The garden is green, the fruit is ripe and things are looking awfully good for the NIU football team.

When the Huskies welcome in 18th-ranked Bowling Green on Nov. 9, the stakes will be high and the players fully realize this.

“This is a real big game for the program,” NIU quarterback Josh Haldi said. “You could maybe pick on one finger all of the games that are more important than this one.”

With NIU having this Saturday as a bye week, the team began the week’s practice on Tuesday getting a head start in preparation for Bowling Green. The Falcons, on the other hand, are focusing their attention to their Saturday opponent of Kent State, who should be nothing but a small bump in the road to their showdown in DeKalb.

This battle of the titans, brawl of the heavy weights, scrum on top of the mountain, on next Saturday could prove to be the deciding game for the MAC West title.

With the stakes high, do the NIU students, fans, alumni and local residents realize the magnitude of this game?

Assuming the sun comes up on the 9th and the mercury in the thermometer doesn’t drop too low, there shouldn’t be any reason Huskie Stadium shouldn’t reach at least 25,000 fans. So far this year, Huskie Stadium has averaged 19,934 fans in its four home games.

Able to hold a max of 31,000 Dawgs, NIU safety Devron Francis is shooting for the ceiling.

“We want to sell out the game,” Francis said. “We’ve got a Top 25 team coming to DeKalb, you can’t get any better than that.”

Francis, a Florida native, knows all about the Floridian’s top three pigskin programs of Florida State, Florida and Miami.

“Tradition is something that they have and the alumni support them,” Francis said. “Not that our alumni don’t support us, but we just really got to get something going for this game.”

After Bowling Green, the Huskies have Eastern Michigan (2-6, 1-3) and finish with defending MAC Champion Toledo (5-3, 3-1), who lost last week to Miami (Ohio).

The destiny is in the Huskies’ paws and it is not something they want to relinquish anytime soon.

“We might not have another shot at this so we’ve got to savor it,” Haldi said. “Right now, we just want to keep it in perspective, but if Bowling Green goes and beats Kent on Saturday, we could have a team that is undefeated and 18th-ranked in the nation, or lower.”

The Falcons are also the only remaining MAC team that is undefeated. However, not a single team they beat has a winning record.

“Not a lot of people know how good we are and a lot of people still underrate the MAC,” NIU cornerback Vince Thompson said.

People are slowly starting to realize that NIU is the best Division IA team in the state, above 2-7 Northwestern and the 3-5 Illini — the only Division IA programs in the Land of Lincoln.

In the continuing quest to further market this football team, on Tuesday night NIU coach Joe Novak, along with Thompson, Nick Duffy, Larry Williams, Dan Sheldon and Michael Turner, appeared on CLTV, something foreign to all of them.

On the same token of Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T, the MAC dominates ESPN.com’s Top 10 mid-major poll with Bowling Green (1), Marshall (2), NIU (9) and Miami (10). The second best conference represented is the WAC with Boise State (3) and Hawaii (6).

While Huskie fever hasn’t completely percolated into the Chicago media markets with the Tribune and Sun-Times, any and all publicity that NIU is getting is appreciated by the veteran, Thompson.

“This is maybe more important for me than for some of the younger guys, just because I’ve been through a lot of the down times with this program and it’s been rough,” said Thompson, who’s been in the program since ’98 as a redshirt freshman. “For us just to take another step forward is great. A MAC Championship has been our goal all year long.”