Football

When senior kicker Jack Mitchell hit a 19-yard field goal with time expiring in the first half, it didn’t feel like the last time Northwestern would put points on the board.

As the whistle sounded for halftime, the Wildcats (4-3, 3-1 Big Ten) led Indiana (3-4, 1-3) 24-3 on the back of three touchdown strikes from sophomore quarterback Clayton Thorson and 371 yards of total offense. Following a two-game stretch that saw the offense come alive to the tune of 92 combined points, NU didn’t show any signs of slowing down early in its matchup with the Hoosiers.

By the end of the game, that hot start was a distant memory.

The Cats put up just 37 total yards of offense in the second half. Thorson completed 18-of-31 first-half passes but went just 6-for-12 in the second, while junior running back Justin Jackson turned 13 second-half carries into only 22 yards.

Given Indiana’s body of work defensively this season — the Hoosiers came into the game allowing a solid 5.1 yards per play, No. 33 in the country, while playing a tough slate that’s included No. 2 Ohio State and No. 8 Nebraska — coach Pat Fitzgerald said he wasn’t surprised that NU ran into trouble.

“I think they’re pretty good on defense,” he said. “They have an identity. They know who they are.”

Nevertheless, the difference between the first half and the second was stark. Early in the game, the Cats were in an up-tempo rhythm, stretching Indiana’s defense to its limits. But after the break, the Hoosiers seemed to have solved NU’s offense in a way that Iowa and Michigan State couldn’t before them.

With the Cats’ offense stalled, the defense was left to close out the game in the second half and did the job in securing the 24-14 victory. NU came up with big plays when it needed them to snuff out scoring opportunities for Indiana, persevering through injuries in the secondary and the struggles of the offense to seal the win.

“Whether we scored 50 points, 100 points or three points, we wanted to impact the game in some kind of way,” junior linebacker Anthony Walker said.

While the defensive showing was good enough to withstand the second-half slump, the Cats are left with work to do as a date with the Buckeyes looms next week. After seeming to turn a corner offensively, NU’s final 30 minutes were more reminiscent of the team that started the season 1-3.

If the Cats want to pull off an upset in Columbus, they’ll likely need a complete offensive performance, and Thorson thinks the unit can recapture that spark that has reinvigorated NU’s season.

“It’s not like it was any one position group or one guy every time,” he said. “We’ve just got to clean it up. We’ve got to play for four quarters again.”

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