This game was a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long road ahead.
With 10 minutes to play in the fourth quarter, Northwestern had a top-25 team on the ropes. Despite a great offensive day on the part of No. 23 Indiana, the Hoosiers were clinging to a 27-24 lead and facing a third-and-9 from their own 26.
Unfortunately for the Wildcats, that was the closest they would get. Indiana QB Kurtis Rourke calmly delivered a strike to Elijah Sarratt for 12 yards, kickstarting a drive that would end in Northwestern’s end zone. Despite a tight first 50 minutes, the Hoosiers were able to escape Evanston with a 41-24 victory.
“Very disappointed in the result,” head coach David Braun said postgame. “We had some momentum of the offensive side of the ball, and we weren’t able to get some critical stops.”
The disappointment was palpable, but so too was the positive outlook on the future. This game was without question Northwestern’s best offensive showing against an FBS opponent, with the ‘Cats’ offense tallying 24 points and 336 total yards. The key to it all was quarterback Jack Lausch, who bounced back from a miserable performance against Washington with arguably his cleanest performance of the year.
“Just saw some courageousness out of him, scrambling and picking up some first downs with his feet,” Braun said. “That’s some of the decisiveness that I was happy to see.”
For Lausch, the week off last week was a tremendous boon for his improvement.
“A big point of emphasis on the bye week was be confident, but be humble. Look at what you need to get better at,” Lausch explained Saturday night. “I worked on what I needed to work on. Had a great two weeks of practice.”
That practice was especially evident in Lausch’s accuracy. After tallying a paltry 53 yards on 27 passes against Washington, Lausch picked apart the Hoosier defense for 243 yards on 23-of-38 passing. His longest throw of the day was a beautiful ball to Bryce Kirtz’s back shoulder that he delivered on the run, picking up 47 yards.
“All experience is good experience, but to find a good amount of success today was huge,” Lausch said. “We’re really excited as an offense, and personally, to really keep building on this.”
For Braun, the offensive success bodes extremely well for the future of this team.
“We’re really excited about what’s ahead for this group,” Braun said. “I think the reaction should be ‘Okay, with the level we’ve seen the defense play at times, if we can put those two things together, who can this group be?’”
Of course, the main issue on Saturday was that the defense played well below its usual output. After not having allowed even 400 yards in a game this season, the Wildcats gave up a whopping 529 to the Hoosiers on Saturday afternoon. The secondary was especially vulnerable, letting Rourke slice them up to the tune of 380 yards and three touchdowns. Even half an hour after the game ended, Braun was well aware of what his youngest defensive unit needed to do.
“Gotta get better. Gotta take ownership and gotta get better,” he told the media. “Candidly, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Of course, it’s not just the secondary. There are 11 men on a football field at a time, and all 11 of them were repeatedly victimized by the Hoosiers all afternoon. As Braun himself said, there were “some miscommunications along the way, some poor tackling along the way. We talked about finding ways to disrupt this quarterback, and we weren’t able to do that.”
And Braun’s offense, despite a much higher success rate than the debacle two weeks ago, was also able to acknowledge they’ve still got a ways to go as well. Receiver A.J. Henning took his six catches for 67 yards and a pair of scores, earning the first multi-touchdown game of his career. Yet even with the individual success, Henning remained focused on how the team could use this loss to improve.
“Obviously it sucks taking a loss…but we’re gonna get right back in the facility, watch the film, learn from the film, and get on to Maryland,” Henning said. “We’re definitely gonna learn from this.”
And that is the key for the rest of the season. The Wildcats pushed a ranked Indiana team about as far as they could, and there are a lot of positive takeaways from this game. The question now is the same as after the Washington game: did Northwestern learn the right lessons from this one?
As Lausch said postgame, “Definitely excited to build on this performance. I understand we have to get better.”
Two weeks ago it was the offense facing a lot of scrutiny; this week it’s the defense. Northwestern’s got enough building blocks now to finish the ground floor. The hope is that continuing to build will get it to the next level.