Chicago State Football kicked off its inaugural Division I season on Saturday, Aug. 29, putting the school on the field as the only Division I football team in Chicago. It is a small program in a big market, and for Chicago State it is the clearest sign yet that the university intends to redraw its athletic identity.
For Monique Carroll, who became athletic director in July 2022, the launch was the result of a decision to build something the school had never had before. Chicago State began formally exploring football at the start of 2023, formed a committee and opened fundraising efforts to cover the startup costs, then kept moving even as the numbers and the optics made the project look unusual.
The scale of that effort helps explain why the debut matters now. Chicago State started at the FCS level, meaning it was trying to assemble a Division I football program from scratch, in a city that had not had one since The University of Chicago dropped football in 1939. The school later joined the Northeast Conference in 2024, added women's triathlon that same year and opened a coaching search that drew more than 300 applicants before hiring Bobby Rome II in April 2025.
Rome brought a résumé built far from Chicago. He was a former North Carolina fullback with NFL stints, joined the Moscow Patriots in 2012, coached Saint Petersburg State in 2013 and was hired in 2014 to launch American football at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. He later spent three years with the Wild Panda because that was how long his visa allowed. His words about that path carried the same theme Chicago State is betting on now: building, serving and seeing something through.
That is where Carroll's role gets more complicated. She said football was not something she would call important, yet she still pressed ahead, telling the president and the board of trustees that if the landscape changed and the move no longer made sense, the school would stop. It never got to that point. The project survived the doubts, the cost and the long odds because Carroll believed the university needed a reset, even if football was not the point in itself.
Chicago State has carried a long athletic burden, with most of its sports owning miserable all-time records and a historically low graduation rate on the books at the U.S. Department of Education. The rare bright spot came in 2024, when Chicago State became the first team in school history to reach the NCAA tournament. Now the university is asking football to do something bigger: change what the school looks like to its own students, to the South Side and to everyone who has not expected much from its programs.
The first season is only the opening test. What Chicago State can become on the field, and whether the startup model can sustain itself financially, remains the question behind the celebration. But the answer will start being written in real time now, with Rome on the sideline and Chicago State trying to prove that a program built from nothing can still alter a school's future.
