Credit for turnaround goes to Fitz and coaches

Things were not looking good for Northwestern on Oct. 7.

The Wildcats had just gotten clobbered by Penn State 31-7 in a game that was more lopsided than those numbers indicate. It was their second straight ugly loss, as they were drubbed the week before by Wisconsin, 33-24, in what was a 23-point game midway through the fourth quarter before two late Wildcat touchdowns made the final score more palatable. And those two losses came mere weeks after Northwestern got embarrassed at Duke, 41-17.

The Wildcats stood at 2-3 on the season and 0-2 in the Big Ten at that point. Hopes for contending for a Big Ten championship with a veteran team had already disappeared and fans were out for blood. They wanted heads to roll.

There were open calls for coaching changes to head coach Pat Fitzgerald’s staff on the WildcatReport message boards, as one would expect. But it was also in the media: mainstream, social and otherwise. Offensive coordinator Mick McCall and offensive line coach Adam Cushing were the biggest scapegoats, and wide receivers coach Dennis Springer drew some ire as well. Fans wanted them gone. If not at that moment, then after the season for sure.

The defense, save for the inexplicable Duke game, was playing well. But the offense that had generated a grand total of 114 rushing yards and surrendered 16 sacks in those three losses was in need of a down-to-the-studs rehab, most fans reasoned.

Fitzgerald defended his coaches and remained patient. Instead of drastic changes, he gave fans and the media the same old tired platitudes about going to work, doing a better job coaching, and developing his players. It seemed ridiculously old-fashioned at the time, almost out-of-touch. Fitzgerald had gotten too comfortable in his 12th year at Northwestern, many said.

But Fitzgerald’s plan wound up working. The Wildcats turned things around and won their last seven games in a row, NU’s longest winning streak in Big Ten play since the magic 1995 Rose Bowl season. And who was most responsible for the turnaround? McCall, Cushing and Springer.

McCall retooled his to-that-point anemic offense. They stopped trying to stubbornly run the ball against stacked fronts and let quarterback Clayton Thorson throw the ball from the pocket. The Wildcats started doing something very unusual: winning games in which they didn’t run the ball effectively. They beat Michigan State and Purdue while rushing for less than 100 yards. They also turned what has long been a weakness of their spread offense over the years – the red zone – into a strength: the Wildcats turned 54 trips inside the 20-yard line into points 49 times, the second-best percentage (90.7) in the Big Ten, behind only Penn State.

The running game returned down the stretch as Northwestern exceeded 200 rushing yards in three of its last four games, including a season-high 306 in the finale. Justin Jackson had to fight for every yard he got all season, but he still managed to hit 1,000 yards to become just the second runner in Big Ten history to do it in four straight seasons.

Springer’s wide receivers, who were once unable to consistently shake man-to-man coverage, started to get open. A different receiver seemed to come up with a big game every week: Jackson, Macan Wilson, Bennett Skowronek, Flynn Nagel, Garrett Dickerson and even Cameron Green led or co-led the team in catches during Northwestern’s streak.

None of that could have been accomplished without improvement from Cushing’s offensive line, the much maligned unit that was singled out as the biggest reason for the team’s early season struggles. The Wildcats played musical chairs along the front line early in the season, throwing out different players from week-to-week, quarter-to-quarter and even drive-to-drive as Cushing searched for the best combination of five.

He finally found it: during the Wildcats’ seven-game streak the same quintet started every game – from left to right tackle Blake Hance, JB Butler, Brad North, Tommy Doles and true freshman Rashawn Slater. They didn’t do anything spectacular but got better each week to the point that they dominated the line of scrimmage in the last two games. The team ran for a combined 583 yards and seven touchdowns in beating Minnesota and Illinois by a combined score of 81-7. Pass blocking was much better, too: Thorson was sacked just 13 times in the Wildcats’ nine wins.

Along the way, Northwestern became the first FBS team in history to win three straight overtime games (over Iowa, Michigan State and Nebraska). The Wildcats beat Hawkeye and Spartan teams that beat Ohio State and Penn State, respectively, shortly afterward. They even earned a No. 22 spot in the CFP rankings.

Fitzgerald is already Northwestern’s all-time winningest coach and has accomplished quite a bit in his career, but turning this season around may represent the best coaching job he’s done in Evanston.

McCall, once the whipping boy, was called out for the exemplary job he did with the offense this season by BTN’s Gerry DiNardo. Fitzgerald sang Cushing’s praises.

After Northwestern’s 42-7 win over Illinois on Saturday, Fitzgerald took stock of how far his team and his coaching staff had come in seven weeks.

“This doesn’t happen by accident. This happens by the way that they have prepared,” said Fitzgerald. “There was a lot of people taking shots at them and taking shots at our program and coaching staff. I think they answered that by shutting the noise off and doing the only thing you can and that is to go to work: roll your sleeves up and go to work. That’s why we are Chicago’s Big Ten team. If we can do that more consistently, if I can coach them better to do that, we can take the next step as a program.”

It’s not sexy. It doesn’t attract clicks. But it works.

BTN’s Corey Wootton – a former Wildcat who may be a bit biased – tweeted Monday, “I think @coachfitz51 deserves B1G coach of the year…the way then turned it around and won 7 straight to finish w/ 9 wins!”

We won’t go that far. The coaches did a great job, but they weren’t miracle workers. Of NU’s seven wins during the streak, only one, No. 16 Michigan State, had a winning Big Ten record. The other six teams the Wildcats downed went a combined 16-38 in conference play.

WildcatReport predicted a 9-3 record for the Wildcats before the season and that’s where they ended up. It’s just that the path to that destination had more potholes than expected right out of the driveway.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why the Wildcats got off to such a slow start. Their offensive line was a glaring weakness, so strong, veteran front sevens like Duke’s, Wisconsin’s and Penn State’s ate them alive. Defensively, they lost three of their top six cornerbacks for the season to injury, leaving them prone to big plays. Jackson, their best player, was dinged up early in the season and wasn’t his usual brilliant self. They were playing true and redshirt freshmen at offensive line, wide receiver, defensive line, linebacker and safety.

Those players rounded into form over time and by the end of the year, BTN named three of them – tackle Rashawn Slater, defensive end Samdup Miller and middle linebacker Paddy Fisher – to the Big Ten All-Freshman team, as many as any other team in the conference. Fisher is the freshman defensive player of the year after recording 110 tackles.

The Wildcats would love to get another shot at Wisconsin or Penn State now, when they are playing their best football. They sputtered out of the blocks, but they are firing on all cylinders right now and will be a tough matchup for whatever team they face in a bowl game, be it the Holiday, Music City, Outback or Citrus.

Fitzgerald was happy for what his team accomplished over the last seven weeks after beating Illinois on Saturday, but a part of him knows that this team had a real shot at achieving something bigger if things had come together a little bit earlier.

“It is great to own the Land of Lincoln for another 364 days, but the destination we want to be at is Indianapolis,” he said. “I am really disappointed we are not there, especially for our seniors and for our fans. But I tip my hat to the Badgers.”

And Northwestern’s fans should tip their hats to Fitzgerald and his coaches.