A blaring whistle swiftly follows the crunch of two burley men smashing together and falling to the ground in the cool autumn air on a Saturday afternoon. Fans cheer and a marching band belts that classic team spirit tune. It’s football season, just not at DePaul.

One student wants to change that.

Riley Halligan, DePaul senior and president of the DePaul Football Club (DFC), wants to bring full-contact, tackle football to DePaul. The DFC may be a club sport by definition, but Halligan and his teammates look to rival established Division 1 football programs at major universities.

“Throw the word ‘club’ in there and people think that it’s a little bit of a decreased intensity,” Halligan said. “We don’t have a varsity football team here at DePaul so we are treating our football program like a varsity program.”

DePaul students made Halligan’s dream a little more salient in recent months, bringing plenty of interested participants. With enough players to fill an NFL-sized roster, DFC is ready to launch DePaul’s first football season since 1948. Unfortunately, it will have to wait until next fall.

DFC will hold a simulated season this fall in order to gain both student and administrative support for next season. Halligan said that this “building season” was a group decision that considered both the immediate future and full potential of the program. For the time being, DFC will play without pads but it won’t be flag football. Riley intends to keep the intensity level high in both practices and exhibitions.

DFC applied for funding from the Student Activity Fee Board (SAF-B) and expects to be accepted as a recognized club in the National Club Football Association (NCFA) soon, but it won’t happen overnight. The process requires numerous requests, review boards and hearings before a club can be officially recognized as an operating entity at DePaul. Devin Miller, DFC treasurer and DePaul senior, understands the importance of playing the waiting game in order to achieve success.

“It’s been nearly 80 years since DePaul played a football game,” Miller said. “We have the potential for a winning program and we are committed to making that happen.”

DFC has no doubts that a great football program could emerge from this initiative, but field space is scarce – and that could present a problem. Halligan is coordinating with area high schools, including Lane Tech High School, to acquire both a practice space and a game space. For a club looking to get off the ground, support and reputation are integral parts of that process.

That’s why DFC enlisted in the help of a man who has been around the block a couple of times.

Carlos Jones, DFC’s head coach, founded the men’s semi-pro football team Chi-Town Blaze in 2007 with a modest roster of just 16 men. In the following six years, the roster size has grown to 40 and made the Blaze one of Chicagoland’s most well-known semi-pro football organizations. He also helped coach the Chicago Force women’s football team to the 2013 national title. If anyone can add credibility to DFC’s efforts to bring football to DePaul, it’s Jones.

“It’s real football,” Jones said. “There is more of a time commitment and dedication to football going on here.”

If there is any rivalry that will get DePaul students and alumni buzzing, it’s the rivalry with Loyola University.

Despite such a stiff relationship in sports, club football brings these two contenders together in a way other sports cannot. Halligan said that there are about three dozen schools in the NCFA, but they are spread out across the country and even, most recently, into Canada.

“They’re all kind of scattered,” Halligan said. “We have the advantage of being 20 minutes away from an established team at Loyola.”

DFC is hopeful that its connections with Loyola will help boost the club off the ground and to the level that could put DePaul football on the map, on the same stage as nationally recognized programs. The group is realistic about its ambitions and understands that the road to a Division I team at DePaul will take several years. Competing with traditional teams like Texas and Alabama seems like a wild proposition, but the team believes that someday that dream can be realized.

Though Halligan is set to graduate after this academic year, he hopes that this season will take off and really gain the support that could bring a Division I team to the nation’s largest Catholic university.

DFC’s next steps begin the final week of September with practices, which will contain conditioning, drills and “will look like a traditional football practice,” according to Halligan. By the spring, exhibition games with Loyola are in the works to be officiated with full pads and contact. All of the information will be updated on the group’s Facebook page, DePaul Club Football, which is cruising to nearly 300 “likes.”

Full-contact football, a cross-town rivalry and a rekindling of nearly 70 years of overdue kickoffs could be a reality at DePaul by the end of the decade if students are willing to make that happen. DFC encourages students and alumni to stay up-to-date with its social networks so they can find out about games and attend them for free.

“The next year or so is going to be a very, very exciting time for DePaul football,” said Halligan. “We really want people to notice who we are and we want people to be excited about going to a club football game – we want them to realize that this is a big deal.”