Revisiting Purdue

With no Northwestern game this weekend, I am saving my Big Ten weekly post for Friday.  Also, given that my teams ranked 5-8 all lost, I still have no idea where anyone should fall on my power rankings; although it is starting to come into place.
Instead, it is time to take a look at this Purdue loss fits into the greater scheme of things.  Is it indicative of anything; or is it just another game.  Are there systemic problems to be concerned with; or was the loss the result of a lack of focus and too many mistakes.  The way EVR looks at it, there are three schools of thought on how to analyze the game and where NU goes from here.

The Upset

There is a view that Northwestern was simply the victim of a good old fashioned upset.  The kind that jumps up to bite a better team when they least expect it.  No one left the Virginia Tech – James Madison game actually believing that James Madison was a better team.  Upsets happen, it is part of the game, and it is part of the joy.  But given how often NU is actually a favorite in a Big Ten game, NU fans are simply not used to this position.

All of the elements of the upset were present: NU was undefeated team trudging through a very easy stretch of games.  It had a bye week to look forward to and what was already looking like the most difficult game of the schedule right ahead.  NU had been playing well, but making a lot of mistakes.  They were ripe for an upset.

On the other side of things, Purdue was a team that was desperate for a win.  This was obvious by the way that the team reacted as the final seconds ticked away.  It had two weeks to concentrate on nothing more but exposing the few weaknesses necessary to exploit NU’s lack of focus.  Like most upsets, it was the perfect storm.  It is easy to point to all of these factors after the fact, but no one was honestly predicting this beforehand – just like most upsets.

Those that subscribe to the upset theory are satisfied with this result because it means that NU is just as good of a team today as they were (in everyone’s mind) at this time last week.  That the team remains a team that could top out at 10 wins, just that it would only win nine now.  It is also a statement for the program that NU is capable of such a major upset by a fellow Big Ten team.  In other words, if NU can truly be upset by Purdue, it must have already accomplished something.  This Purdue game is not a setback, but just a bump in the road.

The negative of the upset theory is that upsets tend to be the beginning of the “downward spiral.”  If the team is not mentally strong enough to overcome the emotional shock of the upset, it could never recover.  A perfect example was the 2001 loss to Penn State.  NU was 4-1, coming off a Big Ten Title and its only loss was at Ohio State.  Penn State was having one of the worst seasons of Joe Paterno’s career.  PSU came into Evanston and beat the Cats 38-35.  The Cats would not win another game that season and would lose 12 of the next 14 games.

Obviously, everyone would like to believe that this was just an upset.  And no one will know the answer until December 1 after NU and Purdue have both finished their seasons.  But in reality, this is certainly the minority view.

The Exposure

There is a certain segment of the college football public that viewed Saturday night as the Boilermaker’s exposure of Northwestern.  That NU is nothing more than a mediocre team that had defeated five worse teams in rather unimpressive fashion.  After the Minnesota game, Lou Holtz remarked that the Cats were one win away from bowl eligibility.  May Mark quickly responded that he could not see where NU would get its sixth win.  This is his view.

And if any Cat fan is honest with him(her)self, this is what most of us thought as we were exiting the stadium / turning off the TV on Saturday night.  That this truly was a major step backwards and a confirmation of what we all had assumed, but feared, might be the case.  That the last two years were great, but that the 2010 version is just a ghost of what its predecessors were.

The offense is too one-dimensional; the defense is too soft; the special teams are too terrible.  And most importantly, the schedule is too difficult.  This team might be good enough to hang with Illinois and Indiana, but otherwise this will get ugly.  This is certainly the view of many of the national media, who have cast aside Northwestern in favor of its new flavor of the month.  Even the five pollsters who kept NU at 25 admitted that they cast their votes before 7:30 EST Saturday.

This is a different view point than the upset+downward spiral mentioned above – because it necessarily assumes that Purdue was actually a better team than NU.  And once you come to this realization, you begin to realize why the knee-jerk reaction of most fans is settling into a nice comfy pool of reality.

The biggest damage caused by this viewpoint is the recruiting angle.  And this comes two-fold.  First, there were recruits at the game Saturday and they may be permanently turned off by the lackluster performance.  Fitz had his work cut out for him this week with those guys.  Recruiting is a fickle business and these high school seniors may make Saturday night their lasting memory of NU.  There is also the concern that Saturday night’s performance will hurt fan support and thus attendance and thus recruiting.  Although ticket sales for the final three homes games appear to be strong enough to counteract any negative attendance effects.

This is the worst nightmare for Cat fans – that maybe this really is a rebuilding year.  Or worse, that maybe NU is just in a down cycle for a few years.  Time will tell.  But even though it was the most common sentiment on Saturday night, most fans have evolved into the more common viewpoint…

Business as Usual

I try my best not to fall into the cynical trap of “typical Northwestern” – the team that always loses a game that it should win.  This is, however, a fact.  Syracuse ’09, Indiana ’08, Duke ’07, and Northeastern ’06 are all games that should have been won by the Cats.   But I do not believe that it is a foregone conclusion that Northwestern will, from now until the end of time, continue to lose one game that it should win.

With that said, the reason why this position is popular, and most likely, is that while past performance does not dictate future results, Northwestern just seems to be more comfortable, and thus more successful, when they are in this position.  NU is now 1-5 when ranked under Fitz.  They are 5-0 coming off of those losses.  NU thrives when not in the spotlight – when not expected to win; which in part explains their inability to live up to expectations.  NU has played remarkably well in the stretch runs of the last two seasons – jumping up and surprising the “big boys” after humiliating losses earlier on.

Until NU has firmly established itself as a power, the team will continue to lose confidence in the times when everyone expects them to win, and to ooze confidence when viewed as the little brother of the Big Ten Conference.

The loss to Purdue put NU right back in its comfort zone; a place where the team can thrive and focus.  Fitz can focus the team on going 1-0 every week because the team is no longer concerned with the outside pressure of remaining unbeaten. 

For other programs, this would be the cop out view; the cliché.  How can a loss possibly be a benefit for the program?  But the Northwestern team has proved time and time again that they play better when no one expects them to.

I invite your comments, which view do you subscribe to?  And where do you think the Cats will go from here?

Go Cats!