Quick programming note, tough week at the day job, so this may be a bit rushed, and for that I do apologize. Will try to go 1-0 next week.
Every sport likes to claim to be a “game of inches,” and football surely is no exception. Whenever a pass glances off fingertips, or a toe grazes the sideline, or a kick hooks over an upright, some swole necked ex quarterback will bark something about how thin the line between victory and defeat is in football.
Few sports, if any, are less of a game of inches in football. There are 36 inches in every yard, the smallest unit of measurement actually used on a football field. It isn’t like baseball, where missing a spot by 6 inches is the difference between a strikeout and 450-foot turbo dong, or the difference between hitting the sweet spot and breaking your bat into 800 shards of wood.
Football is a game of yards, and dozens of yards, and gaping holes, and coverage busts. The entire point of the game is to create as much space as possible. It’s when the game becomes close quarters and cluttered when it feels gross and out of place (sorry, triple option lovers, you’re wrong, and you know it).
It’s that reason that makes Northwestern’s loss against Duke hard to take.
Northwestern was not the better team, though they were not so much the worse team that they couldn’t win. Spotting Duke 21 unanswered points to start the game was, in retrospect, not the best way to start the game. But what we knew about Northwestern’s offense remains true: the offensive line rocks, and the running backs rock.
There is nitpickery to be had on the offensive strategy (the outside runs MUST die a quick death to be replaced solely with inside the tackles concepts) and on the execution (another day, another could-have-should-have-been pick-six from Hillinski), but at the end of Northwestern came within 36-inches of having a chance to send the game to overtime, Pat Fitzgerald’s favorite place, with a two-point conversion.
Then Evan Hull fumbled the ball into the end zone and Northwestern lost.
Non-conference football in the Big Ten West is in several ways completely irrelevant to the task at hand. Northwestern has proved, somehow more than once, that you can lose stupid non-conference games, including to the vaunted Akron Zips, and still play in the Big Ten title. Duke, who sucks, are not really all that much worse than Iowa, who sucks more and yet was a trendy top two-or-three pick to win the West this year. Losing this game, while extremely stinky, doesn’t really change the math for Northwestern when it comes to playing meaningful football games this fall.
What it does threaten is the chance to play in the Dave’s Buy My Bitcoin Wallet My Children Are Starving Bowl in Waukesha, Wisconsin if Northwestern is as bad as is feared. Getting to 6 was never a guarantee, and dropping one of the “gimmes” on your own turf puts you back at square one after stealing a game in Lincoln.
Duke, who, again, suck, exposed Northwestern’s worst position group to great effect, though, and therein lies the real concern.
There are two kinds of sports, weak link sports and strong link sports. A strong link sport would be basketball, where one superstar is really all you need to have a fairly successful team (see: James, Lebron; Howard, Dwight; and Iverson, Allen as stars on bad teams who played for a championship). A weak link sport would be baseball, where you could have two of the 5 best baseball players of all time and still be 20-games under .500 because your 7th hitter and your 3rd best relief pitcher are actually all that matter (the Los Angeles Angels should be broken up by the United States government).
On offense, football could, I suppose, be either. That Aaron Rodgers is able to win football games by throwing to mailboxes with wheels on them and having an offensive line made up of rotten barrels suggests it’s a strong link enterprise, but plenty of college teams who fall apart due to horrible offensive lines suggest the opposite.
On defense, at least, it is abundantly clear that you are only as good as the worst part of your defense. Have a bad secondary and a great pass rush? Doesn’t matter, quick hitting routes will kill you. Have a dynamite back-end and no front? No one can cover wide receivers forever, enjoy the 30-piece that’s about to get hung on you.
Northwestern’s defense will only be as good as its linebackers can be, and that means Northwestern’s defense will be Bad.
For the first decade and change of the Fitzgerald tenure, it seemed as though Northwestern would simply never have a bad linebacker. Recent adoptees of the Book Of Fitzgerald will point to names like Paddy Fisher, but you can dig back to names like Damien Proby, Drew Smith, Anthony Walker, and Collin Ellis too as examples of really dynamite players, both inside and outside. Yes, some of those players (Fisher) were athletically limited, but a lot of them were just bad motherfuckers who knew their job, could get to their spot, and then tackle the crap out of you. They had linebackers of all types.
Now, Northwestern’s linebacking corps is not athletic, but what they lack in speed they make up for in being small. They might not out-athletic you, but they will also not out-think you. It is, unfortunately, not a Big Ten level position group. Any offensive coordinator with a lick of ingenuity (in Duke’s case, former Northwestern WR coach Kevin Johns did the trick just fine) can expose that weakness either in making them cover someone in space, or diagnose a complicated run fit and beat a blocker to a spot.
The group desperately needs an infusion of athleticism and I’m not sure when it will come.
Until it does come, Northwestern is what it has been for most of the past 20 years: a sometimes dangerous, often times toothless team that can frustrate opponents and its own fans in equal measure. In other words, they are going to win the Rose Bowl.
AN IN-DEPTH AND VERY SERIOUS PREVIEW OF NORTHWESTERN-SOUTHERN ILLINOIS
You have to be a sick puppy to watch this game, go find God, go pray about it (see you at the game).