Northwestern University Athletics
The Skip Report: Nebraska Upon Further Review
10/16/2018 12:31:00 PM | Football
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Upon further review. . . .
*EASILY MISSED in the maelstrom that was Northwestern's win Saturday over Nebraska was the work of their offensive line, which protected Clayton Thorson with the same urgency that a mom protects her new-born babe.
"It was doing a great job," the quarterback himself would say following that overtime thriller. "We threw the ball 64 times and had only two sacks and one of those sacks I was trying to escape up the middle. So that one is on me. I mean. To drop back 64, 66, 68 times and only have one sack really, that's pretty impressive by those guys."
*NOT SO IMPRESSIVE was the running game, which featured John Moten IV (23 net yards on seven carries) and Solomon Vault (16 on 12). Not getting any carries were the young first years Drake Anderson and Isaiah Bowser and, later, Fitzgerald would explain, "We're trying to play that redshirt rule a little bit with the two young guys."
That rule allows a first year to play up to four games without losing a year of eligibility and here Fitzgerald continued, "We'll see how it goes moving forward. We were able to get through another game without having to play the two young guys. I want to try and take advantage of that if I can. My patience is running thin, not being able to run the ball. I think Solo's going to continue to get stronger as we go along. Hopefully we'll get (sophomore) Jesse Brown back pretty soon, which would help add some depth there."
Monday, when asked about this group at his weekly presser, he said that Brown had indeed practiced that morning and that he had no update on Moten, who exited the Husker game with an injury. When asked the status of the first years he said, "We're getting to a point with Isaiah that he's got probably one more (game) and then he burns the year. We'll see how it plays out based on the health of the room. Drake's got three more. We'll see how that plays out."
*THOSE RUNNING WOES are hardly a secret and so now Thorson and his receivers are facing defenses that are paying them extra attention.
"That's pretty cool," Thorson said when asked about that. "Just a challenge. They know what we're going to do, and we know what they're going to do, and who is better? We've shown we can do that the last few weeks."
"It makes us excited as receivers that we're going to have the opportunity to catch a lot of balls and run a lot of routes," said Bennett Skowronek, who had a half-dozen receptions against the Huskers. "Blocking is great and everything, but as receivers we want to catch the ball. It's exciting to us. We love the challenge. We want to go out there as a receiving corps and we want to be the reason our offense is moving the chains and scoring points."
*THORSON HIMSELF was more than up to the challenge against the Spartans and the Huskers, whom he torched for a combined 828 yards and six touchdowns while going 72-of-111 (64.9 percent). This, remember, less than 10 months after tearing up his ACL in the Music City Bowl.
"He's a great player. You want to talk about a relentless work ethic, it's him," Fitzgerald rhapsodized on Monday. "Coming back off the injury he had (on Dec. 29) to play in the opener (on Aug. 3) to now just each week getting stronger and stronger and stronger, the performances speak for themselves. For somebody who came back from an injury (a broken leg suffered near the end of his junior year), to look in my rear view mirror, my first month my senior year was not the best football I played as a starter. But after that first month, more than anything the confidence is back. The injury creates a new feeling in your body and how you're going to respond. After a month of playing that becomes the new normal. For him the off-season wasn't getting on the squat rack and setting personal records. It was getting functional mobility and getting enough quad strength to make sure he was healthy and safe. Now he's finally able to get back in the weight room. You think about him this time next year, it's scary how good he's going to be. I think he's going to play this game a long, long time. I'm so proud of the job he's doing leading and who he is as a person. The play speaks for itself. But it's much deeper than that with Clayton."
And where do you see the result of him getting stronger and stronger?
"Quarterback play obviously is between your ears and from the foundation, the floor up. You could see in the Purdue game (the opener) he wasn't really able to drive off that surgical leg. Everything was all upper body, all torque. That plays into it too. His core strength has always been great. I don't think I've ever heard him complain about anything upper body. He does a great job, lower body mechanically, to have the arm component be the final piece. You see some guys throw all arm. They come out of a game and they're iced up like a major league pitcher. He may put ice on just for maintenance. But he's never been on any injury report that I've gotten for anything upper body. So he's got, I think, outstanding fundamentals. But from the standpoint of lower body strength, you can see that getting better each week."
"I really think he's at 100 percent now," Skowronek would echo minutes later. "He's playing at his level whereas the first couple weeks he was coming back from that injury."
*THORSON hooked up with a dozen 'Cats against Nebraska and one of them was the exciting young first year JJ Jefferson, who has merely done this the last three weeks. Against Michigan, on the Wildcats' first possession, he took a flat pass 36 yards to set up Thorson's one-yard sneak for a score. Against Michigan State, early in the second quarter, he caught a 34-yard touchdown pass from Thorson. Then, on Saturday with 12 seconds left in regulation, he pulled in the five-yard touchdown pass that sent the game into overtime.
"Very encouraging for a young player like that to step up and make those explosive plays," Fitzgerald recently said of him.
*ANOTHER who had a reception, the first of his career, was the senior Chad Hanaoka, who wears the much-honored jersey No. 1. It was a 14-yard dump from Clayton on the 'Cats' penultimate drive in regulation, the drive that ended with them cutting their margin from 10 to seven.
"That was pretty cool," Thorson would say of that moment.
"Number one doesn't go to somebody. It goes to The Wildcat and he's The Wildcat," Fitzgerald said when asked about him getting playing time in crunch time. "First of all he's an unbelievable teammate. He works. He's with Isaiah, he's with Drake, getting in those guys' ears everyday about what it takes, how you need to do things to be not only proficient, but also a guy that can be special. We've got great confidence in him, especially when we knew we had to throw the ball. From a protection standpoint, he knows that thing inside and out. He's a technician."
*ANOTHER CONTRIBUTION that won't appear on any stat sheet: Twice on that penultimate drive Thorson was under severe pressure and escaped both a sack and a grounding call by throwing toward Hanaoka, who was in the vicinity of the quarterback's offering.
*ONE LAST THING from that maelstrom of a game that should not be ignored: After the 'Cats pulled to within seven and the Huskers recovered the onside kick, Fitzgerald still had all three of his timeouts to use as his defense forced a three-and-out. As a result, the Huskers could burn only 24 seconds off the game clock.
"They're golden," he later said of the timeouts. "That's one thing we're really good at. We don't have substitution issues. Pre-snap penalties. Calling plays wrong. When those happen, that is when you have to take a timeout that is really unnecessary. That is where teams lose. So credit to our guys for understanding the discipline it takes to win a Big Ten game.
"If we don't have those three timeouts, we probably don't win the game."
