When the Northwestern football team travels, there is only one assigned seat on the charter bus.

For the last three seasons, that seat – located at the front of the bus behind head coach Randy Walker and his wife, Tammy – belonged to Zak Kustok.

Before the 2002 opener at Air Force, sophomore quarterback Tony Stauss made the move to the front of the bus. But after the Wildcats’ 52-3 debacle in Colorado Springs, Walker announced that redshirt freshman Brett Basanez would get the nod against Texas Christian on Sept. 7.

Just like that, Basanez went from being the loud freshman making trouble in the back of the bus to Seat 1A.

All About Attitude

Just your typical, cocky quarterback.

Ask just about any of his teammates their first impression of Basanez, and “cocky” will surface in less than a minute.

While everyone still describes him as, at the least, “very confident,” Basanez says his initial reputation was a pure misunderstanding.

“My coaches always told me, ‘Go in and fight like you’re going to play,'” he says. “From what I’ve heard from the team, they all thought I was saying, ‘I’m going to come in and start.’ That wasn’t what I meant to say. I knew it was Zak’s position, but I wanted to show them that I was going to compete.”

Basanez redshirted the 2001 season but had the same ambitious attitude throughout spring practices, Camp Kenosha and the Air Force game. The swagger paid off as he took the starting job from Stauss, last year’s backup and the assumed heir apparent.

But things were rough for Basanez. He held onto the ball a couple of seconds too long. He committed a lot of turnovers. His completion percentage was, to put it nicely, unimpressive.

But whenever times get tough for Basanez — from being thrown into a leadership role on a team trying to find itself, to taking care of his kid brother, to following Hall of Famer Walter Payton’s son as the high school starting quarterback — he knows how to handle it.

Or at least make it sound like he knows how to handle it.

He’s always tried to project a calm, cool and collected image — he denies that nerves or the 74,215 people at Spartan Stadium were factors in his poor second-half performance in his first Big Ten game. But Basanez says it was last Saturday’s game against Ohio State that made him truly believe he can compete with anybody in the Big Ten.

“I haven’t played well enough,” Basanez says. “I’ve made plays that beat us. But (last week) was a big wakeup for me. It took a lot of (the Buckeyes) off the pedestal — they’re just players.”

This new-found confidence is just fine with NU offensive coordinator Mike Dunbar – so long that it stays within reason.

“The thing about your quarterback is that you want him to be a little bit cocky,” Dunbar says. “We’ve had a couple of conversations, as the old saying goes, but he’s usually very good.”

He always has been, according to Basanez’s high school coach, Kevin Kelly, now a scout for the Cleveland Browns.

“You know him for five minutes and you know he’s Mr. Confidence,” Kelly says.

In the recruiting process, Walker watched Basanez play, then chatted with him for a bit.

Afterward, he said to Kelly: “I can see why you love him. He’s not short on confidence, is he?'”

Big shoes to fill

Kustok left behind more than an empty seat on the bus. The quarterback completed more than 500 passes in his NU career and holds the school record for single-season touchdowns.

But Kustok’s greatness went beyond the numbers.

“I’ll just go ahead and say it: I have been coaching football for 26 years and he’s the best I’ve ever coached,” Walker said of Kustok after the quarterback’s final collegiate game.

It’s a daunting task to fill Kustok’s cleats. But Basanez is game.

After all, he’s spent most of his life filling other people’s shoes.

Opening eyes

Kelly can still remember his first impression of Basanez. It was 1998 and their St. Viator team had just lost in the state playoffs, but had to play one last anticlimactic game.

Kelly had left the sophomore on the junior varsity squad for most of the season, but decided to bring him up for the game, just for kicks, to give the starting quarterback — senior Jarrett Payton, yes, that Payton, now a running back at No. 1 Miami — a chance to play a different position.

While they prepared for the game, Kelly had Basanez throw to Payton on a post route.

“He threw that ball and it looked like it had been shot out of a cannon,” Kelly recalls. “So I made him do it again, and it was another absolutely perfect shot.”

