Jared Thomas, a former Northwestern All-Big Ten center and captain, analyzes Wildcat football for WildcatReport.
Jared Thomas has been in the shoes of these Wildcat players before. He’s been a part of humiliating defeats.
Thomas was a captain of the Northwestern that lost to Ohio State 52-3 back in 2019. That’s the same margin of victory that the Wildcats suffered on Saturday night, when Nebraska laid a 56-7 beatdown on them.
However, Thomas points out that the Ohio State team his Wildcats lost to finished 13-1 and made the College Football Playoff. The Huskers team that just hammered Northwestern rose to 3-3 on the season with the win, its first over a Power Five team.
But the final score doesn’t bother Thomas as much as what he sees on the field does. He’s a Wildcat who bleeds purple, and he thinks the effort the team is putting out is just not acceptable.
“What’s frustrating to me, and to all former players, is that I’m not seeing a lot of fight,” he said. “The Northwestern way is to fight for victory. It’s even in the fight song. I didn’t see a lot of fight for the entirety of the game.”
Thomas was also a part of a team that overcame a dreadful start during his Northwestern career. He was the starting center on the 2018 team that started 1-3, with a home loss to Akron. That Wildcat outfit turned things around and won seven of their next eight to clinch the West division title, play in the Big Ten Championship Game and then triumph in the Holiday Bowl.
Like he always does, Thomas maintains that if Northwestern is going to salvage anything from this thus far disappointing season, the change has to come from the players.
He doesn’t care if they hold a players-only meeting. He doesn’t care if the captains read them the riot act. He doesn’t care if the catalyst is a fifth-string walkon running back.
“Somebody’s gotta do something,” he said. “It’s got to start with the players. It can’t come from Coach Fitz (head coach Pat Fitzgerald) or anyone else on the coaching staff. If a coach has to lead it, then it’s not a team. The players gotta take ownership.”
Right now, big plays are killing the Cats, especially at the beginning of games. And explosive plays at the outset of a game have much more of a devastating impact than those that might occur later, according to Thomas.
“The biggest thing I have to convey is that giving up a big play is one thing,” said Thomas. “But giving up a big play at the start of the game, on the road, is a completely different matter. You feel like you’re never going to get out of there.”
The Wildcats certainly couldn’t get out of the Grand Canyon-sized hole they dug for themselves in Lincoln. On the first snap of the game, Adrian Martinez threw a 70-yard strike to Samari Toure; within 50 seconds, the score was 7-0. It became 14-0 shortly after a Jaquez Yant 64-yard run on the next possession. Then Martinez ran 25 yards untouched on an option to make it 21-0 with 4:14 left in the first quarter.
For all intents and purposes, the game was over by that point.
It’s been a familiar pattern for the Wildcats in their three games against Power Five opponents this season. They gave up a 75-yard touchdown run on the first play against Michigan State and Duke connected on a 50-yard pass on its first offensive snap. In all three games, the Wildcats trailed by three touchdowns before 20 minutes of the game clock had elapsed.
That’s not a formula conducive to winning games, says Thomas.
“It’s psychological warfare,” he said. “You give up big plays like that, at the beginning of games, you’re focusing on not doing it again, instead of just playing. You’re not giving yourself the opportunity to make plays yourself because you’re afraid of another one.”
It also completely changes the focus of the game plan. As the lead ballooned to 35-7 by halftime, Northwestern’s running game went completely out the window as coaches felt like they had to throw on almost every down to rally.
Thomas liked the way the Wildcats were attacking Nebraska offensively: spreading them out and then attacking the perimeter. But they couldn’t continue it because they were falling too far behind and couldn’t afford to run the ball any longer.
While most of the focus has been on Northwestern’s horrendous defensive play, Thomas isn’t letting the offense off the hook. The fumbled exchange inside the 10-yard line in the second quarter was inexcusable for a team trying to cut into what was already a three-touchdown lead. So was the point total.
“You can’t expect to win a Big Ten game – any game – scoring seven points,” he said.
Clearly, though, defense is the bigger issue. Whatever the offense did on Saturday night, chances are it wasn’t going to be able to overcome an opponent that put up 657 total yards – the most ever allowed by a Fitzgerald-coached team – and eight touchdowns, with 427 of those yards and seven of those TDs coming on the ground. The Wildcats didn’t stop anything all night.
Thomas sees all the criticism of new defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil and understands it. He also sees all the breakdowns during those big plays over the course of the game.
But Thomas is a former player, and he consistently leans toward the players’ impact on the field over any coaches’.
“You can blame the defensive coordinator, if you want, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what defense is called,” he said. “Everyone has a gap. Someone is out of position” on those big plays.
He looks at the 70-yard pass to Toure on the first snap and feels like Coco Azema could just as easily have intercepted that pass. “The receiver jumped and he didn’t,” said Thomas.
Thomas doesn’t know the intricacies of O’Neil’s system the way he knows previous defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz’s, which he faced every day in practice for five years.
But he does seem some issues that he doesn’t like. The most glaring one is that the Wildcats’ defense doesn’t have an identity.
Thomas prefaces everything by saying, “comparison is the thief of all joy.” But because Hankwitz ran the defense just last season, contrasting the two is fair.
“With Hank, they played a base-zone defense, and played Cover-3 or Cover-4 80% to 90% of the time,” he said. They would give up the eight-yard hitch, but take away the “70-yard go ball,” like Martinez’s throw to Toure.
“There was identity to Coach Hank’s defense. They would give up some (short) stuff, but you weren’t going to run the ball on us, and you weren’t going to bomb us deep,” he said. Offenses would have to execute all the way down the field to score. Plus, Hankwitz would “add a little spice” with blitzes on third down.
With O’Neil’s defense, “I don’t know if I’ve seen a clear identity,” he said.
He notes that they sometimes play a 4-3, and they play a 4-2-5 “star” defense more often. He’s seen them play a Cover 4, and he’s seen them play man. The net result is that players often look confused, which may explain some of the missed assignments and big plays. It's difficult to play defense when you are thinking instead of reacting.
More than the Xs and Os, however, Thomas doesn’t like the way the team responded to adversity against the Huskers. He’s a Wildcat, and takes these games personally.
“That loss was embarrassing,” he said sternly.
Thomas goes back to Mike Tyson’s famous quote: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Nebraska punched Northwestern right in the mouth to start the game, and the Wildcats, in his eyes, didn’t fight back.
“I know how things run in Coach Fitz’s program,” he said. “Getting beat 56-7 isn’t acceptable.”
The bye week comes at a good time for Northwestern, according to Thomas.
“Some soul searching needs to be done,” he says. “Every player need to ask himself, ‘What does Northwestern football mean to me?’ Not Coach Fitz, not the two Big Ten (West) titles over the last three years. What does it mean to you, personally?
“Do you have enough pride to not get embarrassed 56-7? Let me tell you, when you get beat like that, you don’t want to show your face anywhere. It’s not okay. That intensity, that fight, needs to come from within.”
To Thomas, the excuse of being a young defense with several new starters is no longer valid. They’ve played five games and, he points out, “they got manhandled in two of them.”
He hopes to see a different team in two weeks, when they play Rutgers, a team, he says, “that isn’t the same as the one they played two years ago.” If the Wildcats don't do something drastically different, the Knights are fully capable of laying another smackdown on them.
“They need to take these two weeks and reflect and do something about it. What they’re doing now isn’t working. Something has to change.”
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, who just won the 2021 Indoor Football League championship.
