EVANSTON-Saturday will mark the first game of the 2017 season for all of Northwestern’s players. It will also be the first game at the college level for quite a few of the Wildcats.

Northwestern released its much-anticipated two-deep on Monday and it was littered with first-year players. A total of three true freshmen and five more redshirt freshmen appear among the 44 spots on the depth chart. Throw in special teams and you have four more.

Head coach Pat Fitzgerald said that a lot of rookies on the roster simply came in ready to play and contribute. And if they are ready, Fitzgerald has shown the last few years that he will put them on the field, regardless of their inexperience.

“(The freshmen) had a great summer and they came in ready to compete,” said Fitzgerald at Monday’s press conference. “I think we’re like every program in the country. When you’ve got competition, it allows you to have the best players to be able go out there and earn a job, and that’s what they’ve done.”

There’s one true freshman who earned a starting spot this season: kicker Charlie Kuhbander, the only scholarship kicker on the roster. In addition, three more secured spots on the second team: right tackle Rashawn Slater, defensive tackle Samdup Miller and Will linebacker Blake Gallagher.

Among the redshirt freshmen, two players will take their first snaps in college as starters: right tackle Gunnar Vogel and middle linebacker Paddy Fisher. On the second team, center Nik Urban, defensive end Mark Gooden, cornerback Brian Bullock and safety Travis Whillock will all likely get their first reps in a Northwestern uniform on Saturday.

Neither Vogel nor Fisher, the two first-timers with starting jobs, qualifies as a surprise as both of them have been running with the 1s since last spring. The biggest eyebrow raiser may be Slater. Even though rumors had been swirling throughout camp about his precocious talent, it’s still exceptionally rare for a true freshman to come in and play right away on the offensive line.

Fitzgerald emphasized, however, that the two-deep released today is just a starting point, the first step of a journey that will stretch to November and, the Wildcats hope, into December and January. So he advised reporters not to read too much into it.

In fact, he said the lineup could even change by the time Northwestern kicks off against Nevada. “I reserve the right to do what we need to do on Saturday to win,” said Fitzgerald, meaning that the players who trot onto Ryan Field may not be the same guys listed in the press release today.

Not long ago, Fitzgerald was intent on redshirting as many freshmen as possible. He has loosened up that philosophy over the years as recruiting as improved and more and more players arrived in Evanston ready to play right away.

Fitzgerald even hinted on Monday that there could be more freshmen who see the field before the end of the season, if not the week.

“I think there are more (freshmen) than that that are close, not only true freshmen but redshirt freshmen,” said Fitzgerald. “But we’ll see how things progress.”

“From a competitive depth standpoint, for the start of the season, I like where we’re at.”

Northwestern’s offensive line was a big focus during camp, as Fitzgerald and OL coach Adam Cushing shuffled players like a deck of cards in their effort to “play the best five guys,” regardless of position.

The result doesn’t look much different than the lineup they showed last spring, but, again, Fitzgerald stressed that “the competition is ongoing,” so they will continue to experiment.

The first team, from left tackle to right tackle, is Jared Thomas, Blake Hance, Brad North, Tommy Doles and Vogel. The biggest change is Thomas, a former guard, starting at left tackle, and Hance, a two-year starter at left tackle, moving inside to left guard, displacing JB Butler, last year’s starter.

On the second unit, Hance is the backup left tackle, while Butler is the No. 2 at both guard positions. The other second-teamers are center Urban and right tackle Slater.

With Hance and Butler pulling double-duty, that means that there are eight offensive linemen filling 10 spots on the two-deep. That’s just fine with Fitzgerald, who will play however many linemen prove themselves as ready.

“We’re going to play the best five guys,” repeated Fitzgerald. “Does that mean we play five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten? I don’t know, it’s gonna play itself out… There are a lot of guys in that mix.”

Fitzgerald is an impressive 9-2 in season openers as a head coach, but he has lost two of the last three and fans are particularly focused on last season’s inauspicious season debut.

In 2016 the Wildcats came out of the tunnel and did a face-plant, dropping two straight home games as favorites to start the season. The first one, against a Western Michigan team that wound up 13-1, is nothing to be ashamed of. But the following week, the Wildcats suffered the worst loss of the Fitzgerald era, a stunning 9-7 defeat to Illinois State that was uglier than it sounds.

Not surprisingly, Northwestern’s four captains – safety Godwin Igwebuike, running back Justin Jackson, defensive tackle Tyler Lancaster and quarterback Clayton Thorson – said that they’ve been focused on not repeating debacles like that this season.

“That’s something we’ve used this whole offseason as motivation to start faster and use it throughout workouts, throughout practice, everything,” said Thorson. “That really put us in a hole…We started 1-3 and that didn’t set us up for the kind of season we wanted to have. We were 7-6, which is not a very good record.”

Lancaster added that the program changed the way they practiced and worked out to emphasize fast starts at all times. He vowed that the Wildcats wouldn’t sleepwalk through their non-conference games this year.

“We're going to play every game as if it's our Super Bowl,” he said.