St. Viator, a Catholic school in Arlington Heights, Ill., with just a bit of a football obsession, had suffered several average seasons before Payton and his classmates turned the program around. According to Kelly, many people felt the team would fall back into mediocrity when Payton left.

“Nobody expected Brett to raise the bar, but he did,” Kelly said.

By the time Basanez graduated, he had rewritten the St. Viator record book.

‘Man of the House’

Still, Basanez, who graduated with a 5.2 GPA on a 5.0 scale, left St. Viator in good hands. And with a good arm. His little brother, Kyle, became St. Viator’s signal caller after Brett departed for NU.

The Basanez brothers are just a year apart in school and both played on St. Viator’s varsity in 2000 — Kyle backing up Brett.

Despite the small age difference, Brett was always more of a father figure than a friend to Kyle in their single-parent home.

“Their mom’s always been around for them, but she was a flight attendant and had to be gone sometimes,” said Kelly, who has been a main male role model in Brett’s life. The two still talk three times a week, about football and life. “Brett has been the man of the house in a lot of ways for a long time.”

Brett and Kyle were born in California and lived there with both parents until their mother, Ann, moved her boys to Arlington Heights. Brett was in second grade and Kyle was in first.

While their mother traveled, the boys’ grandmother took care of them.

But for Kyle, Brett was boss.

“He was hard on me,” Kyle said. “A lot of times I hated him for it. But then he left, and I realized how lucky I am that he was doing that my whole life.”

Kyle wasn’t recruited by any Big Ten schools, which Brett says is largely a result of a coaching change at St. Viator before Kyle’s senior year.

“He should have been (recruited more heavily),” Brett said. “He throws better than me, and he runs better than me.”

Kyle laughs off the compliment from his big brother, but disagrees with the arm assessment, especially after watching Brett’s performance last week against Ohio State.

“When we have throwing contests, I win once in a while,” Kyle says. “But he always comes back and beats me in the end.”

Kyle is now playing football at Fordham University in Bronx, N.Y., starting on the JV squad and backing up the starter on the varsity.

“At first it was really nice getting out of his shadow, not being ‘Little Baz’ anymore,” Kyle says. “But then I realized that Brett came along with that shadow.”

Basanez knows how to help raise a family. Now he’s learning how to raise a football team.

Filling The Void

When Basanez got to NU, the Kustok factor was more of an eclipse than a shadow. Redshirting his freshman year, Basanez tried to lay low — not an easy task for such a loud guy — and learn from Kustok.

“I tried to stay out of his way, mostly,” Basanez says. “I tried to watch him and stay with him.”

Playing under Dunbar helps a little bit with the Kustok comparisons.

“This is my first year playing and Coach Dunbar’s first year calling the plays, so we kind of came in together,” Basanez says. “It’s kind of nice to be his first quarterback here.”

In every game since Texas Christian, Basanez has come into his own a little bit more, increasing the speed of the offense and having fewer turnovers. Basanez and the coaching staff agree that the game is starting to slow down for him.

”
Baz is obviously a very bright kid,” Walker says. (His last name is actually pronounced BAZ-a-nay, but it doesn’t matter because everyone calls him Baz.) “It wasn’t a matter of learning, because he knew the offense. But it’s different when four or five angry men that weigh 300 pounds are chasing you. Until you get it right in the face by a 300-pound guy — and that happens a lot in his world — you have no idea what it’s like to play quarterback. He’s learned that, and he’s learned how to pick himself up and play the next play.”

He showed that poise in the first half at Michigan State, and through most of the Ohio State game. With his perfectionist attitude, it shouldn’t be long before the composure is the norm.

“If I throw a pass and somebody drops it, it should have been more accurate,” Basanez says. “(Kelly) always said, ‘It’s your fault. You’re the quarterback, and if you throw a pass and he doesn’t catch it, you need to throw it better.'”

His receivers say that bit of high school advice has followed him to NU.

“He’s always going to the sidelines saying, ‘I’m sorry, my bad. I’ll get you next time,'” senior wide receiver Jon Schweighardt says. “And we know he will get us the next time.”

After all, he’s always come through in the past.

It comes with the swagger.