They are certainly intelligent. They must be to be admitted to Northwestern. But sometimes brains can be a bane. That is what Wildcats senior center Trevor Rees avows as he discusses the evolution of the line he anchors.
“I think early on a lot of us were worried about not messing up,” he says. “We were playing kind of tentatively, trying to get our assignments accomplished. The last few weeks it has been a lot more letting it go. If you mess up, you mess up, but do everything full speed and attack the defense.
“Once we broke out of the mind-set of not trying to mess up, it seems every week it has become more and more physical, more and more aggressive. … It’s controlled chaos. Come off the ball hard and hit somebody in front of you.
“We miss a block every now and again. But at the same time, it’s just that attitude that we’re going to go out there and try to dismantle people that’s helping us.”
Brains are certainly necessary to play their game successfully. They detect those tendencies and weaknesses that can be exploited. But it was a long-ago Browns cornerback named Walter Beach who warned, “If you’ve got to think about what to do, it’s too late to do it.”
So is thinking too much an issue with these Wildcats?
“Yeah. You see it on tape,” senior linebacker Adam Kadela says of the defense he anchors. “You see some guys not swarming, not attacking the way we need to. … That really comes down to the whole not-thinking part and just reacting.
“There are two parts to a play, really. You can be robotic; you have to do your job for the first part. But once you see what’s happening, you have to throw caution to the wind and play with reckless abandon.”
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The Wildcats have traveled through the first half of their season as a potentially potent machine still needing a tuneup. But all that talk of growth, maturity and lessons learned pales aside those words of Rees and Kadela, which explain better than any why the Wildcats have shown a dual personality this season.
There was the exhilarating comeback against Nevada, and there was the baffling bomb against Duke. There was the embarrassment at Ohio State and the late meltdown against Michigan, and last week there was a glimpse of a complete game with their overtime victory at Michigan State.
“I really don’t care,” coach Pat Fitzgerald says when asked why it took them so long to manage that.
“I think the maturity of our football team, I don’t know if we were as clear to the young guys as we needed to be,” senior left tackle Dylan Thiry says. “A lot of us had played in hard games before … been there, been through tough times, and the young guys hadn’t.
“So when it came down to making plays, in the Duke game, I’m standing in the huddle, I’m looking at (other seniors), I’m like, ‘OK, let’s go do it, we know how to do it.’ Then some things fell through. I put it on our shoulders as upperclassmen. We didn’t get the young guys where they needed to be. But I think now they understand.”
His linemates certainly understand, which they proved the last two weeks as the offense rolled up 1,028 yards against the Wolverines and the Spartans.
“Just come off and hit people. We establish early on that we’re going to hit you. Go off and hit somebody,” says Thiry, explaining the approach that has produced those results.
It is a basic approach, and it is just the approach all the Wildcats must adopt if they wish to shed their multiple personalities in the second half of the season they open Saturday at Ryan Field against Minnesota. They are intelligent, decent fellows, but as legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel memorably wondered after listening to a scout extol the choirboy lifestyle of a prospect, “Can’t you find me a juvenile delinquent who can hit?”
The Wildcats did hit last week in East Lansing and gave themselves a glimpse of their possibilities. But, and this is the big question they definitively will answer in the weeks ahead, does that mean they have washed the bad from the good in their system?
“I’d like to think so,” Kadela says. “In college football, you never know what’s going to happen on a Saturday. … I think we’ve been through so many different ballgames we’ve matured a lot and will be a lot better prepared for games that aren’t going our way the whole time. What it comes down to is guys have gotten better each week.”
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