Junior College Football in the West
Deeper and more diverse than you might think
[reposted from my old blog]
When most people talk about JUCO (Junior College) sports, they're generally speaking of members of the NJCAA - National Junior College Athletic Association, though the majority of junior college and community college athletics in the West are not overseen by this body.
Within the NJCAA, the only JUCO football programs that exist in the West are Snow College in Utah, the New Mexico Military Insitutute, and Community Christian College in California. Both Snow College and NMMI are high-level football programs; NMMI won the NJCAA Championship in 2021; but I feel like they are rarely spoken about.
The core volume of NJCAA football is based around the states of Iowa, Kansas, and Mississippi, and so the level doesn't get much attention outside of 4-year institutions looking to pluck some athletic talent from them. The Netflix production "Last Chance U" featured a couple Mississippi programs as well as Laney College in California, a member of the CCCAA, but more on that later.
The NJCAA has split the country into 24 regions, and the region lines often don't quite line up with state lines, creating some odd, arbitrary intra-state divisions.
The West is made up of Regions 1, 5, 9, and 18. And it really makes no sense to me why bordering regions aren't sequentially numbered outside of a couple exceptions.
The conferences that make up the aforementioned regions are the Scenic West Athletic Conference, Arizona Community College Athletic Conference, Western Junior College Athletic Conference, Colorado Community College Athletic Conference, and the Wyoming Community College Athletic Conference.
Of these, only the Western Junior College Athletic Conference plays football, home of the New Mexico Military Institute, and so Snow College and Community Christian College play nationally as independents.
In the Pacific Northwest, the NJCAA essentially does not exist. Instead, there's the independent Northwest Athletic Conference (NWAC) consisting of 36 schools in 4 divisions; North, South, East, and West. Of the 36 programs, 34 are in Washington and Oregon with 1 school in Idaho and 1 in British Columbia, Canada. Unfortunately, the conference doesn't play football, and so Men's and Women's Basketball are the flagship programs.
I doubt we will see football take hold in the conference, though if facilities could be secured I believe there's the geographical density around Portland and Seattle to make things work with manageable expenses.
Outside of Community Christian College as a member of the Scenic West Conference, California also has their own organization, the California Community College Athletic Association, or CCCAA.
As the state of California has a greater population than the entire country of Canada, it isn't all that surprising that they would have over 100 community/junior colleges. Of this group, there are 67 football programs, greater than the 54 football programs of the NJCAA.
These 67 programs are split into the Northern California Football Conference and Southern California Football Association, within which are divisions which are designated as "National" or "American".
The simplest way to describe the difference is that the National divisions are essentially like the P5 of the FBS while the American divisions are the G5 divisions.
As for championships, each conference has a 4-team playoff of the top National teams, and then those 2 champions meet in the CCCAA Championship. As for the American divisions, the top 2 programs in each conference meet up in a single regional championship game. There is also a small collection of bowl games for each conference, though the selection criteria there is unclear.
These programs are an important cog in the football machine as they give opportunities to players who may have been under-exposed and lacked offers, late bloomers, players who need to get their academics in order, or former scholarship players from 4-year schools who fell out of favor and need to get themselves in order and find a new 4 year programs to play for.
Cam Newton famously attended Blinn College in Texas after some poor decisions at Florida resulted in his departure from the Gators program. He won an NJCAA Championship at Blinn then followed that with a BCS Championship at Auburn before being drafted first overall by the Carolina Panthers.
Stetson Bennett is another example who attended Georgia out of high school as a walk-on, left after a season for Jones County Junior College in Mississippi, then returned to Georgia on scholarship and won CFB Playoff National Championships for the 2021 and 2022 seasons.
Some recent quarterbacks who may be unknown include Jake Retzlaff, Jared Taylor, Nathaniel Espinoza, and Diego Pavia.
Jake Retzlaff lacked opportunities when he graduated high school due to COVID affecting his senior year, and he spent 2 seasons in the CCCAA - first with Golden West and a second with Riverside before joining BYU this offseason and is expected to compete for the backup QB position.
Jared Taylor from Washington state went 20-0 as a starter at Feather River College in tiny Quincy, California over the past 2 seasons and is now with FCS Eastern Washington. He is a more athletic QB than Retzlaff, rushing for 1400 yards and 19 TDs in 20 games while passing for 3500 yards and a 39-4 TD to INT ratio. At the moment Eastern Washington only lists 3 QBs on their roster, so I would imagine that Taylor will be in competition for the starting job after the program had a disappointing 3-8 campaign in 2022.
Nathaniel Espinoza has taken a road less traveled. After exhausting his JUCO eligibility following the 2019 season at Golden West, he was out of football for 2 years before ending up at nearby Chapman University at the Division 3 level in 2022. He was clearly the top QB of the SCIAC that season, leading the conference in passing yards, completion %, and TDs. I expect Chapman to at least reach the SCIAC Championship Game this season led by Espinoza, and with their excellent home game broadcasts I encourage anyone to watch their home games through the SCIAC Network.
Diego Pavia is the only non-CCCAA QB of this group, but he did lead the New Mexico Military Institute to an NJCAA Championship in 2021 before joining Jerry Kill's New Mexico State Aggies squad. In 21 games at NMMI he ran for 1100 yards and 15 TDs while passing for 2600 yards with a 31-4 TD:INT ratio. He followed up his NJCAA Championship season taking over the NMSU QB position for good later in the season with electric performances against Liberty and Valparaiso before leading the Aggies to their first bowl appearance since 2017 and only their 2nd since 1960, defeating Bowling Green and reaching the rarified air of a 7-win season.
There is one non-QB CCCAA player that comes to mind - Rejzohn Wright. The cornerback recently went undrafted, though was signed by the Carolina Panthers as an undrafted free agent. His path took him to join his brother at Laney College where he won a CCCAA Championship in 2018 before joining the Oregon State Beavers from 2020-2022.
It's unfortunate that it is generally more difficult for Division 3 programs to take advantage of the talent available at the JUCO level due to the lack of athletic scholarships, but the lack of Division 2 football in the West does open the door for NAIA programs to find players that may have FCS level talent but slipped through the cracks.
Not all schools and programs are equal, so it is important to do research and make the right decisions for yourself, especially with regards to the transferability of course credits. But no one should look down on someone who takes this path, it's clear that it does not preclude an individual from future success.