Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald has been as difficult to read as a calculus textbook when it comes to his evaluation of his struggling football team this season.

After a shocking loss to Southern Illinois in September, he said that he didn't need to do anything to get the ship moving in the right direction because, he said, "The ship is fine."

Just three weeks ago, after his team lost its sixth straight game, to Maryland, he said, "Our program has never been stronger than it is today. We've just had six tough days."

But this is the same coach who also regularly invokes Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. He is famous for his "stats are for losers" mantra, because, at the end of the day, all that really matters are wins and losses.

At his press conference on Monday, after his Wildcats had lost their ninth game in a row to Minnesota, and 15th of their last 16 since last October, I asked him to reconcile those two disparate realities.

Does he really believe that his program is going strong and not in need of anything more than tweaks to get things back on track? Or does he think that drastic changes are needed to reverse what has been a catastrophic couple of years?

Fitzgerald admitted that he will be evaluating everything about his program at the end of the season, and that his team's performance is unacceptable. He didn't come out and say that coaching, or any other kind of changes are certain, but he went as far as he ever has in hinting that they were likely on the way.

"That’s a fair question and I think it will be something I’ll look into after the season," said Fitzgerald. "I think that right now my focus is finishing the season off, number one for our seniors. As a coach, your job is to do everything you can to help them go out the right way, and that’s kind of where we’re at right now...

[But] I’ll look at all those things. I’ll go through [a] macro-evaluation of everything. I kind of do that throughout the year. Then I do the same things, micro-wise. But we’ve got to be better across the board and that starts with me.

"I’m incredibly disappointed in the outcome and the results of our games. There’s no question about that. And ultimately, I’m the one who’s responsible for that, to create that positive-change impact to where we’ve been, [competing] for championships and winning bowl games."

That's what made these last two years particularly frustrating for Fitzgerald and his program. It wasn't too long ago that the Wildcats had things humming.

Fitzgerald's teams made nine bowls in 11 years from 2008 to 2018, the year the Cats won their first Big Ten West championship. The team finished 3-9 in 2019 but rebounded with Fitzgerald's best year in 2020, when the Wildcats won the Big Ten West and the Citrus Bowl, and were ranked 10th in the final AP poll.

But since holding the Citrus Bowl trophy above his head in Orlando -- and honoring retiring defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz -- his program has been in a steep decline.

Northwestern went 3-9 last season, dropping their last six games. This year, they've lost nine straight since opening the season with a win over Nebraska in Dublin, Ireland. They face the very real possibility of losing their last 11 games of the season, which would be the program's longest losing streak since the 1989 team went 0-11.

Maybe it's not a coincidence that in the two years since defensive coordinator Jim O'Neil came on board, the Wildcats are 4-18. Defense was the backbone of the team's success, and the Cats have had problems stopping anything these last two seasons, especially the run. They finished 119th in the nation in rushing defense last season; this year, they are in exactly the same spot.

Unfortunately, Northwestern's problems aren't limited to defense. The Wildcats offense has gone into the tank under third-year coordinator Mike Bajakian, too. They've scored a total of 23 points over the last three games and failed to reach 300 total yards in any of them. The Wildcats rank 128th out of 131 FBS teams in scoring at 15.3 points per game.

But Fitzgerald is pointing his finger at himself before he directs it at any assistants. He's still "trying to push the buttons motivationally" to earn a desperately needed win over these last two weeks to stop the bleeding. But after the season ends with a Nov. 26 game against Illinois, Fitzgerald's focus will turn to larger issues.

"Some of those big-picture things will be things that I’ll look at after the season, and do what I think we have to do to get our program back to where we want it to be, to be competing for championships and playing the way that we’ve played here during my time – which I’m very proud of, frankly," said the 17th-year head man. "I’m very proud of the guys I’ve had the privilege to coach and the guys I’ve had the privilege to work with.

"Same thing with this group. I’m bitterly disappointed that we haven’t been able to help them get the wins that we all want, but I absolutely love the group, they’re a terrific group of young people that I think have an incredibly bright future."

Fitzgerald hopes that he can send this group off with a win. The Cats get their second-to-last chance on Saturday at Purdue.