C.J. Bacher came from what seems like a different era of Northwestern football. When Bacher was the quarterback in Evanston, from 2006-08, the Wildcats were known for their offense, and the gunslinger from California collected yards like a car console collects coins. Meanwhile, NU’s defense couldn’t stop anyone.

Now, the opposite is true. The defense is suffocating opponents, while the offense is running in wet cement. After five games, Northwestern has a grand total of 702 passing yards and two touchdowns. Bacher once threw for 520 yards and five TDs in one game, against Michigan State in 2007.

Hunter Johnson, TJ Green (briefly) and now Aidan Smith have all taken turns leading the offense as the quarterback, with very little success. Northwestern ranks below 120th in the nation in points, yards, passing and SP+.

Bacher says he watches Northwestern today like a fan rather than a former quarterback. All those years of film study, he said, wore off after a few years. “Now I just watch the ball instead of the backside safety,” he says. He is more interested in cheering for the Wildcats than analyzing the game plan.

So Bacher is just as disappointed as any NU supporter in the Ryan Field stands who couldn’t tell a cover-four from a two-by-four. The difference is that Bacher sees a lot more than the average fan does. He even saw this sluggish start coming – though he didn’t think it would be this bad.

“Any time you’re playing three quarterbacks in the first five games, it’s not a good sign,” he said.

Bacher envisioned these problems because Northwestern was replacing Clayton Thorson, a four-year starter and the school’s all-time leading passer. Anytime that happens, Bacher says, there’s going to be a natural downturn in offensive production, especially in the passing game.

“You’re losing a four-year quarterback who’s now on an NFL roster,” he explained. “The expectations are high, and fans think that the next guy is going to immediately pick up where (Thorson) left off. It doesn’t work that way.” Especially, he says, when the quarterbacks replacing him are making their first career starts.

Bacher anticipated these issues arising because he lived through a similar situation himself. Eerily similar, in fact.

Back in 2006, head coach Pat Fitzgerald’s first year as head coach, Bacher was one of three quarterbacks trying to replace Brett Basanez, who had been a four-year starter and just graduated the year before. Basanez, like Thorson, had been unbelievably productive in purple, throwing for more than 10,000 yards in his career, a mark that only he and Thorson have reached in Northwestern history – and one that only three other Big Ten quarterbacks have attained.

None of the three QBs battling for the job in 2006 had much experience. Mike Kafka, a redshirt freshman who had the best arm of the bunch, started the season opener, but the offense struggled. He gave way by Week 5 to fellow redshirt freshman Andrew Brewer, who was a better runner than thrower and would eventually move to wide receiver the next season. Bacher, a redshirt sophomore who had played 53 snaps in his career to that point and was battling an injury, didn’t come on until late in the game in Week 7, a loss to Purdue that dropped the Wildcats’ record to 2-5.

But Bacher gave the offense a spark and he won the starting job. The next week, the Wildcats exploded for 38 points against Michigan State and – even though they lost the game, 41-38, after the biggest comeback in NCAA history – the team had found its quarterback.

Bacher wound up starting the rest of the season, as well as the next two years. He still ranks as the No. 4 passer all-time at Northwestern (7,571 yards) and the single-season passing record holder (3,656 yards in 2007).

This year, NU had a quarterback with some experience in Green, but he broke his foot in the season opener and is lost for the season. Johnson, like Kafka, has an arm with NFL talent. Smith coming off the bench to lead two fourth-quarter touchdown drives against Wisconsin two weeks ago reminded Bacher of his own performance against Purdue 13 years ago.

But it remains to be seen whether Smith can sustain that spark and nail down the job, like Bacher did.

The statistics Northwestern’s offense has amassed per game this season are abysmal – 14.4 points (127th in the nation), 140.4 passing yards (122nd) yards and 292.8 total yards (127th). In fact, they are the lowest since that 2006 season. That year, the Wildcats finished with just 16.6 points, 169.0 passing yards and 311.1 total yards per game.

What’s the next lowest offensive production year during the Fitzgerald era? The 2015 team, which scored just 19.5 points and generated only 327.1 yards of offense. That season actually had the lowest passing game production of Fitzgerald’s 14 years, only 138.5 yards per game. Not coincidentally, that was also Thorson’s first year as a starter, when he was taking over from two years of Kain Colter and Trevor Siemian rotating as quarterbacks, and one year of just Siemian as the No. 1.

So the three worst offensive seasons in Fitzgerald’s career came in years where he was replacing a multiple-year starter at quarterback, and they are the only years where the Wildcats scored less than 20 points per game. Maybe Bacher is really on to something with this new quarterback-poor offense theory.

The results for each of those three years vary greatly, however.

The 2006 season, coming after the sudden death of head coach Randy Walker just two months before the opener, was expected to be a down year. The Wildcats lived up to that low bar with a 4-8 record, the worst mark of Fitzgerald’s career.

In 2015, despite one of the worst offenses in FBS, the Wildcats rode a sophomore running back named Justin Jackson and a ferocious defense led by Anthony Walker Jr. – two guys playing in the NFL today – to 10 wins and an Outback Bowl berth.

This year, while the defense has been outstanding (27th in scoring and total defense in the nation), Northwestern is just 1-4 (0-3 Big Ten) and in danger of seeing its five-year bowl streak coming to an end.

The whole scenario can be frustrating to Northwestern fans. From the 2000 Big Ten championship season to about the mid-2010s, the Wildcats’ spread offense was the program’s identity. They could put up yards and points with just about anyone, but their defense was the weak link – they had to play in shootouts, or they had no hope of winning.

For the last few years, the tables have turned and Northwestern’s defense has been the team’s backbone. But now that they have the other side of the ball figured out, the offense has gone into a shell.

Bacher isn’t stunned by that development, either. “Generally, there’s a negative correlation between how good a defense is and how conservative an offense is,” he said.

In Bacher’s day, “we had to air it out and move the ball up and down the field to be competitive.” Now that Northwestern’s defense can shut opponents down, Fitzgerald won’t open up the offense and take as many chances with the ball because, “chances are, the defense is going to get the ball back for you, anyway,” says Bacher. It’s what Fitzgerald likes to call complementary football.

And so it goes, the pendulum of football, swinging from the offense to the defense. The hope is that there is still enough time to get the offense into the swing of things this season.