It was nice while it lasted, right?
On one of the coldest Evanston nights of the school year, with a surprisingly large portion of the new Ryan Field overcome by Hawkeyes fans and half of the stadium’s Wildcat Wall student section empty by halftime, Northwestern suffered a torturous 24-10 defeat to Iowa. Its high-flying, Chip Kelly-led offense was impotent for this first time all season, while its defense and special teams were torn apart by Iowa’s speedy skill-position players.
Maybe, I should’ve
expected this. All season long, many longtime Northwestern football fans that have experience suffering through Big Ten play after a bright start, have been in the comments of these three takeaways articles telling me to be cautious about getting over-excited about a Northwestern football season. But, I didn’t listen to them, and I believed that there was something truly special about this NU team this year.
Maybe you all were right.
Or, perhaps, this week the wheels just fell off, with injuries catching up to the ‘Cats in a big way and the coaching staff calling its worst game of the season.
Here are three takeaways from Northwestern’s disappointing performance against Iowa.
1. Aidan Chiles makes this offense go
This loss, by no means, was Nicco Marchiol’s fault.
The senior transfer was presented with a big task entering Saturday’s game. With starting quarterback Aidan Chiles dealing with an upper body injury, Marchiol was asked in the middle of the week to make his first start since suffering a season-ending injury last year at West Virginia. He made that start against No. 19 Iowa, who’s 12.5 PPG scoring defense was the second-lowest mark in the Big Ten and the fourth-lowest in D-I heading into Week 10.
And the former four-star recruit did a serviceable job. Marchiol finished the game 24-for-32 on his passes for 181 yards, a touchdown and zero turnovers. He was accurate and avoided mistakes.
But what he didn’t do was make the play-winning, drive-winning, game-winning plays that Chiles has for this Northwestern offense all season long.
Specifically, Marchiol didn’t have the same ability to improvise when plays break down, something that Chiles had been doing to bail out NU’s offense all season. Instead, if Marchiol was forced out of schedule, the play would often end with a negligible offensive result for Northwestern.
Oftentimes, Marchiol couldn’t even get a pass off under pressure and resorted to scrambling instead. Many of the scrambles drew a hopeful roar from the ‘Cats fans in the Ryan Field stands, until reality dawned on the crowd: Marchiol doesn’t have the fast, strong legs of Chiles, whose heroic runs for first downs are highlights we’ve grown used to. The senior finished with 23 carries for 52 yards and was sacked six times — a season high for an NU signal-caller. For reference, Chiles has been sacked just 18 times in eight games.
Because of the QB change, Chip Kelly was forced to find a way to keep things simple for Marchiol. We saw him scheme up quick, simple passes that kept him in the pocket, while also frequently rolling him out to his left, trying to integrate on-schedule movement into the offense.
Knowing this was the gameplan, Iowa stacked the box and pressed Northwestern at the line of scrimmage. Usually, while this restricts an offense’s ability to make shorter passes, it allows for more opportunities to take one-one-one shots downfield.
This was not the case for the ‘Cats. On Saturday, the brutal truth was revealed about NU’s offense: it doesn’t have receivers that can win downfield. No matter how sound Griffin Wilde, Drew Wagner, Hayden Eligon II, Luke Dehnicke and Alex Honig are as route runners and pass catchers, they all lack speed and could not get off the line and beat Iowa’s defensive backs deep.
This could be seen from the start of the game, like on NU’s first of 10 failed third down attempts against the Hawkeyes.
Iowa shows eight defenders at the line of scrimmage: four down linemen, Cam Buffington, the Mike LB, showing blitz, and three corners in press coverage. Northwestern is looking to get a receiver open on the far side of the field. Wagner runs a slot fade at the top of the screen and gets absolutely no separation on his defender, while Dehnicke runs an out and has it swiftly picked up by strong safety Xavier Styles, who rotates down in this third-and-short package. Meanwhile, Buffington hangs back as the QB spy, forcing Marchiol to rush and throw an incomplete pass to Dehnicke, who isn’t open.
With Chiles, defenses can’t press Northwestern like this. The Michigan State transfer is able to keep broken plays alive, making it necessary for opposing defenses to play off the line of scrimmage. It doesn’t matter that the ‘Cats’ receivers are slow, because Chiles’ extension of plays gives NU’s extremely crafty route runners time to get open.
In other words, Saturday we learned that Chiles is the centerpiece that has made this offense special. With its star quarterback, NU may have had a chance against the Hawkeyes. Without him, it had nowhere to go.
2. Chip Kelly had his worst game of the season
1-for-11 on third down. 1-for-4 on fourth down.
