Adversity is not new to Grinnell College football. The team has won exactly two games each year since the cancelled 2020 season. In that span, the Pioneers have lost games 93-0 to Illinois College in 2023 and 79-0 and 70-0 to Lake Forest College in 2021 and 2025, respectively.
This year, Grinnell beat Beloit College 24-0 and have a home game against Lawrence University, who Grinnell have beaten four times in a row. With signs pointing towards another two-win season, a plausible question arises — how do the players feel about the team?
Jack Reed `27 and Luke Konczal `29 spoke to The S&B earlier this season after a close loss to Macalester College about their hopes for this season.
“We’re just gonna put our heads down and go to work as hard as we can, make sure we meet the expectations that we have for each other and win the football games that we know we can win,” said Reed in September.
“I think genuinely, especially from a defensive perspective, we didn’t play a bad football game and there’s a lot of things to be happy about,” said Konczal in September.
In a follow-up interview this week, Reed said there is a stronger desire to win and win now. “Establishing some wins at the end of the season would be moving forward in the right direction going into next season,” he said.
Reed described the final two games of the season against Lawrence and Cornell College as “wins that we think we can get, and honestly, quite frankly, are needed.”
Konczal recognized the impact that a losing season has on a team. “There’s some obvious frustration that should be expected,” he said. Still, he said that optimism is strong among the team.
“Everyone on the team knows we’re right there, especially going into these last three games. So I wouldn’t say the confidence is low or anything like that. We’re just ready to finally put it all together,” he said.
Even in a season marked by repeated losses, the players are optimistic that they are on the right track to prolonged success.
Neal Steger `29 said that this year’s team culture differs from previous years’ in the resilience and motivation shared by the players.
“I think the one thing that we can say is that our team hasn’t given up, and we still are putting in effort every single week at practice, and we want to win games, and we will,” Steger said. “It’s just a matter of time, and we just have to get things right. And, I mean, it will happen.”
Having been on the team for two years longer than Konczal and Steger, Reed said he has witnessed a transformation within the squad.
“I think the experience that the older guys have, being in an environment that wasn’t successful and wasn’t necessarily building up for success or building up like a close-knit culture really allows us to have this sort of mindset that we have to have all 65 guys on board,” Reed said.
Grinnell’s last game of the season is Nov. 15 against Cornell College, which is the Pioneers’ Senior Day. If Grinnell wins as expected against Lawrence, this game would be their final opportunity of the season to break the two-wins-per-year streak.
