The Wildcats stood tall while facing challenge after challenge.
Despite a season filled with turmoil and emotionally taxing moments, the Wildcats will go home with their sea legs underneath themselves and a culture that will allow them to weather any storm.
Everything that possibly could have gone wrong for the 2024-25 Northwestern Wildcats seemed to go wrong, as well as several things that didn’t seem possible until they happened. Chris Collins phrased it well in his final press conference of the season after Northwestern fell to Wisconsin 70-63 in the second round of the Big Ten Tournament: “There were things that happened this year that just don’t happen. With the injuries, with just crazy things in games, just things that I’ve never even seen, it felt like they all happened in our games.”
Outwardly, this was not as successful as a season as the last two years. The ‘Cats will not be dancing when the Selection Show concludes on Sunday. But the culture win for Northwestern will reverberate long after the departures of Matt Nicholson, Ty Berry, Nick Martinelli and the rest. Northwestern proved it can compete with anyone, no matter who is wearing the purple jersey.
This season was about so much more than the wins and the losses, the refereeing and the injuries. It was an embodiment of the program’s DNA. Collins said this year was as rewarding as any he’s ever had a coach.
“All you want to do as a coach, you want to feel like your guys left it out on the floor and gave you everything they had, and they did,” Collins said.
Berry on the word he’d use to describe Northwestern’s culture: Toughness.
“It’s not about being the best team in the country, it’s about being the hardest playing team in the country.”
— Inside NU (@insidenu) March 13, 2025
It starts at the top. Northwestern and Big Ten fans know how good Collins is at steering the ship, but the 12th year head coach rarely gets his flowers on a national level.
“He brings it every day and leaves it all on the line for us every day. I’m just so grateful for his leadership to me, his mentoring to me. He’s like a father figure to me,” Berry said.
Collins held the team together through a number of major changes this season.
“I felt like we had to reinvent ourselves about four different times,” he said.
Two different Barnhizer foot injuries bookended the season. Jalen Leach went down just two games after Barnhizer was ruled out for the year. Berry started the season slowly while working back from a torn meniscus that ended his senior campaign. Collins’ message never wavered despite the adversity.
“He’s really about loyalty and he’s about the right things. He has great values and those values he’s instilling in all of us,” Martinelli said.
In a college sports landscape marked by the frequency of transfers, the program’s loyal players stand out. Northwestern lost just one player to the portal last season, redshirt first-year Parker Strauss. Buie, Berry and Nicholson all spent five seasons in Evanston. Barnhizer played four. Martinelli is poised to return as the senior leader of next year’s squad, despite being talented enough to play at any school he desires and make a lot of money doing so.
Berry, in particular, benefitted from the loyalty so pervasive throughout this program. After nine months without playing basketball during his knee rehab, he understandably started the season slowly. But Collins kept his faith in his grad student.
“A lot of coaches would have quit on me and would have just said, no, you’re done,” Berry said. “You will never be as good as you were, and he didn’t do that. He kept his belief and just kept pushing me and motivating me.”
Before a home game against Maryland in January, Collins moved Berry to the bench. The move flipped a switch for the three-point sniper, who reeled off four consecutive double-digit performances. Even once he was reinserted into the starting lineup, Berry scored at least eight points in all of the team’s final 17 games. He had scored three or fewer in eight of the first 16 games.
Perhaps the biggest proof of how deep the purple blood runs came from one of the most unlikely sources. When Leach went down with his knee injury, the ‘Cats were thin at the guard position. The coaching staff went to sophomore Jordan Clayton — who at the time was planning to redshirt and had not appeared in the team’s first 23 games — and asked if he’d be willing to sacrifice his extra year of eligibility to play the final 10 games. Clayton agreed.
“I would do anything for [Collins]. To me, it’s bigger than basketball, you know, it was something I wanted to do,” Clayton said.
The sophomore carried out Collins’ trust by starting in all 10 appearances and scoring 4.7 points a night while grabbing 2.4 rebounds and dishing out 2.5 assists. Clayton recorded his first two career double-digit scoring games in the Big Ten Tournament.
With major roster turnover for Northwestern, fans could be forgiven for worrying about the future. The school landed its best recruiting class ever, but still has to contend with losing three program legends this offseason. That doesn’t matter with Collins at the helm.
“No one cares. We never make excuses,” Collins said. “We just try to figure out how we can be successful with what we got.”
For the graduating players, their legacy amongst the fans will be the two NCAA Tournament appearances with wins in each. But inside the program, the lasting impact will be a gritty mentality that is rarely equaled in college basketball. As Berry put it: “Me and Matt can honestly say that we left this place better than we got it.”