Northwestern University Athletics
The Skip Report: 10 Things to Know About the Receiving Corps
10/18/2017 2:46:00 PM | Football
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Ten things about the forward pass and some Northwestern receivers. . .
1. It is an easy thing to complete in the backyard when playing catch with your son or daughter. But when you drop back, and a half-ton of mean-spirited and ill-willed defenders are bearing down on you, and your receiver is on the move and pursued by another defender with equally-bad intentions— well, then it is something else all together.
"What goes into completing even a five-yard pass on Saturdays is so much more than just (pitch and catch)," says Northwestern quarterback Clayton Thorson. "It's countless hours in the film room in the offseason day after day. It's working on little things. It's staying with one guy and working on a five-yard in-cut, one corner route. To the outside fan it's, 'He's got to complete this' or 'He's got to catch that' or 'He's got to run that route.' And they don't know what goes into it. It starts out, really, with getting to know guys, and developing that trust there off the field, and then on the field you trust them as well."
2. The ultimate result of those countless hours is an on-field Bromance, which is just what we witnessed last fall while watching Thorson and Biletnikoff Award finalist Austin Carr. They thought alike and saw things alike and anticipated just how the other would react, and so often it seemed as if a Thorson offering were connected to Carr's hands by some invisible string.
But now Carr is gone and, of the 15 'Cats who have caught a pass this season, just the running back Justin Jackson, the superback Garrett Dickerson and the wide outs Flynn Nagel and Macan Wilson have worked with Thorson for multiple seasons. Among the rest one is the junior superback James Prather, who is primarily a blocker; three are in their second season with him (the true sophomore Bennett Skowronek and the redshirt sophomores Cam Green and Charlie Fessler); and a full seven of them are either true first years or redshirt first years or a transfer catching passes from him in a game for the very first time. This is why, at his presser last Monday, Pat Fitzgerald described his corps of catchers as "Developing."
"From the start to now, personally I have a lot more confidence in myself at the receiver position," the redshirt first-year wideout Riley Lees would say minutes later, describing how he has developed. "As a whole I think we all do, especially the young guys who haven't played before this year."
3. Last Saturday, in the Wildcats' win over Maryland, Lees caught three passes for 39 yards and returned three kickoffs for 70 and two punts for seven.
"We were one block away on three different kickoff returns from having explosive plays, and I really liked his aggressiveness as a punt returner," Fitzgerald would say. "That's what we're looking for, guys who can go out there and provide a spark, make a play."
"Riley's special with the ball in his hands," echoes Thorson. "He's really good. Really good. He's fast. I tell you, he's fast. He can blow past some guys and he can make people miss. If he continues to progress as a receiver, he's going to be playing for awhile."
4. Lees was an All-Everything quarterback at Libertyville (IL) High School. But when he was recruited, recalls Fitzgerald, "We told him the truth. We thought he was a dynamic athlete. But we didn't think he was going to be a quarterback. I don't think he liked that initially."
"Honestly, no one recruited me as a quarterback," Lees himself will say when asked about that. "I was pretty used to it by that point. It wasn't a shock."
But did it upset him?
"It is what it is," he deadpans. "I didn't have good mechanics anyway. I just kind of ran around and chucked it."
5. He, then, is in just his second season as a wide out, and still on the front end of mastering the nuances of his position. This, in turn, makes him an apt symbol for so many of the 'Cat catchers, who are early in the process of learning the college game and of building that symbiotic relationship with Thorson that characterizes the best pitch-and-catch duos.
"I've got to know what they want and they've got to know what I want," he will say, describing the optimum situation.
But that is not possible, not yet, not with a group so callow and so new to the college game. Two of them, in fact, were still in high school at this time last fall and, as he speaks of Jace James and Kyric McGowan, Thorson all but shakes his head in wonder at it all.
"Those guys," he says then, "come in the summer, and they're playing right away, and they've only been here three months."
6. So it is no surprise that Fitzgerald describes his receiving corps as developing, or that there have been instances of miscommunication between its members and its quarterback.
"It comes down to being on the same page, and being on the same page on different routes," says Thorson. "Different routes can have adjustments, different things in the routes. Like Riley said, as these guys have gotten more reps, they've gotten more confidence. They're playing faster. They're making decisions right away. In preseason camp some guys were, 'I don't want to do this wrong.' Now it's, 'We're going. And if we're wrong, we're on the same page and we're wrong together.' If we're on the same page, we're OK."
7. But here is the thing about developing that rapport that characterized his relationship with Carr.
"It never stops. Last year it never stopped," says Thorson. "Even with Austin when he was catching all those passes, it never stopped. We had to continue to work on things after practice. We had to continue to hone down different things. We had to continue to grow on and off the field. That never stops and obviously with these young guys you've got to continue to grow, continue to grow. A lot of these guys haven't gone through a whole season and I have, and some of the older guys have. We're just going to continue to work with them. They're getting a lot better."
8. One young guy who has certainly gotten better is the redshirt sophomore superback Cam Green, who last week against Maryland stepped in for the injured Garrett Dickerson and led the 'Cats with a half-dozen catches for 49 yards.
"I'm excited to go out there and play," he will say when asked his reaction upon hearing Dickerson would be limited against the Terps. "The best thing about it is Garrett has taught me so many things that I know now, I just go out there and try to play like him. He's a great role model to have. He goes out there and does extremely well. Extremely well. He goes out there and makes big plays. So I just try to fill his role and go out there and make some big plays for the team as well as just do my job. Gladly, the coaches trust me."
"I think," says Fitzgerald, "there's a ton of growth that's going to happen for him here in the back half of his career."
9. At Stevenson High outside Chicago, Green was a 200-pound wideout, a position often peopled by glamor boys. But at Camp Kenosha of 2016 he was switched to his current role, where he is a 230-pound blocker more often than a celebrated receiver.
"It's hard. It's extremely hard. It's hard work," he says of his new job. "I never pictured myself, when I came here, I never thought I was going to block a defensive end. But my teammates, they said I could do it. Now I believe I can block the defensive end if I have to."
And does he now take as much pride in a good block as a good catch?
"Absolutely. Absolutely," he says with a smile. "That's one thing we really focus on in our room. Most of our job is about blocking. It's not all about just catching the ball. When you're out there running a route, you're one of four or five people running a route. So your chances of getting the ball are very slim. But when you're blocking, you have a big influence on a play."
10. Then there's the true sophomore wideout Bennett Skowronek, who in a practice last fall made a play during a seven-on-seven drill that awed then-middle linebacker Anthony Walker.
"This guy's going to be really good," he told Thorson that day.
"Without a doubt, his competitive nature," safety Kyle Queiro will say when asked what quality in the catcher prompted Walker's rapture. "He's one of the few receivers on our team who's always chirping back and forth with the DBs, and creating that competitive environment that we definitely need to thrive and get better. That's surprising for a guy who's 18 to be doing that to a guy like me, who's 22. It kind of took me by surprise."
"Last fall he (Skowronek) was holding onto his own butt," Thorson says with a laugh after hearing Queiro's comment. "But in the spring he started talking because he had confidence in himself. I don't know if trash talking is the thing we need. But it's a byproduct of him having confidence in himself. So I'll take it."
