Northwestern University Athletics
Image Building: Wildcats Looking to Build on Recent Successes
8/7/2009 12:00:00 AM | Football
Aug. 7, 2009
By Skip Myslenski, NUsports.com Contributing Writer
EVANSTON, Ill. -- Bret Bielema, the Wisconsin coach, chuckles softly at the memory. He is thinking back here to October of 1989, that fall when he was a reserve lineman at the University of Iowa, and the unfortunate death of his sister just days before the Hawkeyes' meeting with Northwestern. "I wasn't going to play in that weekend's game," he is saying now and again he chuckles softly.
"But I was an underclassman and, at that time, I remember I really wanted to play, I thought I'd really have a chance to play in that game. I always tell the story. I was at my buddy's wedding, probably 10 years ago, I was telling it and I said that back then, the conclusion was the Northwestern game, you were going to win it. But that's all changed. That's the way I feel."
"When I was playing, Northwestern wasn't as good (as it is now). They weren't as good a football team, a football program," Minnesota coach Tim Brewster is adding minutes later. He played at Illinois in the early '80s and here he continues, "So we would have been disappointed if we had lost to Northwestern, without question.
"There were times, there were periods where that was the case. But I don't think that's the case any longer. I think the success Gary Barnett had at Northwestern, and now the current success that Pat (Fitzgerald's) having, I think they've proven you can win at Northwestern, you can do it the right way, and you can attract a very high quality student-athlete with not quite all the emphasis on the student and just as much on the athlete, which is what you've got to have to win. Period."
In that fall that Bielema recalls, the Wildcats lost to the Hawkeyes by 13 and finished their season 0-11 under Francis Peay. They were 2-9 under Dennis Green when Brewster was a junior at Illinois, which that year beat them by a tidy 32, and 2-9 again when he was a senior and the Illini escaped by a mere eight. In that decade of the 80s, in fact, the Wildcats suffered through three winless season and won just 18 of 110 games and finished a paltry 13-71-1 against their Big Ten brethren.
The reality now, of course, is far different from those hapless days of yore. Yet a ragamuffin reputation, a feckless image, can be harder to eradicate than that red wine stain decorating your white shirt, and often it is easier to escape the long arm of the law than it is to shed a past so filled with failure and folly.
"You know when two rivers collide, I think we're in that body of water right now. That confluence," Fitzgerald himself will say when asked if his 'Cats still suffer from that perception problem created so many years ago. "Kids today are really excited about our football program because they know us as a winner. They come and see the support and our facilities and they meet our coaches and our players.
"Then there's a certain group of adults and parents that only know Northwestern from not being successful in their day. When we get in that jumbled water, we do the best job we can of telling our story in relationship to what the young person knows. I think we're starting the glory years of the modern era of Northwestern football."
There have, most certainly, been moments of glory over the last 14 years and they are as familiar to any Cat fan as Mustard's Last Stand. The conference championships in '95 and '96 and the trips (respectively) to the Rose and Citrus bowls. Another championship and another bowl (the Alamo) in 2000, and then appearances in the Motor City Bowl (2003) and the Sun Bowl (2005) and the Alamo again (just last year).
Only Ohio State and Michigan won or shared more than the three titles the Cats earned in that interlude, and over the last half-dozen years they have run up just two less conference victories than Penn State and more than Purdue and Michigan State, than Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana. Since 1995, the Wildcats have posted a winning composite regular-season record: 83-79. Yet, to trot out just one example, 20 Nittany Lions and just three Cats have garnered first-team All-Big Ten honors in those same six seasons.
That is the kind of influence wielded by the stigma of the past and so it is not surprising to hear Fitzgerald say, "I hear more negative questions from the media because they're more historians and have more thoughts of what happened in the past. But when I'm visiting with recruits and parents and high school coaches, they understand our program. Not that the media doesn't. But, well, there was the big group of time when we didn't win."
He himself was recruited in the wake of that time and yes, says Fitzgerald, other schools used the Cats' failures while trying to dissuade him from playing in Evanston. ("They said they'll never win there consistently. Don't you want to win?") But now, he adds tellingly, "I think the only negative recruiting (he faces) are things we can fix. Attendance. That's a fact.
"But you can't recruit that we're not winning. Facts are there that we are. You can't recruit that we're not developing guys for the NFL. We have more in the NFL than we ever had. You can't recruit that we're not going to continue to be what we are academically. You look at our grade point average, you look at our academic success, you look at our reputation, it's getting harder and harder to get into school here. So the only negative I've heard is, 'Will the stadium be full?' We need to do that more consistently and we will."
So, he is finally asked, the bad old days aren't much of a hindrance anymore?
"Not on the front lines," Pat Fitzgerald finally says. "Not in the day-to-day recruiting battles. Not in our relationships with coaches. No. Not at all. Again. There's going to be some periphery where we're hearing that. Do you have to do it, what? Is consistent 20 years, 25 years of winning? Yeah, probably, to overcome what we had to overcome.
"It was as negative as it could be."
