no information I can find on the Midwest Conference suggests that Illinois College was a member of that conference prior to 1983.
I can’t seem to find any info on Google about Illinois College’s historic conference affiliations. I know this is super obscure but does anyone have any knowledge they could lend.
Edit: I seem to have solved it, the Prairie College Conference appears to have been an NAIA conference that stopped sponsoring football in 1967. Illinois College played their non-football sports in the PCC but their football team was an NAIA independent until 1980.