Back in late September, linebacker Billy Silva looked down at his hands and frowned, mumbling that he could count his remaining games as a senior on 10 fingers.
After a disappointing loss to Penn State in mid-October, senior quarterback Zak Kustok said players couldn’t get down on themselves when the team still had a chance to salvage its season with five games left.
Two weeks later, after losses to Purdue and Indiana, Kustok started converting the countdown into days — 18, to be exact.
When he spoke again on Monday, it was 10.
While no Northwestern senior seems ready to accept that his playing days are numbered — Kustok thanked a reporter for planting the seed in his head for the first time on Monday — each one appeared conscious of the dwindling days since the beginning of the season.
And now, with only two games left — both in the coming week — and little hope of a bowl appearance, the countdown has shrunk to five days.
You can count them on one of Billy Silva’s hands.
The disappointing season has spawned diverging attitudes among the Wildcats (4-5) as they head into Senior Day against Bowling Green (6-3) on Saturday.
“We want to go out on a good note, and the way this season is going, we still have two games left,” Kustok said. “I think we can still turn this around. We’re not giving up on the season yet, and if things go well, we can still be 6-5.”
But Kustok knows that it’s hard to impose the sense of urgency that the seniors feel on a starting lineup that contains four freshman.
“It’s my job to get to other guys on the team, if there are guys that don’t think that way, to think the same way that we do,” Kustok said.
Playing a nonconference opponent on a weekend that was originally scheduled as a bye makes Saturday’s matchup that much harder for Kustok’s younger teammates to take seriously.
But Bowling Green has been creeping up the rankings as one of the nation’s toughest defenses, allowing only two rushing touchdowns all season. NU’s battered ground game, which features a fourth-string running back and a converted wide receiver, will square off against the No. 3 rushing defense in the country.
And although the Mid-American Conference team boasts few familiar names, the unit ranks in the Top 25 in the country in total defense, interceptions and — NU head coach Randy Walker’s favorite stat — turnover margin.
“They’ve been having a great season, and we’re going to catch a great game out of them,” Walker said. “It’s going to be a demanding test of our ability to bounce back.”
And it wouldn’t be the best time for the underclassmen to give up.
This season, which started with the media tabbing the Cats as Big Ten favorites, has been particularly rough on the 14 members of the senior class who will be honored in a pregame ceremony.
“It’s been hard,” senior linebacker Kevin Bentley said. “You come in with all these starters back, you really don’t expect to miss a beat, you expect to be a whole lot better. It seems like time after time things have gone wrong for us. Things have just snowballed … and it’s made me want to cry at times because I know we’re a lot better than we’ve played.”
Senior defensive end Napoleon Harris agreed, but he supported Kustok’s unwavering hope that the graduates go out with a pair of victories — even if they have to drag the underclassmen with them.
“We fully intend to have a winning record,” Harris said.
