Beng's Idiot's Guide to Northwestern Football in 2020
If Northwestern were a regular football program, they would be entering a “put up or shut up” phase in their head coach’s story arc.
After a division title, Northwestern fell into a moribund state of decay on offense that saw longtime offensive coordinator, part-time war criminal, and full-time target of Northwestern fans’ ire, Mick McCall, shipped to Ames, Iowa in a cardboard box without air holes poked in the side.
A head coach firing a long-time coordinator would normally mean that there is writing on the wall. Once the problem coordinator is sent packing, the head coach loses a fall guy if something goes wrong. It’s not like you can duck criticism by firing your wide receivers coach.
But, as you must clearly know as someone who cares about Northwestern enough to read a preview article, Northwestern is not a normal program and this is not the state of affairs that Pat Fitzgerald must deal with. Yes, Mick McCall’s reign has ended and the beginning of the Mike Bajakian Imperial Age brings with it whispers amongst the peasantry of a new concept called “competency” that has not been seen in Evanston for many moons. But even if Bajakian is a bust and the 3rd and medium playbook still is mesh and only mesh and nothing but mesh forever, Pat Fitzgerald will, as ever, rise above the riff-raff and inveigh against the inexorable rise of “Kids with Phones” for as long as he wants to preach in his Evanston parish.
And maybe, for once, that bizarro job security will afford Northwestern some time to grow. Recruiting has undeniably picked up. A quick peek at the talent on the roster shows that five of the ten most coveted recruits on the roster are freshmen, including fringe five-star offensive line talent, Peter Skoronski who is already slated as a starter at left tackle as a true freshman. The replacement of offensive line coach Adam Cushing (who quietly was a worse coach than even McCall) with Kurt Anderson has been a revelation that could in time see Northwestern be a true competitor to Wisconsin.
Northwestern may on some level appear to be a “win now” team, with 7 of its 11 offensive starters seniors or grad transfers. But this is still very clearly a team that is a few years away yet.
Northwestern has precisely zero business playing football this year.
There is no good argument for it. You cannot in good faith say that it is a good idea to gather 85 people to go play a sport that requires 10 large people to go clang helmets for 3.5 hours during a global pandemic.
You especially can’t make that argument when the people putting their health on the line aren’t picking up a paycheck.
And yet, there’s a weird pseudo-paternalistic tone to that paragraph that reasonably upsets people. The kids do undeniably want to play. They’ve been told that it’s as safe as can reasonably be expected, and we have been told the same by people in white coats with many acronyms following their name. There too is a degree of hypocrisy to me pearl-clutching over football being allowed to continue while knowing full well that I will be in front of my TV when Northwestern’s season kicks off on Saturday. I’ve already watched several teams play and then immediately go down with outbreaks of a life-altering disease. The hypocrisy is already deeply present.
And yet it is upsetting to me, deeply, that we’re going to do all of this anyway. Northwestern rattling the saber of their new catchphrase, “bring your own juice,” does not sit well with me. I do not like that the concept of pushing ahead and playing this game in an environment so dangerous that fans will not be allowed in any capacity at any distance from each other at any level of mask-wearing compliance has been so normalized that now it’s cute to make a slogan out of how much their absence will change the way the game is played. Also, the $151 “exclusive virtual season ticket” content that the athletic department is peddling to save some of its precious revenue is, flatly, a bit distasteful.
There have been a lot of very well-reasoned and artfully crafted pieces on what it is like to watch sport in this era of no fans and the mask theatre of coaches wearing face shields while hurling spittle at a referee two inches from their face as their dedicated get back coach whose mask has been looped around his chin for the past 7 hours pulls him back at the waist. But when the ball is placed on the tee to the sound of the creaking flag poles of Ryan Field and the season starts, the overwhelming emotion for me will be utter confusion. They say sports are a reward for a functional society; while Northwestern football has never been rewarding for anyone functional, society now mirrors its dysfunction.
None of this has to happen. And yet.
Northwestern football’s 2020 season will be defined by its offense, an unfair fact of life for a defense that is primed to be, yet again, one of the better units in the conference.
The offensive line should be average at worst and will likely be an asset, even if Rashawn Slater, the first genuine blue-chip offensive lineman, opted out of the season to prepare for the NFL Draft. There is a decent mix of experience and exciting talent up front that should give the team some degree of stability.
The skill positions will be outmatched. There isn’t a winning Big Ten team that would be meaningfully improved if they added their pick of Northwestern’s running backs or wide receivers. Riley Lees is good with the ball in his hands, Kyric McGowan is fast as hell, and Ramaud Chiakhiao-Bowman is a big-bodied target, but no one who we’ve seen play any meaningful amount of snaps is good enough at enough things to break through the ceiling of mediocrity.
The running back room doesn’t exactly elicit oohs and ahs. Isaiah Bowser is a dump truck who can run through most folks who meet him in the hole, Drake Anderson is a fun little scat back, and Evan Hull ran for 220 yards against UMass last year. We’ll see if Bowser has the pass-catching skills to emerge as a featured back.
Peyton Ramsey was a great pick-up as a grad transfer. He’s experienced, poised, makes good decisions, and does enough with his legs to make defenses game plan against it. He, of course, also benefited in playing in one of the best offensive systems in the conference, throwing to a bevy of talented pass catchers in an offense suited to highlight his decision-making and downplay his lack of arm talent. I figure he’ll start for the entire year.
