They’re no longer awful.
It took two years for it to climb from the depths of a disgusting abyss, but at long last, the Northwestern men’s basketball team has shown that it has more than a snowball’s chance of winning games against decent teams.
Wednesday night’s win over Florida State, NU’s first triumph against a major-conference, non-Big Ten opponent in recent memory, proved that the Cats have turned a corner and entered the realm of the dozens of average Division I teams.
That might not sound too good, but it’s actually the first major step in resurrecting the program from the ashes of 1999, when the Cats stumbled through a 5-25 season in which freshmen and sophomores played all but two minutes.
Now NU is in position to start whispering something that would have been unthinkable in that ugly 1999-2000 season — NIT.
Standing at 4-1, the Cats have taken the first few baby steps on the road to putting together a season of respectability. But those four wins don’t guarantee anything — NU still needs a lot of friendly bounces in order to start making extra travel plans for March.
NU already has a few things going its way, starting with the upcoming schedule, one that makes a 10-1 or a 9-2 record before New Year’s Day perfectly feasible. The Cats won’t face anyone tougher than Kansas State or Arizona State until their conference opener against Indiana on Jan. 2, and they also play their next three games at home. Gotta believe that head coach Bill Carmody is licking his chops at the thought of vaunted Florida A&M coming to town in a few weeks.
And while the math might seem rather boring, it pays dividends when going through the schedule this time around. NU will have 11 games under its belt when the Big Ten season starts, and it will play one more easy nonconference game before the season is done. Tack on 16 conference games and you have 28 contests in total. If the Cats can win 15, they’re in the NIT. Even if they were to drop their 29th game — a first-round matchup in the Big Ten tournament — they’d still be better than .500 overall and good enough to reach the Big Dance’s ugly stepchild.
Of course, when you’ve won three conference games in two years, even the ugly stepchild starts to look like a beauty queen.
NU fans accustomed to chanting “NIT” as an insult aimed at middling Welsh-Ryan Arena visitors would be well-advised to back off for a while. Let’s face it: Purdue’s trash is NU’s treasure right now, and there’s nothing wrong with rummaging through the scrap heap for a few wins.
The Cats will have to win ugly — they’re not going to score a ton of points, and they still haven’t figured out how to score against a basic zone defense. But as long as they beat every single team they should — like the Libertys of the world — and can come up with a couple of upsets (read: Ohio State), then they’ll be in prime position to challenge for a postseason berth.
Will they beat Illinois this year? No, they won’t. Indiana? Nope.
But eyeing the NIT, it doesn’t even matter.
And after the last two seasons, mediocrity never sounded so good.
