Jared Thomas, a former Northwestern All-Big Ten center and captain, analyzes Wildcat football for WildcatReport.
Jared Thomas doesn’t like what he’s seeing from Northwestern’s offense.
While there were problems in all three phases in the Wildcats’ 33-7 loss to No. 6 Michigan on Saturday, the offense is near and dear to Thomas. He started 30 games on the offensive line for the Wildcats from 2015-19.
So he knows what he’s talking about when he says Northwestern is straying from its formula for success.
“The winning formula has always been to run the ball, and then use the pass to complement the run,” said Thomas, a two-year starter at center who captained the 2019 team. He’s not sure why the Wildcats have strayed from that M.O. lately.
Thomas did some research and found some interesting statistics to back his premise. In all three games the Wildcats won this year – against Indiana State, Ohio and Rutgers – starting tailback Evan Hull got at least 20 carries. In the team’s four losses – to Michigan State, Duke, Nebraska and Michigan – he got 10 or fewer in each game.
Against Michigan on Saturday, Hull had just six carries, and one of them went for a 75-yard touchdown. So he doesn’t understand why the Wildcats abandoned the run so early. He doesn’t accept the standard “it wasn’t working” as a valid reason, either.
“Just because you your gain one yard on one play and three yards on another, doesn’t mean you go away from it,” said Thomas. “Those are the plays that could go for 60 yards in the second half.”
He continued, “When we don’t run the ball, we let them off the hook. We don’t make them have to stop us.”
Thomas, as you can tell, is a Wildcat at heart. He says “we” whenever he talks about the team. When he talks about running the ball on play after play, he gets passionate, clapping to emphasize each snap.
“The fact that they stopped running the ball tells me that they don’t have confidence that they can run the ball for the rest of the game,” he said. “They’re giving up on it…to do what, exactly?”
Thomas doesn’t think Northwestern should run the ball to get Hull 20 carries or to hit some magic number. He thinks that continuing to run pays dividends in other areas of the offense.
Quarterback Ryan Hilinski struggled on Saturday, completing less than 50% of his passes for 129 yards and his first interception of the year. He was often under heavy pressure and made several throws off of his back foot because pass rushers were in his face.
“You want to alleviate the pressure on Hilinski? Hand the ball off,” he said. “If you don’t, they don’t have to respect the run and can just pin their ears back and blitz the heck out of him” – which is exactly what the Wolverines did.
It also would have negated some of the Wolverines’ massive advantage in time-of-possession. Northwestern ran the ball just twice in the first quarter and five times in the third. Michigan held the ball for 22:54 of the first half and just under 40 minutes for the game.
Once they fell behind 24-7 in the third quarter, the Wildcats had to abandon the run entirely in an effort to get back into the game.
Thomas says it’s “not my job to question the play-calling,” but he clearly is troubled by offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian’s abandonment of the running game. He thinks they “fell in love with a lot of screen passes” against Michigan and didn’t stick with the run, even after Hull made by far the biggest play for the offense in the second quarter.
“When a pass is incomplete, they don’t stop throwing the ball, do they?” he asked. “They have to stick with (the run).”
Northwestern’s defense didn’t get much help from the offense on Saturday, but they didn’t do themselves any favors, either, according to Thomas.
While he lauded the way limited the Wolverines to 10 points on three trips inside Northwestern’s 5-yard line in the first half, he thinks that poor tackling and missed fits were reasons they were out on the field twice as long as the offense was.
“The No. 1 thing going into the game was stopping the run, and they had so many opportunities to do that and get off the field. But missed tackles killed us,” he said.
Thomas saw a lot of tacklers miss chances to bring down Michigan ballcarriers, particularly in the third quarter, when the game got away from them. The Wildcats had multiple opportunities where a solid open-field tackle would have limited a Michigan back to “two to four yards. Instead, they went for 12 or 15 yards.”
Part of those tackling issues may be the result of a “trickle-down effect” from giving up so many big plays early in the season. Thomas thinks the defense is so focused on not giving up big plays that they’re missing little ones right in front of them.
Thomas also noticed a lot of missed fits in the running game, where players weren’t where they were supposed to be to cover all the gaps. Thomas said he saw the backside linebacker stray too far to the play side, or the play-side backer over-pursuing too far to the play side, often outside of the pulling offensive lineman in front of him.
“That’s how you get gashed,” he said. “It’s not sound defense. At some point, those plays have to be made.”
Still, the defense kept Northwestern in the game for two and a half quarters, before the offense’s lack of production finally did them in.
“You can only do so much when one side of the ball is not producing for so long,” he said.
We covered offense and defense, but Thomas thinks that special teams gets some of the blame for this one, too. Northwestern trailed 10-7 at halftime, and the score was just 17-7 when the game completely turned on a couple of special teams plays in the third quarter.
The first was Charlie Kuhbander’s missed 39-yard field goal with 7:59 left in the quarter. Northwestern had just mounted its best drive of the day, going 59 yards in 12 plays and converting a third-and-13 and third-and-8 in the process.
But Kuhbander’s kick hooked to the left and missed. It was his fifth miss in nine attempts, leaving Northwestern as one of two Power Five teams in the country that have made less than half of their field-goal attempts this season.
“That was a momentum killer for a team playing on the road,” said Thomas. Instead of closing the gap to one score at 17-10, Northwestern came up empty. Then, the game was put out of reach with another special teams blunder on the Wildcats’ next possession.
The Wildcats were punting from its own NU 31-yard line when the left side of the line inexplicably failed to block Cornelius Johnson, who came in untouched and blocked Derek Adams’ punt. Michigan’s Caden Kolesar recovered it at the NU 24 and Hassan Haskins scored three plays later.
Suddenly, what had been a tight game just minutes earlier was 24-7. “That,” said Thomas, “was pretty much the game.”
While Thomas says he can never just “live with a loss,” he saw several positives in Saturday’s setback to Michigan.
“There’s a lot to learn from a loss like that,” he said. “I can live with the effort (against Michigan). You can build off that. They just need to correct mistakes.”
At the same time, however, Thomas knows that it’s getting too late in the season to make those mistakes and learn those lessons.
“We’re seven games in, so saying they’re too young or they have new guys can’t be the narrative all season,” he said.
He knows that, right now, the program’s focus is to make a bowl game. They have to find a way to win at least three of the five remaining game to achieve that objective.
The good news, says Thomas, is that all five games – against Minnesota and Iowa, at Wisconsin, against Purdue and at Illinois – are winnable, in his eyes. On the flip side, though, the Wildcats could easily lose all five games, too.
“The margin of error is going to be small, either way,” he said. “It’s all up to 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, who just won the 2021 Indoor Football League championship.
