NAPERVILLE, Ill. – North Central and Elmhurst will represent the College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin (CCIW) in the 2012 NCAA Division III Football Championship as announced today.

Both the Cardinals and Bluejays, along with Wheaton, shared the conference regular season title, but North Central earned the automatic bid to the NCAA postseason because of the point differential tiebreaker.

The Cardinals will make their seventh postseason appearance in eight years when they travel to Thousand Oaks, California to face California Lutheran (8-1) on Saturday, November 17 at 2 p.m. Central time.

Elmhurst will make its first-ever NCAA Division III Football Championship appearance and will travel to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Coe College (10-0) on Saturday at Noon. The conference title was the Bluejays’ first since 1980.

This marks the third-straight year and fourth time in six seasons that the CCIW will send multiple representatives to the NCAA Division III Football Championship.

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The College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin (CCIW) was founded in 1946 and currently services eight member institutions including Augustana College (Rock Island, IL), Carthage College (Kenosha, WI), Elmhurst College (Elmhurst, IL), Illinois Wesleyan University (Bloomington, IL), Millikin University (Decatur, IL), North Central College (Naperville, IL), North Park University (Chicago, IL) and Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL). During the 2011-12 academic year, the CCIW honored 1,323 academic all-conference recipients, 16 CoSIDA Academic All-Americans, 1 CoSIDA Academic All-American of the Year, 89 all-Americans and three national championship teams.