In most parts of Illinois, no one really talks about the 1985 Bryan Cox-led, coach Bob Shannon-driven East St. Louis Flyers the way they should. They were honored by USA Today and the National Sports News Service (NSNS) as the national high school football championship team of the year, an achievement that would be repeated in 1999. No other high school football team in Illinois can claim that distinction.
Now we’re standing on the precipice of another team entering that hallowed homily.
Win or lose this week, next week or never, the Mount Carmel football run of 2025 will always mean something — preseason No. 1 ranking, expectations beyond any the state has seen in probably the last two generations, etched in these Sun-Times pages in August as possibly “the most talented team the Chicago area has ever seen.”
The Caravan went through the season as a squad functioning more like a squadron, a 12-0 juggernaut unable to be matched or defeated. They were held under 30 points once and had only three single-digit victories. They go eight or nine legit future D-I players deep — depth on offense and defense that hasn’t been seen in the state since Red was Grange. They have a coach, Jordan Lynch, who followed a legend only to become one.
Their move up to 8A from 7A this year will be how all conversations about this team begin and end. They beat three-time defending 8A champ Loyola twice. In a game that was supposed to be the Caravan’s biggest test, they demolished Lincoln-Way East, two-time 8A state semifinalists the last three seasons, 48-7. More than undefeated, MC is (almost) unbothered.
Where there was supposed to be struggle for them in this move up, there wasn’t. Where there was supposed to be challenge, there wasn’t. Where they were expected to face “Class 8A” adversity, they didn’t.
Let me rewrite that: They didn’t . . . “allow it.” Please consider and recognize the difference.
“What [this season] has meant to us is that we’ve been able to carry on the tradition of so many men before us,” Mount Carmel athletic director Phil Segroves said. “Mount Carmel has been playing football for over 100 years. There’s a standard here. We tell the players: ‘It’s not your tradition yet. It will be yours when you leave. Now what are you going to do to write your chapter in this tradition?’
“So far, we’ve upheld the standard, but there’s more work ahead of us.”
Mount Carmel provided a different sense of “meet the challenge” in this day and circumstance in which neighborhoods like the one the school is in are being inhumanly “blitzed.” It gave a “prove everyone wrong” mantra within a surrounding neighborhood where many of us are looked at as “wrong” at birth. Even as an $850 million presidential center is being built less than a half-mile north. The team quietly became a rallying cry — one that not even the school probably understands how deep it goes.
Now come the single-season conversations. The debates. The 2025 Mount Carmel Caravan vs. Everyone. The resurrecting of their 1993 5A champs. Undefeated. Same of an ’88 team that went unbeaten, beating three other undefeated teams (consecutively) en route to a 6A state crown. A program that has 16 state titles (10 under Frank Lenti during his 34-year run as coach) and is considered in damn near all high school football circles as the cream of Illinois football, that has a team right now far greater than any that has been formed inside the walls and on the grass of 64th and Dante.
Where will they stand?
Not a prep school. Not a football factory. Not nationally known a la Mater Dei in California or Archbishop Moeller in Ohio (which the Caravan beat 43-42 to open the season). In the end, Mount Carmel is a small neighborhood school. In a much different way than a Hyde Park or Kenwood or King, but as an educational institution that plays the role as one of the anchors of everything the neighborhood it sits in represents. And if this Caravan team eventually goes on to win the state title, it will have the chance to be to high school football in Illinois what the ’85 Bears have been to the world of football over the last 40 years.
Let that marinate.
“From a community perspective,” said Art Thompson, ex-NEIU football coach and the father of a former Mount Carmel football player as well as a resident who stays blocks away from the school, “[this team] reminds me of what the Bears talk about all the time: ‘Good. Better. Best.’ The kids have learned to embrace all cultures from all communities within the Chicagoland area. Coach Lynch seems to have a knack for bringing up great talent in tiers. There are great freshman players, sophomores, juniors and seniors, but they play well together regardless of age and experience. They are very proficient at what they do.”
Proficient. Intentional. Inspirational. For one year, this year, thus far, Mount Carmel’s football brotherhood has overcome all the pressure and inarguably become, as predicted from the get, them.