Northwestern University Athletics
Point/Counterpoint: Northwestern's 47-14 Win Over Towson
9/5/2009 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 5, 2009
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NUsports.com Special Contributor Skip Myslenski checks in with his take on Saturday's 47-14 win over Towson at Ryan Field.
POINT: The 'Cats won. Big. Breezing, to borrow a horse racing term.
COUNTERPOINT: Their victim was Towson, an FCS Division school whose two-deep depth chart had 18 true or redshirt freshmen among the 46 names listed.
POINT: Arby Fields, the 'Cats own freshman running back, showed promise in his debut, scoring a pair of touchdowns and gaining 48 yards on a half-dozen carries.
COUNTERPOINT: After gaining four on the first play of the 'Cats second possession in the second half, he cramped up and did not appear again. "It was a failure to hydrate last night as well as I should (have)," he later explained. "Coach (Pat Fitzgerald) preaches that all the time."
Freshman mistake?
"Yeah. Yeah."
Did you hydrate some?
"Yeah. Yeah. I hydrated some. But I was so excited about the game last night, I drank one, maybe two Gatorades and felt I'd be fine. I was just so ready to play I didn't think about hydration."
POINT: Fields, asked how he was after the game, said: "I feel good."
COUNTERPOINT: Jeravin Matthews, another of the Cats' committee at running back, turned his left ankle late in the first half and had to be helped from the field. Official word on his condition won't come until Monday, but he didn't look good.
POINT: The 5-foot-10, 200-pound Jacob Schmidt, another on that committee, banged in for a touchdown from two-yards out and later broke one for 13 after being inserted with the 'Cats facing a third-and-three. His role, then, appears to be the short-yardage back.
COUNTERPOINT: Fitzgerald wouldn't admit that, saying only that "We're going to play our guys to their strengths." But then, speaking of Schmidt, he did add: "The kids have nicknamed him Larry Csonka (the former Dolphin bruiser). I'm not sure they even know who he is. But (Jacob's) a physical young man."
POINT: Quarterback Mike Kafka played within the framework of the offense, completed his first half-dozen passing attempts and finished the afternoon a gaudy 15-of-20 for 192 yards.
COUNTERPOINT: Late in the first quarter, after running up that streak of completions, he badly overthrew a streaking Matthews, whose defender was so lost he was in another zip code. "I just missed him," Kafka would say of this error, which was of no consequence in this game. But it is never good to blow a gimmee since, someday, the consequence may be fatal.
POINT: Thirteen of the 'Cats 16 receptions (for 242 yards) were spread among five members in their new corps of receivers, who have taken to calling themselves the No Names.
COUNTERPOINT: Six of them (for 145 yards) went to former quarterback Andrew Brewer, who carried one 72 yards for the first receiving touchdown of his career. "Now you know at least one of their names," Fitzgerald later quipped.
POINT: The 'Cat defense did not surrender a first down until the last play of the first quarter and limited Towson to a mere 40 yards in its first five possessions.
COUNTERPOINT: On their sixth possession, which came after 'Cat backup quarterback Dan Persa threw into coverage and suffered an interception, the Tigers put together a 12-play, 78-yard scoring drive. "Hank (defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz) tells a great story," Fitzgerald later said. "When the bell rings in the firehouse, the firemen don't go, 'Oh, no.' They go, "Great. It's time to go.' That's what we talk about with sudden change. You're a fireman, the bell rings, you go put the fire out. We had the opportunity to do that today and we didn't get it done."
POINT: The 'Cats defensive starters did not ring up a sack, did not cause any fumbles and got neither of their team's two interceptions. "We need to need to pull the ball out more, get more turnovers, get more sacks," Fitzgerald would acknowledge.
COUNTERPOINT: Starting end Corey Wootton and starting corner Sherrick McManis did not play after the 'Cats went up 30-0 less than four minutes into the second quarter. ("Our plan was to keep those guys limited today if the game dictated that," said Fitzgerald.) Then there were the schemes deployed by Hankwitz, who often recalls a mad scientist with his concoctions of looks and blitzes. Here, against a clearly overmatched foe, he played it straight, serving up only vanilla from his vast repertoire of flavors. "We," safety Brendan Smith later said, "didn't throw much at them."
POINT: The same was true of the 'Cat offense, whose own coordinator (Mick McCall) can produce flights of fancy. "We didn't show very much. We were pretty base," said Kafka.
COUNTERPOINT: When asked about his team's basic approach, Fitzgerald called up his best Cheshire cat grin and, addressing those opponents still ahead, baldly declared: "We ran everything today." This was a nice display of his puckish sense of humor.
POINT: The crowd of 17,857 was widely entertained and appreciative.
COUNTERPOINT: "We need to have more energy, more passion on the sidelines," insisted Fitzgerald. "It's a little over $52,000-a-year to be on scholarship here. I had a lot of paid cheerleaders today who didn't do a very good job. I'll take care of that."
POINT: Coaches regularly say that a team improves the most between game one and game two.
COUNTERPOINT: "I agree with that if you have the right attitude going to practice to improve," said Fitzgerald. "The film study that we're going to have Monday morning is the most-critical film study this team's had. If we go in with open eyes and open ears and listen and learn, then we'll grow from it and get better on Tuesday, then just keep improving each week. I told the team we're going to start adding more weight on the bar. We're going to have some momentary failure trying to get that bench press off our chest. But we've got to learn from those things and grow and attack it even harder the next week. Our Leadership Council, our captains and our seniors, they know what we're looking for and they know, at times today, what we had from a focus and passion and execution standpoin t was not what we're looking for."
POINT: The 'Cats won. Big. Breezing, to borrow a horse racing term.
COUNTERPOINT: "We did some things really, really well. Some things we'll be able to accentuate and grow from and try to continue to emulate," concluded Fitzgerald. "Then there's some things, as a coach, you don't get focused on the positives."
