Northwestern announced coaching changes on Monday, but it’s safe to say it wasn’t the sort of sweeping transformation that many fans were hoping for.
Head coach Pat Fitzgerald announced that tight ends coach Bob Heffner was retiring after 43 years of coaching, including the last 13 at Northwestern. Special teams coach Jeff Genyk will assume the tight ends job, while retaining his special teams responsibilities.
The last part of the equation is the surprising one: the Wildcats will add a cornerbacks coach as its 10th full-time assistant. Cornerback coaching responsibilities will be taken away from defensive backs coach Matt MacPherson, who will now, we can assume, coach safeties only. Plus, when you look at the bigger picture, defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil is a defensive backs coach by trade.
That gives the Wildcats three coaches with experience in one position group. Is that overkill? We will find out.
Fitzgerald is probably looking for a dynamic recruiter for the open cornerback coaching spot, someone who is younger than Heffner, certainly, and one who can relate to today’s athletes. Hopefully, one that can help the Wildcats prevent big passing plays, too.
Purdue victimized the Wildcats for four passes that went for more than 40 yards while beating Northwestern 32-14 two weeks ago. Illinois, which had one of the worst offenses in the Big Ten, even hit the Wildcats for four explosive passes, including 39- and 56-yarders, during Saturday’s 47-14 loss.
While this staff shuffling will bring at least one new perspective to the staff room, many fans were expecting more after a dismal 3-9 season that followed a Big Ten West-division championship. It’s the second time in four years that the Wildcats went from first to worst in the West.
Adding a cornerbacks coach won’t help the 119th-ranked rushing defense in the nation. Plus, it does nothing to address an offense that was worst in the Big Ten in scoring (16.6 ppg),
But we didn’t expect Fitzgerald to dismiss either of his coordinators so early in their careers in Evanston. It’s just not a Fitz-like thing to do.
O’Neil is in his first year. At least he was willing to change his base defense from the 4-2-5 “star” alignment we saw early in the season, to Mike Hankwitz’s old 4-3/Cover-4 after the assassination in Lincoln and the bye week. The defense also allowed fewer big plays after that 56-7 loss to Nebraska, before backsliding badly the last two weeks. Stopping the run, however, was something they never really solved.
Northwestern’s offense, on the other hand, showed very little improvement through the year and never really established an identity under offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian. The Cats never scored more than 14 points during their six-game losing streak to end the season, and their season average of 16.6 points per game is just a hair better than the 16.3 they averaged during the offensive meltdown of 2019 that cost previous OC Mick McCall his job.
In Bajakian’s defense, Northwestern’s quarterback play was, shall we say, lacking, as three signal callers combined to complete 57% of their passes, with 13 touchdowns and 14 interceptions. But even in 2020, when the Wildcats had third-team All-Big Ten grad transfer Peyton Ramsey at the helm, they were no better than a mediocre offense, averaging 24.7 points per game to finish 10th in the conference in scoring.
This is going to be an offseason of change for the Wildcats. Not only in the coaching staff, but the roster. Five Wildcats have already entered the transfer portal, including four on Monday. Fitzgerald and his staff are out recruiting and are no doubt shopping for transfers. A quarterback, we assume, will be high on the priority list.
Whether all these developments will appreciably change the results on the field remains to be seen.
