The harsh reality slapped guard Adam Crum two Mondays ago. It happened during an offensive line meeting when tackle Dylan Thiry nudged him and whispered, “Man, we only have five [games] left.”
“I go, ‘Wow,'” Crum recalls. “You don’t even think about it. You get into a routine, you have your schedule. … I hadn’t thought about that until then. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot and all the seniors have.”
That same cold truth struck receiver Kim Thompson just last Monday during the seniors’ weekly meeting with coach Pat Fitzgerald.
“At the beginning of the season, I was like, ‘Awww, we have 11 more of these,'” Thompson says. “Now we have just four more. It’s definitely a kind of shock. Your career’s coming to an end real fast, so you have to make the best of it.
“For most of the seniors … that sense of urgency definitely has set in. You can tell.”
They arrived a lifetime ago, fresh-faced and facing a future that seemed to stretch forever.
They were young, after all, and when you are young there is always a tomorrow, yet one-more opportunity to play the game they had played for so long. For them, they firmly believed, there would be an endless string of Saturdays to feast on football.
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But now, so suddenly it seems, they are in the winter of their careers and able to see the curtain falling clearly on their stay at Northwestern. They travel to Purdue on Saturday to face the Boilermakers and then they are guaranteed only three more games together, and a possible bowl.
“They started football in the 2nd grade,” Fitzgerald said. “They have played so much football. To go out the right way has been a rallying cry for us.”
That has evolved into the Wildcats’ latest mantra and, to emphasize the point, Fitzgerald constantly reminds his seniors that only six teams in the school’s history, its six bowl teams, have their names up at Ryan Field. The urgency of the moment then was emphasized even further at a meeting this week when offensive coordinator Garrick McGee had his seniors stand.
“Everybody look,” he said. “You have only four more games left, guaranteed, with these guys. They have only four games left in their career. Let’s give it all for them.”
“It’s definitely a motivation,” Crum says recalling that moment. “You watch on film, you see yourself not making plays you think you should and making fundamental errors, it’s very frustrating. It feels like a wasted opportunity. We always talk about the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. We only have a couple left, so you’re definitely motivated to do everything you can.”
“I’ve kind of had that mentality all season. I feel like I’m on borrowed time,” Adam Kadela, the fifth-year senior linebacker, says a day later. “If I hadn’t gotten a medical redshirt my sophomore year, last year would have been my last … so I try to look at every game as something special. But especially now … it really gives you a sense of urgency to make this team special.
“We have so much experience, we know how hard it is, we have to make sure the younger guys realize we have a chance to do something special and it’s the last time we’ll be together. We have to make them realize how important it is to us now.”
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