Ifeadi Odenigbo's last shot at redemption

EVANSTON- 2016 will be more than Ifeadi Odenigbo’s final season as a Northwestern Wildcat. It will also be his last shot at redemption.

The fifth-year senior defensive end came to Northwestern out of high school with the high expectations that come with being not only the top-ranked recruit of his class, but of the entire Pat Fitzgerald era. Yet over the first three years of his career, Odenigbo has been used as a pass-rushing specialist and has never been a starter; a part-time player who showed glimpses of his outsize talent on occasion, but one who hasn’t lived up to his status of one of the best 100 recruits in the entire country in the Class of 2012.

Odenigbo thinks back and says that can live with how his college career has gone so far. But he still has some unfinished business to take care of before he can be proud of it and say that he realized the massive potential he showed as a high school player. He knows, too, that, for the most part, he has been his own worst enemy in his development.

“As of now, I’m not pleased with where my progress has gone, but I can work with this,” said Odenigbo at Northwestern’s Media Day on Wednesday. “And this is my last year to make up for it.”

To understand how Odenigbo feels, one must go back to January of 2012, when he committed to Northwestern out of Centerville (Ohio) as a four-star recruit, the No. 99 overall prospect and the No. 9 weakside defensive end in the nation. He remains the bluest chip Fitzgerald had ever landed, and his offer list looked like a Top 25 poll, with the likes of Alabama, Oklahoma, USC, UCLA and, yes, even Ohio State.

An academically oriented kid, he raised plenty of eyebrows when he chose Northwestern over finalists Notre Dame and Stanford. He was a potentially program-changing recruit, one that could not only impact the Wildcats’ fortunes on the field, but in recruiting as well. If Northwestern could pluck a player like that from Ohio State’s backyard, there’s no telling who else they might land.

Fans got their first glimpse of how different Odenigbo was right out of the box. On national signing day, Fitzgerald held his customary press conference to unveil his new signees to the media. Right away, Odenigbo stood out.

Other signees’ highlights were often grainy tapes from spartan high school stadiums; Odenigbo’s, however, was in HD, snippets from ESPN's telecast of the Under Armour All-American game at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla. The other incoming Wildcats' videos used spot shadows or arrows so that you could see which pixelated blob on the screen was the player on which to focus; Odenigbo's had an ESPN analyst breaking down his plays in slow-motion replay, with a telestrator.

The message was clear: Odenigbo was a different breed of recruit.

Yet his career in Evanston hasn’t gone exactly as planned, even if it started auspiciously. Odenigbo appeared in his second collegiate game as a true freshman in 2012, a rare feat for a program that likes to redshirt its rookies. But, as luck would have it, he hurt his shoulder in that game against Vanderbilt and was out for the rest of the season, missing out on a 10-win season and a Gator Bowl victory.

Since then, there have been mostly flashes, like distant lightning on the horizon, for teams that underachieved and posted two straight 5-7 seasons.

In 2013, as a redshirt freshman, he made just nine tackles playing almost exclusively on passing downs, but 6.5 of them were for a loss and 5.5 were sacks, second-most on the team. He also had a quarterback hurry that led to an interception by Chi Chi Ariguzo in NU’s showdown with Ohio State.

Odenigbo had what looked to be a breakout performance against Western Illinois in 2014, when he became just the fourth player in Big Ten history to force three fumbles in a single game. He finished that contest with two sacks but went on to record just one more all season. He also deflected a pass that led to a Jimmy Hall interception in a win over Wisconsin. But Xavier Washington, a true freshman who was just a two-star recruit out of high school, seemed to make more of an impact as a reserve that season than Odenigbo did.

Last year was more of the same, even if the team reversed its fortunes to finish 10-3. Odenigbo played in 12 of 13 games and ranked second on the team with five sacks, but he failed to really influence any games and starters Deonte Gibson and Dean Lowry got all of the accolades -- and for good reason, as both are currently in camp with NFL teams.

The knock on Odenigbo early in his career was that he was too skinny to play every down. When he arrived at Northwestern, he was a sleek 6-foot-3, 205-pounder. He could use his elite speed off the edge to rush the passer, sure, but he didn’t have enough weight to hold the edge against the run.

Odenigbo worked hard in the weight room to add bulk to his frame each season. Last year, he weighed in at 250 pounds. On Wednesday, he said he tipped the scales at 270 well-muscled pounds. Odenigo said that he bench pressed 285 pounds as an incoming freshman; he now puts up 430 on the bench and showed the world in a tweeted video last week that he could deadlift 720 pounds four times.

Strength is certainly not the issue anymore, and Fitzgerald says that size alone was never what was holding Odenigbo back. It was consistency. The coach didn’t feel like Odenigbo could be counted on to do his job every down.

“Ifeadi, you probably saw the tweets that he sent out, he’s stronger than he’s ever been,” said Fitzgerald. “It’s never been a lack of ability to rush the passer with Ifeadi, it’s just been consistency, and that’s on myself and Hank (defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz) and (defensive line coach) Marty Long as coaches to help him get where he needs to be.”

Odenigbo agreed with the coach’s diagnosis, but not the cure. He sees himself as the major culprit. If he had a bad game, Odenigbo said that he tended to dwell on it in his mind, and the result was a sort of paralysis by analysis. He was thinking too much on the field and not reacting. That hurt his performance.

“When you go through a slump -- some guys go through it, some guys don’t -- people respond differently,” he explained. “I think back in my younger days, I didn’t respond the appropriate way.

“So, when you go through a slump, I tend to overthink quite a bit. I need to be more simple, and kind of just have that swagger. That swagger you need to say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on right now, I need to overcome this and respond to adversity.’

“When you don’t get a sack a game, you think ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ Keep calm, cool down. Most importantly, we’re winning right now. That’s the most important thing. Everything else is going to come into place.”

Ironically, Odenigbo feels like he got past all of the internal mind games by reverting back to his high school self and adopting a more confident mindset.

“You overcome that by saying, going back to what you did in high school and everything: ‘I’m the best player here.’ It’s not ‘I think I can,’ it’s ‘I know I can.’ I know I can. I know I can.’”

He only had two practices to go on, but Fitzgerald has liked what he’s seen so far from No. 7 in camp.

“Ifeadi definitely is focused and he’s had two really good mental days in shorts so (I) look forward to seeing how that progresses,” he said.

It’s obvious that the failure to live up to expectations has weighed on Odenigbo. Typically, when players are asked to look back on their careers, they almost invariably say that it went by too quickly. Not Odenigbo.

“That’s what everyone says, ‘Oh, college went so fast.’ For me, I thought it went pretty long. When you’re in the weight room struggling, trying to make gains, I remember every second, every time I was sweating blood. The hell that we went through, all the adversity that we faced. I feel like it went the right time.”

The 2012 Top 100 Odenigbo was a part of is littered with names like Jamies Winston, Reggie Ragland and Todd Gurley, players who are already stars in the NFL. There are plenty of busts on the list, too, of course. Odenigbo lies somewhere in between.

But he knows that his career is not over yet. He has one more season to leave his mark in Evanston, if not for history’s sake, then for his own. He still wrestles with his legacy in his own mind.

“I’m happy with the player I’ve become. Career? I still have something that’s still unfinished. So I guess this will be my year. This will be the end of this year, and this will sum up how everything went.”