Northwestern University Athletics
The Skip Report: A Dominant Performance
9/6/2015 2:52:00 PM | Football
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By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Themes emerged as late summer moved resolutely toward fall and the 'Cats season opener with Stanford. They were healthier than they had been a year earlier. They had, with those sound bodies, competed more ardently in camp than they had then. They were deeper now as a result of that competition. They were buttressed by the veterans on their defensive line and in their defensive backfield, the most-accomplished position groups on the team. They were to be led, when the decision came, by a redshirt freshman quarterback with a demeanor all described as calm. They were focused on dominating in that netherworld called The Pit.
Those were some of the big story lines as they prepared for the Cardinal, but that promised nothing. They were still just words that had not-yet been fashioned into a best-selling novel. That would not happen until Saturday at Ryan Field, where all of them played out in the 'Cats 16-6 win over No. 21 Stanford. They rolled in 10 defensive linemen without missing a beat, which testified to their depth. Their young quarterback, Clayton Thorson, never rattled even after throwing freshman passes into coverage. Their defense surrendered just a pair of field goals and their lines--especially their defensive line--out-performed their Cardinal counterparts, who were draped with the reputation of being bad hombres.
"The big guys up front, they did the dirty work today. We won the line-of-scrimmage battle today," middle linebacker Anthony Walker would later say.
"I think our O linemen, they really showed up today," said running back Justin Jackson.
"I felt defensively we unleashed a caged bull today," defensive end Dean Lowry would say. "It's been a long time coming. Our whole mentality this whole off-season has been competition and work ethic, a blue-collar mentality. This first game was a huge matchup against a very prominent opponent. We were really fired up for it, and we just unleashed it today, unleashed all the frustration of not making a bowl game last year and knowing the past few years we could have been a better team."
"Our O line did a great job all game," said Thorson.
"Every football game is the same way. But this game for sure needed to be won up front," Pat Fitzgerald would finally say. "That's what I saw from the boundary. I thought that was a dominant performance by our defensive line. I thought we controlled the line of scrimmage on every single play defensive-line wise. And I think our offensive line did some positive things. Perfect? No. But dominant from the standpoint of a team that we have a lot of respect for the way they've always played physical, the way they've always come downhill and run the ball offensively. Then the same thing defensively. They were one of the most-stout defensive fronts in the country, not only last year, but a bunch of years.
"So we talked to the guys about dominating upfront to make this be a statement game about where we are at right now. I thought our guys made that statement today against a very, very good football team."
Last year the defensive line viewed itself as The Bad Boys, a football version of the Detroit Pistons of the late '80s and early '90s who terrorized the NBA with their physical play. This year they see themselves as The Savage Patch Kids. "Savage boys," defensive tackle C.J. Robbins explained last month, "is the mentality of just being savage on the field, going all out like (the Texans') J.J. Watt or Jadeveon Clowney, being someone who's mean on the field, someone no one can block. The savage is what we're focusing on."
They were hardly that early against the Cardinal, who took the opening kickoff and quickly marched down to the 'Cat nine. Now, on second down, it ran a sweep left against the flow, but tackle Tyler Lancaster was not fooled. The 300-pound sophomore instead stayed home, held his ground and smothered the run, and two plays later Stanford settled for a field goal.
"Maybe a little bit too early to tell," Fitzgerald would say when asked if Lancaster's stand had shifted the momentum. But shift it did, and the numbers tell the story well enough here. For on that opening drive, the Cardinal had gained 64 yards on 12 plays. But through the rest of this opening half, it would gain just 23 on 16. (One more revelatory stat: 11 of Stanford's 28 first-half plays resulted in either no gain or negative yardage.)
The 'Cat offense, in turn, went three-and-out on its first possession, but on its next, its line flexed and it drove to a tying field goal. "The attitude we want to adopt is be tough both mentally and physically," its center, Brad North, had earlier explained. "The last few years, I feel like we just kind of lost that. So we want to build consistency, and then we want to try to just dominate the guy across from us."
It was on this drive that it began to do that, assiduously protecting Thorson and opening holes for Jackson and Warren Long. It sprung Jackson for 16 on a third-and-one and then held firm as Thorson found Christian Jones for 11 on a third-and-seven. It sprung Jackson for four, then Long for four, then Jackson for 19, then Jackson for three, which carried the ball down to the Cardinal 14.
Jack Mitchell's field goal would now follow after a pair of incompletions. But the tone had been set, and at game's end Thorson will have suffered no sacks and the 'Cats will have rolled up 225 yards on 54 carries (4.1 ypc) and Stanford, just 85 on 27 (3.1 ypc). "We," Justin Jackson later said, "just balled out today. I'm really proud of everyone."
Pat Fitzgerald had been coy all through camp when asked about Clayton Thorson's running skills, but obviously they were extant. He had rushed for 567 yards and a dozen touchdowns as a high school senior. Now, five minutes into the second quarter, they would be put on full display for all to see. That happened first on this drive's opening play, Thorson scampering for 12 on an option left. Then it happened most vividly on this drive's final play, Thorson taking an old-fashioned quarterback draw and carrying it 42 yards for this game's only touchdown.
"Our O line had a huge gap and I just took it," he would say of his run. "It's pretty easy when you got half the field to work with. So our O line did a great job. On that play and the whole game."
"When he gets into the open field, he can move," Jackson would say of his quarterback, who outran the Cardinal DBs on this play. "He's got those long strides. He can go. That's a big weapon for us on offense."
Still. That would be the biggest outburst of offense on this afternoon, and now this game evolved into an old-fashioned, back-alley brawl. The third quarter was literally played out between the 20-yard lines and early in the fourth, Mitchell's second field goal pushed the 'Cats lead to 10 after they had picked up all 61 yards of this drive on the ground. Stanford responded with a field goal of its own, which again made this a one- score game, and now the 'Cats faced a third-and-eight at their own 27 with some six minutes remaining.
They had run successfully all day, and they were protecting a narrow lead, and the clock was there for them to bleed. But here Thorson took the snap and looked left, looked toward Miles Shuler running a fly down the right sideline, and then he gave a glimpse of all that is in him by launching a strike to his receiver, who collected it at the Cardinal 48 for a 25-yard gain. "We just needed a first down," he would later say. "That's what we were stressing. We need to get first downs. The O line had great protection, I felt comfortable back there, and I just let it rip."
"I like the fact that he's being aggressive," said Fitzgerald. "I like the fact that he took the matchup on the outside and took the one-on-one shot. Feel free to keep playing us man. We've got our weapons back now with Christian and Miles and Danny (Vitale, the superback) and the guys in the offensive backfield."
Now, six plays later, Mitchell would kick his third field goal of the afternoon, this one a 49-yarder, and again this was a two-score game with just 3:38 remaining. Stanford would still try to rally, would here drive to the 'Cat five. But then safety Kyle Queiro would pick Cardinal quarterback Kevin Hogan to put an exclamation point on the defense's dominating day. "I talked about getting back to our standard," Fitzgerald was soon saying, here referencing one more theme that had emerged as late summer moved resolutely toward fall.
"And our standard around here is we play, for whatever reason, we play close games. When we've been very good, we win close games, we finish the job. That's what the guys were talking about in the locker room. This is a new team, and we know how to finish, and the defense finished the job."
"The thing that's really different about this year is we were really confident in ourselves going in," Justin Jackson would soon conclude. "We had no doubt we were going to go in there and win that game, and we played like that. Obviously, we've got to clean some stuff up. But overall I think we did a pretty good job of moving the ball and playing our type of football.
"Our mission this year is to prove we need to be where we feel we should be as a team and a program. We're trying to get back to that standard."
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