By Abe RakovThe Daily Northwestern

Coming into the season Northwestern had no expectations. The Wildcats could have gone 0-16 in the Big Ten and it wouldn’t have been too surprising.

But then the Cats went 10-3 in non-conference play with wins over semi-respectable DePaul, Miami and Utah. And with wins come expectations. But for the second game in a row, the Cats didn’t live up to the new bar.

NU forced Michigan into a slow pace that favored the Cats, held Michigan to nine points below its season average, and the normally high-flying, athletic Wolverines scored just two fast break points. Only one Michigan player scored in double figures.

But the result was a 12-point home loss to a very beatable team.

So now that Northwestern is 0-2 in the Big Ten, was the 10-3 start a mirage or are the disappointing losses to Penn State and Michigan merely bumps in the road?

It’s probably a combination of both. NU is a middle of the road Big Ten team. The Cats will only get better because they’re still a young squad with 10 underclassmen.

Freshman Kevin Coble played 28 minutes, junior transfer Jason Okrzesik had 19 minutes and freshmen Jeremy Nash and Jeff Ryan each played 13 minutes. None of those players played for NU last year. All of them are still learning how to play with their teammates while the season progresses into Big Ten play, making the learning process harder. Now that the competition is tougher, the young players have gotten exposed at times.

Coble has gone cold, as he is 3 for 16 with 10 points in two Big Ten games. He had a miscue with more than five minutes left in Saturday’s loss when he wrestled teammate Tim Doyle for an offensive rebound for a good three seconds or so before going out of bounds, giving the ball to Michigan with the Wolverines up by six.

While Nash was stellar on defense most of the day (highlighted by the charge he drew that led to a Tim Doyle layup on the ensuing possession to pull the Cats to within two with seven minutes left), he had his freshman mistake as well. With NU somehow still in the game despite missing nearly everything it threw at the basket in the second half, Nash missed an uncontested layup with just more than three minutes left that would have made the score 50-46.

The fact that NU has to rely on freshman to make plays in those crucial situations doesn’t bode well for the immediate future – neither does the fact that its next three opponents are Michigan State, No. 4 Wisconsin and No. 6 Ohio State.

But for the rest of the season the new expectations will loom over the Cats. So far they haven’t lived up to them.

Basketball editor Abe Rakov is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].