COLORADO SPRINGS — At the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference’s media day Wednesday, Adams State coach Marty Heaton nodded toward the Colorado School of Mines contingent and teased the Orediggers players about being future “millionaires.”
Marc Schiechl, the Orediggers’ star senior defensive end from Lakewood’s Bear Creek High School, smiled. After all, there are a lot worse things that can be said about opponents. It’s central to the image of the elite, engineering-oriented university in Golden, and it seeps into the football program too.
“We’ve heard other teams call us ‘nerds,’ and it makes it even better when we beat them,” Schiechl said. “We just tell them, ‘You just got beat by a bunch of nerds.’ When I talk to people, in fact, a lot of people don’t even know we have a football team. They just know it’s a good academic school. I tell them we balance football and school, and it makes it more impressive to them.”
The preseason poll of the RMAC coaches picked the Orediggers, 8-3 overall and the league runners-up last season, to finish second again to Nebraska-Kearney in 2010. Schiechl was named the RMAC preseason co-defensive player of the year, with Nebraska-Kearney tackle Josh Rohde.
Listed at 6-feet-3 and 255 pounds heading into his senior season, Schiechl is considered a possibility to get into an NFL camp next year. While that might seem unlikely for an NCAA Division II player in Colorado, his collegiate story at least sounds similar on the surface to that of former Northern Colorado defensive end Aaron Smith, about to begin his 12th season with the Steelers after playing Division II ball at UNC.
Like Smith, who was from Colorado Springs, Schiechl was undersized coming out of high school and overlooked by the major-program recruiters.
“Mines was really the only place that offered me a scholarship,” Schiechl said.
A good student at Bear Creek, he fit the Mines academic profile too.
“I’ve put in a lot of hard work to get here. Coming out of high school, I was probably 6-1 and 185. Even when I took the recruiting trip to Mines, there was a tackle that was 6-6 and 320, and I said, ‘I’m going to get eaten up.’ I decided if I was going to play, I needed to get bigger, or I was going to embarrass myself.”
This summer, Schiechl already has made at least one preseason Division II All-America team.
“He’s a perfect example of looking at a very good player in high school and looking at potential rather than saying, ‘Hey, he’s a ready-made guy who can walk in right now,’ ” Mines coach Bob Stitt said. “He’s 250-something now and could play at a lot of places.”
Footnotes.
Nebraska-Kearney, the preseason pick to repeat as league champion, has applied for admission to the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association and is expected to begin play in that league in 2012. . . . The coaches’ predicted order of finish, behind Kearney and Mines: Chadron State, CSU-Pueblo, Mesa State, Adams State, Western State, New Mexico Highlands, Western New Mexico and Fort Lewis. . . . Former Colorado quarterback Bernard Jackson, who last played football in 2006, has joined the CSU-Pueblo program. He is listed as a senior quarterback, but ThunderWolves coach John Wristen — a longtime CU assistant coach — indicated Wednesday that at least initially, Jackson would play wide receiver and possibly safety.
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