The ‘Cats converted on third and fourth downs under 15% of the time on Saturday, despite having an average yards-to-gain of 3.69 yards on such situations, outside of two outliers where they had 12 and 16 yards to gain. On third and fourth downs where it had three or less yards to gain, Northwestern was 2-for-8, going 0-for-6 after starting the game with two conversions in such situations.
All season long, NU has thrived in short-yardage third-down situations. Entering the Iowa game, NU ranked 21st in all of college football in third-down conversion percentage at 47.13%.
Against Iowa, Chip Kelly’s creativity on third downs disappeared.
Kelly just didn’t do enough to create openings for his skill-position players and instead hoped that his unit would be able to beat Iowa with pure strength or speed. The worst of it came in the second quarter, when NU, down 14-0, was stopped on third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 deep inside of Iowa’s 30-yard line:
On both plays, Kelly calls for a power run, the first being a Marchiol sneak and the second a Komolafe handoff. Both times, he pulls one tight end in motion pre-snap, but there’s really no deception at work here; Kelly was just straight-up betting on his offensive line to beat one of the best front sevens in the Big Ten in the trenches. And it didn’t work…and never was going to work.
But it wasn’t just on critical downs where this pattern showed up.
As I discussed earlier, Iowa frequently stacked the box defensively against Northwestern throughout the evening. But, this was no surprising convention from the Hawkeyes’ defensive coordinator Phil Parker. Rather, this is something teams commonly do when facing an offense with a strong run game and an unproven quarterback.
It is just as common knowledge that in order to get a team to stop pressing up on you at the line of scrimmage, you have to beat them downfield. If the ‘Cats were going to have any chance to win without Chiles, they needed to find a way to make Iowa pay for crowding the line of scrimmage.
Kelly wasn’t able to make it happen for Northwestern. The ’Cats didn’t take a true deep shot downfield against the Hawkeyes the entire game — not one true attempt. Sure, there were plays where the first option may have been a deep route, but not once did Kelly’s schematics work out for Marchiol to pull the trigger on a deep ball. The New Hampshire play-caller was never able to open up the field, and I’m not afraid to say that I expected more.
Of course we’re all happy that Chip Kelly is in Evanston. He is undoubtedly the best offensive coordinator that Northwestern has had in a long time (if not ever). But Saturday was not his best.
3. This defense could be good if fully healthy
To end this article, I actually want to give some praise to Northwestern’s defense.
The ‘Cats’ defense has had injuries issues all year, especially in the secondary. Against Iowa, it got back senior captain Robert Fitzgerald, but it remained without starting cornerback Josh Fussell and key safety Jon Jon Stevens, who was injured in last week’s contest against Oregon.
Yet, fighting through injuries, it was Tim McGarigle’s unit that kept this football game contentious for way longer than the ’Cats deserved to be in it. While Iowa held Northwestern to just three points through three quarters, NU’s defense somehow managed to keep the Hawkeyes’ advantage at just two scores for over 40 minutes of game time, forcing three punts in the first half.
Then, in the second half, Northwestern defended its explosive defensive reputation. The ‘Cats came away with two takeaways in the second half, forcing multiple opponent turnovers for a fourth time this season. Fitzgerald made his third interception of the season in the third quarter — which at the time felt like a potential turning point in the game — and Brayden Brus recovered a fumble forced by redshirt sophomore Dominic Kirks in the fourth quarter.
With its explosive plays on the defensive end against Iowa, Northwestern continues to be one of the country’s leaders in turnover margin, where it’s ranked fifth at +1.4 per game, and takeaways, where it’s ranked tied for 15th at 1.8 takeaways per game. And this is all while having constant injuries in the secondary!
Now, I always like to contextualize a player, unit or team’s performance with how good its opponent was. Despite being a top overall team in the Big Ten, Iowa is not one of the conference’s most electrifying offense. It ranks 11th in the Big Ten in scoring offense (27.8 points per game) and offensive yards per game (373.9), while ranking 87th nationally in expected points added per offensive play (0.094).
In fact, Iowa’s offensive performance against Northwestern was one of its better games this season against a Big Ten opponent, with it getting extreme efficiency from Hank Brown, who was 16-for-21 passing, and L.J. Phillips Jr., who averaged over six yards per carry.
But NU’s defense played a great game on Saturday, working to keep NU alive for a lot of the game while down important defensive backs. The ‘Cats may not be a “great” defense right now, but they proved to me with a gritty performance against Iowa that it could be one of the better units in the Big Ten if fully healthy.
