The Wildcats’ teams of the past drop this game. They’d find a way to lose, usually in the most agonizing manner available. It looked like that was inevitable in the dying moments of this one.
And yet, despite failing on a fake punt from its own 28-yard line in a tie game, on the road, against the coach who built the program, the Wildcats won anyway.
That tells you most of what you need to know about how this team is different. Michigan State took over with 3:29 left, moved to the NU 15 and sent Liam
Boyd out for a 33-yard field goal that should have given the Spartans the lead. The old Northwestern watches that kick go through and starts explaining itself. This Northwestern saw Brendan Flakes’ hand deflect the kick, drove 64 yards in 58 seconds and let Jackson Kleather win it 24-21 from 34 yards with two seconds left.
For most of the afternoon, this was not a pretty football game. Michigan State outgained Northwestern 72-13 in the first quarter. The Spartans finished with eight tackles for loss and five sacks. Their two biggest plays on special teams, a 44-yard kickoff return and a 41-yard punt return, set up touchdowns. Northwestern didn’t lead in the second half until the clock read 0:02.
Braun didn’t dress it up afterward.
“There were too many missed opportunities there in the first half,” Braun said. “We got to find ways to start cleaner. And I don’t want to say faster.”
Caleb Komolafe’s 10-yard run early in the second quarter put Northwestern up 10-7, and the run game had to find its footing in real time on the way to his 67 yards.
Komolafe said the fix started on the sideline.
“We just got to be better at our keys,” Komolafe said. “You go back to the work that we did on the sideline, fixing things, and we ultimately started to do better.”
They did. After that first quarter, Northwestern outgained Michigan State 347-233 and held the ball for nearly 35 minutes. The Wildcats went 5-for-5 in the red zone and converted 7 of 14 third downs while the Spartans managed 3 of 12.
Michigan State went for it on fourth down four times and got stopped twice, both inside Northwestern territory.
That is what situational football looks like on a stat sheet, and what separates a good football team from a great one. Anybody can beat somebody by 30 when everything is clicking; prevailing on a day when it feels like many things aren’t going right is harder, and in the Big Ten it might be worth more.
The counterargument is obvious: Michigan State is 2-5, it’s still finding itself under a first-year coach, and a 33-yard field goal that gets blocked is as much luck as it is resilience. Maybe Northwestern didn’t prove anything beyond the fact that it can beat a bad team in a close game.
But the Wildcats were the better team in the moments that decide close games.
That’s the same thing Braun has been saying since July. At Big Ten Media Days, he talked about the 88% of returning snaps that chose to stay at Northwestern.
“That’s how you win in the fourth quarter in the Big Ten, with a bunch of guys that are going to battle for one another,” Braun said this summer.
That sounded like a talking point in July. Saturday looked a lot like the plan.
Then there was Aidan Chiles, who spent two years in East Lansing and walked back into Spartan Stadium to a crowd that made sure he knew it. He gained one yard on his first two snaps. A week earlier, asked about the trip, he had looked at the Northwestern media and answered in a flat monotone.
“I’m excited. Do I look excited?” Chiles said.
He didn’t look like himself early. He held the ball too long on certain snaps, and he was 5-for-10 for 55 yards at the half.
“I’m a little disappointed in how we started off,” Chiles said. “But at the end of the day, a win is a win.”
Nobody made the storyline THE story.
“We weren’t really in the mindset of exterior factors, like former this, former that,” Flakes said. “When we get in the white lines, all we focus on is the job that we have in front of us.”
Chiles was a different quarterback after halftime: 13-of-17 for 171 yards, the two-point conversion, and the 64-yard drive in the final minute that set up Kleather’s kick. He put the day in simple terms.
“We came here with one mission,” Chiles said, “and we achieved it.”
The second quarter offered two chances to extend the lead, and Northwestern let both slip. Chiles put a 23-yard throw right in Drew Wagner’s hands in the end zone and Wagner dropped it. Kleather came out and had his 41-yard try blocked by Eli Coenen. Two chances gone in two plays.
Even with that, the Wildcats were able to regroup and not make those mistakes again. On a 14-play, 61-yard drive, Chiles sneaked for two yards on third-and-1 and scrambled for five on third-and-4. Then he bought time in the pocket on third-and-8 and hit Alex Honig for 19. It ended in a Kleather field goal, but it ate 7:32 and kept the ball away from a Spartan team still clinging to a 14-10 lead.
Kleather has a phrase for it.
“Something we say in our room is birdie after bogey,” Kleather said. “So step up, and if you miss a kick or if something poor happens, you just step up and do your job next time.”
Braun said he never needed to say a word to Kleather.
“Nothing needed to be said to Jackson,” Braun said. “He’s built for that opportunity.”
When Michigan State pushed the lead to 21-13 early in the fourth quarter, Northwestern answered with a four-minute, 77-yard drive. Chiles sneaked it in from the 1 and hit Alex Honig on the two-point conversion to tie it at 21.
Chiles said the offense went to tempo and caught Michigan State off guard.
“We were going tempo, so it was a little different than huddling, and it was kind of catching them off guard,” Chiles said. “It was nothing special. We just executed how we were supposed to.”
Then came the fake punt. Braun needed the same attitude from his team afterward, that no-frills mentality.
“We’re not going to operate off a platform of fear,” Braun said. “I certainly made a decision to go with the fake punt that I thought was a good call…and in hindsight it was a horrible decision. But that’s what great teams look like. They have one another’s back. This football team had my back in that.”
Komolafe said the sideline lived it in real time.
“After we didn’t get the fake, it was just encouraging the defense to go out there and get a stop,” Komolafe said.
Special teams looked like the unit most likely to cost NU the game. Then it won it, for the first time this season.
“We knew it was going to be a knockout-dragout battle on special teams,” Braun said.
Flakes said he felt it coming before the snap when he got his hands on Michigan State’s kick.
“I just had a feeling in my body I was going to get the play,” Flakes said. “It was like slow motion. As I put my hand up, I had full vision on the kicker, and I was just floating with my right hand in the air and it went right to my hand.”
Braun said the block came from alignments built so that when the hands went up, someone had a chance to touch the ball. Then the offense went to work on a scenario it had also practiced, the two-minute drill with no timeouts. Chiles hit Komolafe and Wilde to get across midfield, then found Wilde again for 17 along the sideline. Komolafe ran to the 16, where Chiles spiked it with five seconds left.
“Our guys have been in the furnace in practice scenarios with that so many times you could tell that they were ready for the moment,” Braun said.
Kleather’s 34-yarder split the uprights with two seconds left.
“Never a doubt,” Chiles said. “We knew it was going in this game. We just didn’t know how.”
He waited until the kick went through to let any of the emotion out.
“I’m not going to lie, I was popping a little bit,” Chiles said. “I was popping into the crowd a little bit, because they were popping into me. I let the emotions get the best of me, but at the end of the day, I was just relieved.”