Hunter Johnson, he of the five-star rating, the Clemson commit, the once-heralded savior of Northwestern football, enters the season as a backup. Actually, we’re not sure because it’s him OR Andrew Marty. Johnson, I fear, has been irreparably broken, the final casualty of the Siege of McCall. It’s rare that a player comes to Evanston who clearly has NFL skills. Johnson was that. He can probably still throw a ball through sheet metal from the far hash and is athletic to boot. But he now looks shattered, ruined by a hellacious year in an offensive system that could make Patrick Mahomes look hopeless. TJ Green will be around as a backup to the three backups and a sixth-year big brother figure. We won’t be seeing any Aidan Smith this year as he has opted out due to COVID-19 concerns. We respect his decision greatly and think he’s smarter than all of the Big Ten’s top brass, but his career 4.4 yards per attempt and 1:3 TD-to-INT ratio will not be missed.
And that is the caveat to all the doom and gloom in this section. Riley Lees might be an actual threat in the passing game. Isaiah Bowser might be a legit 25 carries a game back. The lingering effects of McCall shroud this entire offense in a marine layer of suckfulness. The scheme was so hopeless there’s a chance that an even slightly below average coordinator could reveal star players who’ve been on the roster all along.
The Big Ten’s leadership should be roundly mocked and criticized for their response to the pandemic for a thousand years. They, alongside with the Pac 12, made an objectively prudent decision to postpone football in the throes of the coronavirus earlier this year.
Then, they saw precisely one weekend of SEC football and their eyes bolted out of their head and they all went “AWOOOOOOOOGA” and started panting like dogs and salivating when they saw the dollar signs they were missing out on.
The plan to play 9 games in 9 weeks is hilarious. It has a zero percent chance of success. Wisconsin now has a 7-day rolling COVID-19 positivity average of above 20%. Indiana is trending similarly. Illinois’ numbers are reaching heights not seen since April and May. The entire Midwest is going in one direction, and it isn’t the good one (perhaps Rutger will be declared champions by default in December).
Football starts on Saturday.
Northwestern’s offense and Northwestern’s Whole Shit have been pretty hard to watch for a good long time. Their defense does not suffer from that problem.
Mike Hankwitz is the best coach no one has ever heard of, and I have very little doubt that his defense will again be a pain in the ass in the most delightful of ways. Earnest Brown will be great, Paddy Fisher has one more chance to prove he’s an NFL talent, J.R. Pace is a ballhawk with dumb athleticism, it’s all a very delightful thing to watch in flow.
That being said, the defense is losing two competent starters in Samdup Miller and Travis Whillock after wisely deciding to opt-out. Yet that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as one of the liberating things about not writing things like this more than once every 4 months is I do not know most of the names on the defensive two-deep, yet I am confident that by week 4, I will be familiar with “That D End Who Drops Into The Flat And Nearly Picks Off One Pass A Game” or “That Linebacker Who Sweeps Up Messes” and “That Nickelback Who Is a Nice Piece, You Know, He Could Be Something Soon.”
Pat Fitzgerald’s preference to worship the false idol of coaching stability mostly sucks, but let this defense continue to cook for a thousand years.
Northwestern is not as likable to me now as it was growing up as a fan, and I don’t think all of that is just because I have grown into a morose, irony-poisoned 26-year old who finds it more fun to laugh than cheer.
Most of that stems from a mistrust of Morton Shapiro and Jim Phillips to make decisions about what is in the best interest for Northwestern student-athletes and the school in general. They have not earned that benefit of the doubt. Shapiro’s response to student protests, regardless of what you think about the substance, was sorely and offensively lacking the tone required to thread the needle he attempted to thread.
Every passing day, Shapiro feels far more like a venture capitalist BCG guy trying to wring every dollar out of Northwestern students and faculty than he does a university president. I do not like his vision for the school, and I think the negative effects of his presidency are evident in every corner of campus life.
My distaste for Phillips, who as of publication has slaughtered three goats on a Powerade-branded altar to earn favor with the gods of the National Collegiate Athletics Association in his never-ending quest to ascend to the presidency of their ranks, is well-documented.
Pat Fitzgerald has defied all odds in avoiding putting his foot in his mouth about the pandemic, and if there is a “good guy” in the Northwestern bureaucracy, it is undeniably Fitz. Well-meaning people can come to different conclusions on issues, and while Fitz will always be associated with union-busting by the Juche wing of college football Twitter, it’s hard to speak with him for longer than 15 seconds without recognizing that he is at the very least well-intentioned.
But this year will put all of Northwestern’s festering problems to the test. When there is an outbreak on the team, and make no mistake there surely will be eventually, how will the administration, the coaching staff, and the university at large, who all hold responsibility for the resumption of the season, respond? It’s easy to say the right things when everything is working. It will be far harder once that stops being the case.
I don’t think Northwestern will be very good this year. I think Mike Bajakian will probably be an average offensive coordinator who is being given a staggeringly below-average unit with which to try and put points on the board this season. The defense will be good, but it won’t be elite, which it would need to be to drag six, or maybe even five wins from this schedule.
I don’t really even think Northwestern will be very interesting, even in the “what the fuck is going on over there” way it was last season. This team has powerful toasted white bread with butter energy.
As usual, the Big Ten West will be a horror show. Minnesota will turn into a pumpkin. Nebraska will get pummeled by 900 points against Ohio State and will not recover. Wisconsin will be Wisconsin again, cool. It’s a random number generator, ultimately, on this side of the conference.
What I can say with certainty is that Northwestern football will not be the distraction its fans and administrators want it to be this year.
I will watch because I am weak and have little else to do on a Saturday these days. But there will be no plausible deniability to be found in watching these games. It will be uncomfortable. It will be dystopian. As the only blogger left standing, BYCTOM, wrote, it will be Cyberpunk.
You can’t watch college football this year without feeling gross about it, no matter how many of your brain neurons you can shut off.
I’ve been saying that Northwestern plays “plague football” for the better part of five years now. Now, that’s not a metaphor.
Football, for worse and not for better, is back. Go ‘Cats.
