DURHAM, N.C. – Two years ago, things seemed to be falling into place for Northwestern. The Wildcats were ranked, had a 4-0 start, and College GameDay was coming into town heading into an Oct. 5 showdown with No. 4 Ohio State. Alums like Mike Greenberg were saying things like “it is by far the most important game played on campus in the nearly 30 years I have been connected to the school.”
And through 51 minutes, Northwestern looked the part. The ‘Cats had a 30-27 lead until Carlos Hyde went Carlos Hyde and put Ohio State up 34-30 with a little over five minutes left. Northwestern seemed to have one more rally in it until Kain Colter was stopped on fourth and one. The team knew it missed a golden opportunity – in prime time with the world watching – but seemed proud of its efforts. Head coach Pat Fitzgerald was upset yet excited for the future of the program in postgame. Student journalists were still buzzing after the game about the possibility of a big bowl game after a 4-1 start that saw the Wildcats go toe to toe with a top five opponent. Everything seemed fine.
To say “and then the bottom dropped out” would be a bit of an understatement for the team from Evanston.
Following the GameDay weekend, Northwestern lost seven games in a row, including that memorable Hail Mary by Nebraska, the three overtime game vs. Michigan, a three-point loss to Minnesota and an overtime loss to Iowa. The team ended the year with a dead cat bounce win over Illinois but still couldn’t get to bowl eligibility at 5-7.
The next year was more of the same, aside from that overtime win over Notre Dame. Getting beaten by Northern Illinois at Ryan Field in Week 2. A 48-7 thumping to Iowa. That revenge loss to Illinois the final week of the season that kept the Wildcats out of a bowl game. Not to mention the cloud of national attention that came from the players deciding to unionize, leading to a N.L.R.B. ruling in August ultimately rejecting the bid.
Nobody was more excited to turn the page on the nightmare of the past two years than Northwestern itself, and the Wildcats knocked loose any sleep they had with an opening week win over Stanford. Folks were quick to call it the demise of Stanford, but after a win over Duke in Durham on Saturday – and Stanford’s upset of USC later on in the day – it’s maybe time to wake up to the possibility of Northwestern as finally assuming the role it was so close to taking on that rainy day in Evanston two years ago.
“We’ve been a part of that roller coaster ride here for a couple years,” Fitzgerald said after the game on Saturday. “We tore down that roller coaster. Burned it. We’re focused on us and just trying to get better, and that’s where the guys are at right now.”
Getting better is one thing. Staying loose and confident is another, and there doesn’t seem to be any woe-is-me whipped dog mentality left amongst anyone in that Northwestern locker room right now. Coming off the field, the entire team was hooting and hollering because the win meant they’d get to eat Chick-Fil-A on the bus.
Even the typically formidable Dean Lowry, the Wildcats’ terrific defensive end, couldn’t contain his excitement. When asked about the prospect of those addicting chicken sandwiches, he started beaming.
“It’s huge,” Lowry said. “The last time we had Chick-Fil-A was I think the Notre Dame game. It’s definitely good to get Chick-Fil-A again.”
College kids love junk food, and after a brief impromptu chant of “CHICK-FIL-A, CHICK-FIL-A, CHICK-FIL-A,” the guys turned their attention to the music in the locker room, blasting Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” and booming the words to Silentó’s “Watch Me” with plenty of dancing to go along with it.
Make no mistake; this isn’t because the team felt like it stole one against another Power Five opponent. Rather, this was more a sense of satisfaction that hard work is finally paying off. Sure, Duke has won 19 games over the past two seasons and its own renaissance has led to a stadium renovation that means there’s finally no longer a track around the stadium and the PA gets to blast Migos and Crime Mob during timeouts.
But Northwestern feels it can not only go up against the other academic powerhouses like Stanford and Duke, it can beat traditional powers as well. The first three weeks of the season are validation in some respects, not in the bulletin board “the media was wrong” false motivation or anything like that, but that all the work in preseason, and on the recruiting trail, and in the weight room, and in the film room, is actually paying off.
The demons were dropped off in bags Dexter-style somewhere in Lake Michigan, and Northwestern appears ready to resemble the 10-win team that beat Mississippi State in the TaxSlayer bowl in 2012 instead of the snakebitten team of the past two seasons.
Although some fans aren’t ready to buy in all the way, at least not yet.
“Basically, Kain Colter coming up short on that fourth-down play against Ohio State was the start of a downward spiral for a program that until then had been on the rise,” Sports Illustrated college football editor and 2011 Northwestern grad Ben Glicksman said. “And now is the first time I am even sort of kind of cautiously maybe optimistic about the program since.”
Two years of that nonstop roller coaster would have those with even the most ironclad stomachs feeling queasy, but it’s safe to say a better Northwestern is good for the Big Ten as a whole. With so much focus on conference superiority, it’s important the league’s sometimes afterthought teams rattle their sabers a little bit too.
Ohio State and Michigan State came in at Nos. 1 and 2 in the AP Poll on Sunday, the first time the Big Ten had the top two spots since November 2006. Iowa grabbed a sneaky good win over Pittsburgh (at least, this early in the season) to move to 3-0. Even Indiana shocked many by staying undefeated after beating Western Kentucky.
There’s still plenty to criticize if you’re looking for it (Minnesota’s shaky play vs. Kent State, Purdue being Purdue, Illinois getting waxed by North Carolina, Nebraska’s 1-2 start), but not from the Wildcats, who have those two big Power Five wins and their eyes fixed firmly straight ahead.
“We’ve flushed what’s happened over the last two years,” Fitzgerald said. “This is a totally different team. Quite frankly, I think everybody behind me is tired of talking about it. I guess now, it’s time to start talking about the 2015 team, if you guys don’t mind? That’d be good. But I understand you have a job to do, too.”
Northwestern’s giving us something to talk about. And if it keeps winning, the past will be just that, while the rotting wooden roller coaster of the previous two seasons lays in shambles left to be swallowed up by the nature of progress and the passing of time. There’s still a long way to go. You know what they say: Even Six Flags Great America wasn’t built in a day.
