Jared Thomas, a former Northwestern center and team captain, provides his analysis of Wildcat games weekly for WildcatReport.
Jared Thomas has a message for Northwestern fans after watching the Wildcats get drilled by Michigan State, 38-21, last Friday night.
“It’s the first game of the season,” he said. “Let’s not all get freaked out about one game.”
The former Wildcat All-Big Ten center and captain knows what he’s talking about. He played on the 2018 Northwestern team that started out 1-3 with a loss to Akron before rebounding to win seven straight conference games, the Big Ten West title and the Holiday Bowl.
Typically, a team improves the most during the first three games of the year, said Thomas. At some point during the season, a team is going to “take a lump,” as he put it, and play a bad game. And a lot of times it happens in openers, which he says are always difficult because of the number of new players settling into new roles.
That’s especially true for a Northwestern team that has lost more production than any other Power Five team going into this season. At least, he says, Northwestern got a game like this out of its system early.
“I like that Northwestern is going to be able to learn a lot from a game like this early in the season,” he said. “It’s hard to win in the Big Ten, and they’re learning that you can’t have self-inflicted wounds and still expect to win. It makes winning that much harder. A lot of lessons are going to come from that.”
The Wildcat players, now, will look at what they could have done better and go to work on improving them. The good news is that the mistakes he saw were ones of technique, not scheme, and those can be fixed.
MORE ON THE GAME:
Takeaways: Michigan State 38 Northwestern 21 l MSU, Walker run over Northwestern l Fitz, Cats recap loss to Michigan State l Loss to MSU no reason to panic
Thomas is a believer that there are a handful of plays – maybe five or six – that usually determine the outcome of a game. You don’t know when they’re going to come, but if you don’t win those plays, you typically don’t win the game, he says.
Here are the plays that Thomas thought were pivotal on Friday night.
1. Walker’s 75-yard run: This one was easy to figure out. On the first play of the game, MSU’s Kenny Walker III took the hand off, turned the corner and was gone, outrunning NU’s defensive backfield for a touchdown. That knocked the Wildcats on their heels and set the tone for the game.
“College football is all about momentum,” said Thomas. “They go 75 yards on the first play of the game and the morale goes down.”
2. Kuhbander’s missed field goal: Michigan State delivered a big shot on that first play, but the Cats came right back with a haymaker of their own, a 41-yard pass from Hunter Johnson to Bryce Kirtz to the MSU 28-yard line. But the drive stalled and Charlie Kuhbander missed a 44-yard field goal attempt. On the next drive, the Spartans cashed in again for a TD.
“You have to get points right there,” said Thomas. “Instead (on the following drive), they scored again and all of a sudden it’s 14-0.”
3. Missed blitz pick up: Down by two TDs at the MSU 23-yard line, Northwestern decided to go for it on fourth-and-7. The Spartans sent seven and, Thomas said, the O-line failed to pick up the blitz. With pressure in his face, Johnson had to get rid of the ball early. The result was an incomplete pass intended for Kirtz.
“If you convert and we go score, it’s 14-7,” said Thomas, who still refers to the Wildcats as we. “That feels a lot better than 14-0 and turning the ball over on downs.”
4. Bad snap: In the second quarter, facing a third-and-5 from its own 25-yard line, Northwestern’s snap sailed wide of Johnson, who knocked it down, picked it up and tried to run but was stopped for no gain. The Wildcats punted on the next play. It was the second straight drive that featured botched ball handling before the play: on the drive before, Johnson inexplicably dropped the ball during his windup. Those kinds of mistakes can shake a team’s confidence and snowball.
“A mistake happens, and if you let it compound to a second, third and fourth mistake, you lose,” he said.
5. Late hit out of bounds: With the score still 14-0, Payton Thorne kept the ball on a zone read and scampered down the left sideline for a 16-yard gain to the NU 29. Then, as he was going out of bounds, linebacker Chris Bergin hit him in the back and drew a 15-yard personal foul call. One play later, Thorne threw a 14-yard touchdown pass to Jordon Simmons to extend the Spartans’ lead to 21-0.
“That’s really going to stick out on film,” said Thomas. “The outcome could have been a lot different. As Coach Fitz always says, momentum is a real thing.”
6. Failing to score on first drive of the second half: After a 29-yard kickoff return by Coco Azema, Evan Hull busted a run right up the middle for 49 yards to the MSU 20. Trailing 21-7, NU had a golden chance to cut Michigan State’s lead to one score. But an illegal motion penalty on first down set the Cats back, and then, on third down, Johnson was sacked for a 10-yard loss. Again, Kuhbander missed the field goal, a 38-yarder, and the Wildcats came up empty. Michigan State took over and drove 80 yards for a three-touchdown lead.
“That was a just a sequence of missed opportunities,” said Thomas.
To Thomas, failing to capitalize on those plays put the game out of reach for the Wildcats.
“If they get half of that list cleaned up, it might have been a one-possession game,” said Thomas. “People see the final score and think the sky is falling.”
But Thomas saw plenty of good things that the team can build on. First and foremost was the play of Johnson, who finished 30 of 43 for 283 yards, with three touchdowns and no turnovers.
“Hunter looked poised, and he knew where he wanted to go with the ball,” said Thomas. “That’s something they can hang their hat on that will have a positive impact moving forward. If you saw a game like that and the quarterback played badly, we might be in trouble. But the quarterback played well. His receivers did, too. It was definitely a bright spot.”
Thomas even saw improvement in the defense. The Wildcats had one of their worst outings in recent memory, allowing 511 yards overall, with 326 of them coming on the ground. But Thomas thought that the unit “found its groove” after the first quarter and a half.
Walker ran for 264 yards, but almost half of that came on two plays: 75- and 50-yard runs. After allowing 194 yards in the first quarter, the Wildcats allowed less than that number combined over the next two quarters. That could have given the team a chance to get back in the game had the offense executed on some of the plays outlined above.
Thomas isn’t sure why Northwestern struggles in early season games. "That's a good question," he said.
As WildcatReport detailed, this is nothing new: head coach Pat Fitzgerald is 5-12 in September over the last five years and 31-13 in all other months.
Thomas thought that, in this case, the fact that it was the team’s opening game with so many new faces in the lineup had something to do with it.
“It’s not an excuse,” he said, “but they had a lot of new starters getting their feet wet. That makes it tougher because no matter what you do in practice, you can ever equate to what it will be like in a game.”
In 2018, when Thomas was the starting center, the Wildcats won the season opener, a Big Ten game at Purdue, but then lost three straight before righting the ship to claim the West title.
“They’re all learning lessons,” he said. “All teams go through growing pains.” Though, he points out, they can learn lessons while winning, too.
“You have to learn early and apply it late,” he said. “They’re going to coach them hard and show them the right way to do things. That’s what shows up late in the season and how you win seven straight Big Ten games (like the 2018 team did).
“Coach Fitz does a good job of coaching fundamentals and teaching guys how to play the right way. That’s how we separate ourselves at Northwestern. We might take some lumps early, but we keep getting better each and every game.”
That seems to be true. Fitzgerald is 16-6 in November over that same five-year period.
Then, Thomas seems to be channeling his former coach when he talks about the future of this team.
“All of their goals,” he said, “are still in front of them.”
Jared Thomas started 30 games for Northwestern from 2016-20, including the last 26 in a row at center. He was a member of the 2018 Big Ten West championship team and an All-Big Ten honorable mention selection and team captain in 2019. He now plays for the Massachusetts Pirates of the Indoor Football League.
