Three weeks ago, Northwestern was riding high. The team had won five of its last six games and NCAA tournament buzz grew in Evanston for the first time in recent memory.
Fast forward to the present, and all of a sudden the Wildcats aren’t feeling so hot. Literally.
NU (14-11, 5-9 Big Ten) has dropped four of its last five games and plunged out of contention for an at-large tournament bid, all while three of their important contributors fell ill.
“First, I got sick,” said freshman center Luka Mirkovic, who lost 12 pounds in four days as a result of his weakened state. “And then John Shurna, and then Kevin (Coble). We were kind of in a groove, playing our game in rhythm. Now, not the whole team, but just certain guys don’t really feel well and it got them off balance.”
During Tuesday’s practice, coach Bill Carmody was awaiting an update on the status of freshman forward Davide Curletti, the next player to fall victim to this fast-spreading virus.
Not that the team is using the illnesses as an excuse.
“You have a bunch of guys on a team,” Carmody said. “If somebody’s sick somebody else has got to come through. It happens to every team – or a lot of teams – so we have to be able to handle it better than we did against Minnesota.”
Sunday’s game in Minnesota was the most recent of the losses in NU’s slump, and perhaps the most devastating. The Cats fell 72-45 to the slumping Golden Gophers, a team they had handled on their home court a month earlier.
In that game, the team’s leading scorer, junior forward Kevin Coble, contributed just five points while battling the stomach bug. Coble had been limited in practice in the days leading up to the loss, and played just 22 minutes – the fewest he has played in any game since the fifth game of his freshman year.
What exactly are the players dealing with?
“Some winter things – for me it was just my stomach,” Coble said. “It’s tough. It’s hard to recover from because there’s really nothing you can do about it except take some IVs to try and recover as quickly as possible.”
But as the team finally begins to recover from the widespread stomach bug that has been affecting it for the past three games, it encounters another obstacle.
On Wednesday, the Cats travel to Bloomington, Ind., where they have not defeated the Hoosiers since 1968, three years before the famed Assembly Hall opened.
While NU’s underclassmen were unaware of the 41-year tradition, they were impressed with the statistic.
“Holy cow,” freshman forward John Shurna said.
“Wow, that’s quite a (while),” Mirkovic said.
But the team seems unfazed. NU defeated Indiana (6-20, 1-13) at Welsh-Ryan Arena by a 77-75 count late in January. In addition, both Shurna and Mirkovic said the team understands that past squads accumulated the drought, and that the current incarnation of the Cats needs this win for conference tournament positioning more than it does to end a streak.
However, with his collegiate career winding down, senior guard Craig Moore senses a little more urgency and wants to collect a win at Assembly Hall while he still has the chance.
“I can’t feel that weight (of the drought) because I haven’t been there for all those years,” he said. “But I definitely feel the weight in terms of, I haven’t won there and coach Carmody hasn’t won there, and our people that are with me haven’t won there.”