To Live And Die In Evanston at 11 AM Against An FCS School
When structure beats agency, you lose to an FCS school from Carbondale.
Northwestern has signed Ryan Field’s death warrant.
At some point (it isn’t clear when, yet), its doors will shutter and Northwestern will pack up and take its show on the road (it isn’t clear where, yet) while its home is rebuilt from the ground up to bring “cutting-edge technology and modern amenities, accessibility for all, and provide an exceptional home-field experience.”
Ryan Field, in its current iteration, is a dump. It is not a fun place to watch a game. The tarps that cover a section of the stadium that shouldn’t really exist are hilarious, as are the lines of high school-esque bleachers that have two temperature settings: oven broiler or absolute zero. The north end-zone, which has a roof that could be used for something cool, feasibly, but isn’t, is weird, the south end zone is generally 15% full, the video board is smaller than my tv at home, the sound system is an iPhone speaker, and the gameday atmosphere (when the crowd isn’t 50% road fans) is that of a Lyric Opera matinee.
The grass is nice though.
It is very similar to the Welsh-Ryan Arena of yesterday, but with less charm.
It makes a very fitting tomb for Northwestern football.
The perk of writing these posts the morning of games is that I don’t have to relitigate the things that everyone else has said and you have already read about Northwestern waking up on Saturday morning and making a conscious decision to lose to a mediocre Missouri Valley Conference team with a roster of players consisting of zero guys Northwestern would have any interest in picking up. The con of writing this post on the morning of the Miami Ohio game is that there really isn’t all that much left to say.
We will begin with the offense, which, sadly, sucks in the exact ways anyone who had a clear-headed view of this team could see that it would suck. Evan Hull is good, but it’s becoming evident that it doesn’t matter (plus we may have to Begin A Dialogue about Ball Security Problems). For significant portions of the game, it looked as though Northwestern could have just lined up, ran a power run inside the tackles, gotten six yards every single play, and scored a touchdown on every drive. Then, they stopped trying to do that, then it stopped working, then they lost to SIU.
The passing game is remarkably bleak. As was posited on this blog after the Nebraska game, it was probable then that game would be the high water mark of Ryan Hilinski’s season. That feels more prescient after a game where he averaged 5 yards per attempt against an FCS team while completing 63% of mostly dink and dunk routes. Whenever Hilinski is asked to throw a ball outside the hash marks, it becomes a journey. Arm strength issues are apparent, decision making issues are apparent, and pass-catching talent issues are apparent. There just are not enough high quality football players on the offensive units, not something you want to feel after watching a Big Ten team play an FCS team.
The defense, somehow, is more disappointing, but I will continue to zig where everyone else is zagging.
Jim O’Neil is not the problem here.
That’s not to say he is not a problem. It is likely that he is very bad. There are some scheme issues that the All-22 Literati have pointed out. But if you look at Northwestern’s defense and assume that the number one issue is the defensive coordinator, I am putting you On Watch for Not Knowing Ball.
It is natural in college football to blame the adults (the coaches) before you blame the literal children (the players) for your team’s problems. It is in very many ways yucky to put the blame on a 19-year old stranger for disappointing you by losing a silly game. But that does not mean it is wrong.
Northwestern’s defense is bad because Northwestern does not have enough good football players who play defense.
There are good players, most of whom were unavailable against SIU (Cam Mitchell and Coco Azema were extremely notable absences). But holy guacamole, watch these linebackers and tell me there is a coach on the planet who can make this ship sail.
Once upon a time, Northwestern had athletes at linebacker. Nate Hall was undersized but fast. Anthony Walker was a sideline-to-sideline nightmare. I remember Drew Smith being freak-ish as well. Of course you can’t always have NFL starter-quality middle linebackers every year. But the lack of speed in the middle of this defense is its Achilles heel, and if even SIU can expose it, there’s no chance it can hold against even the Big Ten West.
I spent the majority of the football game only looking at the way Northwestern’s linebackers played, and it filled me with dread. There are clearly things about this scheme that expose their weaknesses. But what scheme can you draw up that covers for a group of players who cannot tackle, cannot cover, and cannot run?
The O’Neil hire was bad. It was doomed to fail. Were he to be replaced, the problems would still remain.
The least fun place to be as a fan is where the agency of the coaches and players can no longer overcome the structural inadequacies of the organization. That’s where Northwestern is. The years of coaching alchemy by Pat Fitzgerald and, perhaps more so, by Mike Hankwitz have given way to a team without the baseline talent required in the chemical equations that yields wins.
There are reasons why Northwestern does not have a lot of NFL quality athletes, and most of those reasons are self-imposed. Academic restrictions for athletes at Northwestern are tougher than just about anywhere else. That’s not elitist bluster, that’s not wish-casting, that’s true, ask anyone who would know. For most of the past 15 years, Northwestern has been able to have its cake and eat it too, being able to beat its chest as a Paragon Of Virtue while still winning football games.
Now is the time to start questioning that ethos.
If you zoom out on Northwestern Football, what do you see? I see a football coach who is paid millions of dollars with a functionally for-life contract. I see a university that gave the most beautiful part of its campus to its athletics department and a several hundred million dollar glittering glass and gold-trimmed box for its football team’s practices. I see plans for a brand new football stadium, one that will be built using hundreds of millions of dollars of alumni donations. I see a school that makes hundreds of millions of dollars from television deals made to broadcast its football and basketball teams. I see a school that is a member of an athletics conference that stretches from Beverly Hills to the New Jersey turnpike and that has eyes on the Space Needle and the Sonoran Desert.
What about that fits with the altruist visions of the Northwestern Student Experience that academic restrictions serve to protect, or the Virtues Of Student Athletes? The blush is so off of the rose in collegiate revenue sports, even if Northwestern’s old-fashioned fanbase clings to old notions. Northwestern has spent too much time and way too much money for it to continue pretending those “values” still matter.
If Northwestern is going to continue to be a part of this game, it needs to jump in with both feet now. Coaching changes are band-aids, they’re treating a symptom and not a cause. If Northwestern wants to spend almost-a-billion-dollars on football facilities this decade like it has, it should at least have the decency to not fucking embarrass me.
Northwestern can either recruit athletes from high school and the portal who are good enough to win football games at the sport’s highest level, or it can continue desperately trying to cobble together 6-win seasons off Grit and Discipline.
The last two weeks have laid bare how far away Northwestern is from either.