EVANSTON-Tell Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald that his teams have gotten off to slow starts the last couple years and he replies, “That’s a nice way to put it.”

He knows that his Wildcats have stumbled out of the gate in each of the last two seasons. In 2016, they did a face-plant out of the tunnel, losing their first two games at home, to Western Michigan and FCS Illinois State. Last year, they started 2-3, suffering a particularly ugly 24-point road loss at Duke.

This year, the stakes are higher than ever as Northwestern opens the season with a Big Ten game for the first time since 1984. To add to the pressure, the Wildcats will be playing on the road against Purdue, a West Division opponent, on a Thursday night.

“Anytime you play a conference road game it's a challenging task,” explained Fitzgerald at Northwestern’s Media Day. “Add gasoline to that fire by having to play in the opener. It's an important next three and a half weeks (of practice), without a doubt, for us to be ready for that game. No doubt we know that they'll be ready and we know it will be rocking and we know it'll be on national TV… We know what we're getting into.”

You can be sure that Fitzgerald has been looking long and hard at his team’s lackluster starts to the last two seasons – and three of the last four, if you include the 2014 campaign that began with a pair of home losses.

This year, he is altering his practice plan to get his team ready for the challenge it faces at Ross-Ade Stadium. As he points out, “if you continue to do the same things over and over again and expect a different result, that’s the definition of insanity.”

Ask Fitzgerald what his team is doing differently this year to start quickly this season and he talks about analytics. Ask a few of his veteran players, and they talk mostly about the team’s mindset.

The solution will likely need to incorporate both.

Fitzgerald said that he and his assistants, along with both the strength & conditioning and medical staffs, spent a good bit of time in the offseason analyzing their practice plans and crunching the numbers. The verdict: Fitzgerald was working the players too hard at the beginning of camp, so they weren’t at their peak at the start of the season. Therefore, he’s made “some little tweaks here and there” to how he prepares his team.

“From a standpoint of my management of the squad at the beginning of camp, I think we've gone maybe a little bit too hard, too early, and we've had to play catch-up to get our guys to recover,” he said. “So we're enacting a little bit of a different plan here as we start things up, and hopefully that will turn out some different results from a preparation standpoint.”

The thought is that lighter practices in early August will give the team stronger legs at the end of the month. “Hopefully that will turn out some different results from a preparation standpoint, and then we've got to take that preparation to a huge test (at Purdue),” he said.

Fitzgerald shared the findings of his research and his plan for camp with his squad. Junior wide receiver Bennett Skowronek heard all of the science behind Fitzgerald’s plan, but he maintains that the biggest change has to occur from the neck-up, not necessarily the neck-down.

“Fitz talked to us briefly about scientific data to get us into camp out of camp fresh and peaking at the right time, but it’s really just an emphasis,” said Skowronek. “The leaders on offense have talked about starting fast. Everything we do – practice, weight room, lifting – we have to have the emphasis on starting fast and getting out the gates quickly.

“Quite frankly, that's hurt us the last couple years. It’s more a mentality. We have to have that mentality of being always on the attack. I think it's important for us coming out of the gate this year because we open up with a prime-time, Thursday night game at Purdue.”

Fifth-year senior guard Tommy Doles agrees. He has absolute faith that the coaches and strength & conditioning staff will put together the right plan to get the team ready. But he still thinks that it’s up to the players to prepare themselves both mentally and physically to come out fast from the opening kickoff. And that happens by coming out fast every day and in every drill during practice.

“I think about what I can control,” said Doles, who is entering his third year as a starter on the offensive line. “How do we start practices, or how do we start lifting. Because I think what we are doing out of the gate can become a habit. So if we're consistently dragging at the beginning of practice or at the beginning of a workout, why should we expect ourselves to come out ready to go at the beginning of games or at the beginning of the season?

“That’s something that the leadership on our team has been thinking about. We know that's been an issue the last couple years. So I'm confident we're going to take…the lessons we learned and the confidence that we've gained and bring it into the start of the season.

“The last thing I'll say is that any game is a big game, but knowing that we have a Big Ten West opponent, that's extra motivation right away.”

Junior defensive end Joe Gaziano says that he and his teammates aren’t changing their mentality for the start of the camp. He has seen it evolve since the Wildcats began workouts last winter, and it’s all focused on one thing: winning a Big Ten championship.

“It doesn't start in camp,” said Gaziano, who led the Big Ten in sacks last season with nine. “It starts in January, when we hit the weight room. So it's a matter of when you first get to the weight room to warm up, or when you first get on the field trying to condition, you have to have the mentality that you're not going to waste any minutes, you're not going to waste any seconds walking around or doing something that's not going to help you win the Big Ten.”

The Wildcats will find out how well their new physical and mental plans worked shortly after 7 p.m. on Aug. 30 in West Lafayette.