In identifying the season-shaping teams from each of the Power 5 conferences, it’s very hard to look past the Northwestern Wildcats and the Nebraska Cornhuskers when the Big Ten comes up for discussion.
No, it’s not because the two teams meet this weekend in Lincoln, returning to the site of Nebraska’s Hail Mary victory in 2013. The Cats and Huskers are the season-shaping teams in the Big Ten partly because there aren’t enough good alternatives, but mostly because they occupy two very different yet equally powerful identities. Northwestern and Nebraska fit two of the central profiles that make it hard to debate the extent of a given conference’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Northwestern sits in a very clear box in terms of perception; how the Cats evolve (or fail to) in the next month and a half will determine if Pat Fitzgerald’s team can shake this perception or not.
Very simply, the perception with Northwestern is that it benefited from a sleepyhead start time for a West Coast foe (9 a.m. Pacific for Stanford) in a season-opening game. Since then, the Wildcats have not been able to meaningfully improve their offense. Clayton Thorson remains as fundamentally limited at quarterback as he did against Stanford. The Minnesota game was something of an exception, but overall, the Wildcats have not developed their offense to any meaningful or conspicuous degree.
This team gained a lot of mileage based on its defense, but as soon as it ran into better and more physical opposition — Michigan and Iowa — it was torn apart. The Wildcats have no bad losses on their resume, and Stanford is an excellent win, one that’s even better now than many people thought BEFORE the season started. (Most pundits had Oregon winning the Pac-12 North, and did not expect Stanford to win that division.) Yet, the midseason verdict on Northwestern is that it has been exposed, and owns a ceiling which is much lower than it was a mere two weeks ago.
When a team gets spanked by quality opposition as Northwestern has been over the past two weeks, conference-strength skeptics will swoop in like vultures. They will pay constant attention to a fallen team, waiting to see if it will collapse. Whether Northwestern collapses or steadies the ship will be an important way to measure Big Ten strength and staying power in 2015. The league needs the Cats to stabilize and finish 8-4 at minimum in order to say to the rest of the country, “We’re a deep league.”
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Nebraska occupies another very distinct position on a “conference depth” bingo card.
The Huskers didn’t start like a house of fire, only to then get ambushed in consecutive blowout losses which have caused pundits to recalibrate how they view a team. No, unlike Northwestern, Nebraska didn’t get off to a good start this season; the Huskers — like the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL — have played one close game after another, and something usually happens late in the proceedings to bring about an excruciating one-possession loss.
The Hail Mangum to BYU.
The overtime loss to Miami.
The brutal game mismanagement by Mike Riley which enabled Illinois to steal a comeback win against the Huskers.
A last-second field goal by Wisconsin after the Badgers had missed with under 1:30 left in regulation. Nebraska has constantly lived on the margins and usually fallen off the precipice. A mixture of bad luck, bad coaching, and ineffective endgame offense has kept the Huskers on the wrong side of fortune, but when a profile such as this one emerges during the course of the season, one has to see the remainder of the body of work before rendering a final verdict. Should Nebraska rebound in the next six weeks, we’ll be touting the Huskers and the Big Ten instead of saying what a drag on the conference Big Red proved to be in 2015.
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Northwestern. Nebraska. Two teams that just happen to cross paths in week eight are also the foremost season shapers for the rest of the Big Ten Conference.
