Football

At the beginning of the season, expectations for the Wildcats were low, with bowl dreams ambitious if not completely out of reach. Seven games later, Northwestern is 5-2, and fans shouldn’t be complaining.

Right now, the Cats are on track to finish the season at 7-5 with wins against Purdue and Illinois. That isn’t just barely making it to a bowl game; that’s a strong season for this team. By the way it looked from the outset, they shouldn’t have beaten Stanford, Duke or even Minnesota, at least not by 27 points. But they did. And that street goes both ways. Losses — especially bad losses — come suddenly, too.

I admit, racking up two straight blowout defeats with a combined 78 points scored against them, doesn’t look great. In fact, it looks horrible. However, the team that played against both Michigan and Iowa is not the same team that went on a five-game winning streak. These past two games were a slump, and an embarrassing one.

Looking strictly at the stats, NU outplayed Stanford, Duke and Minnesota in average yards per carry and average yards per reception. The one exception to this was in yards per carry against Duke. It says a lot, though, that NU had this amount of consistency in these earlier games. There was no fluke Hail Mary pass to win a game, no botched opposing field goal. NU had to depend on its own talent to pull off the streak. And that’s not to mention how strong and highly ranked the defense was.

There’s a lot of past tense in that last paragraph. The stats for the past two games say it all. NU’s average rush per carry was 1.52 yards, compared to Michigan’s 4.37, and average yards per completion against Michigan came out to 8.67 to the Wolverines’ 10.53. Against Iowa, the Cats averaged 1.96 yards per carry with Iowa running for an average of 5.76 yards, and average NU receiving yards was about 7.35 per completion compared to Iowa’s impressive 12.38.

There are some reasons why this slump — again, it’s a slump, not a landslide — might have happened.

One potential explanation relates to both the past 5-7 seasons and the fleeting glory days of years past. Historically, the Cats don’t like October. NU has always played unimpressively during this midterm-laden month. Looking back from 2011 on, it’s astonishing how much of a trend this is. Games during the month of October produce similar results each year: 2011’s October had four losses in five games that month, 2012 had two in four, 2013 had four in four, 2014 had two in three, and so far 2015 has two out of three. The bright side is the Cats have bounced back in the past. The November 2011 and November 2012 teams — which are more on par with NU’s talent this year than the 2013 and 2014 teams — both did better with the calendar change. During November 2011, the team had three wins in four games, and in 2012 the team had two out of three.

And let’s not forget that this is still a young team. The most noticeable of these younger players is redshirt freshman quarterback Clayton Thorson, who is still developing, and that doesn’t take just seven games in his first season. Iowa had C.J. Beathard’s junior-year experience to help it, and Michigan had Jake Rudock, a senior. With more experience and more games played, Thorson will continue to improve and settle down. And what better time to have that happen than the remaining half of the season, which has an undoubtedly easier schedule. Other position groups with more experience — receivers and the entire defense — have less of an excuse. But with a different mindset and game strategy, the Cats can — and should — return to their early season success.

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Twitter: @StephanieKellyM