After a badly beaten Northwestern left Tulane, it was obvious that the team needed a hard reset. A week later, under the lights of Northwestern Medicine Field at Martin Stadium, it got just that.
In the Wildcats’ 42-7 win against Western Illinois on Friday night, they accomplished everything that they couldn’t in their season opener.
Yes, the victory was against an FCS opponent, far from the Big Ten competition Northwestern will see in the coming weeks. But a team can only control the situation in front
of it, and there wasn’t much more NU could do to make the most out of this match. After all, it could have been a lot worse (as head coach David Braun said in his post-game press conference, the program has lost to FCS teams before).
Northwestern’s turnaround began from the very first drive, when Preston Stone’s third-down pass to Ricky Ahumaraeze and Cam Porter’s 44-yard run set the tone for the team’s first touchdown of the night and the season. From then on, the scoring piled up while the Leathernecks faltered over and over.
“Just like seeing the shot go in, or like the snowball effect,” wide receiver Griffin Wilde said. “You just keep going and going and the drives just put themselves together.”
The result? A 526 yard day for Northwestern, the largest total in Braun’s now two-plus-year tenure in Evanston. Meanwhile, Western Illinois had more total drives (12) than first downs (10), getting the ball past the Wildcats’ 40-yard line just twice up until its touchdown effort in garbage time.
Stone was Northwestern’s biggest beneficiary of this one-sided game. After his four-interception New Orleans nightmare, the transfer quarterback bounced back with a 21-for-29, 245-yard and three touchdown performance. Though he wasn’t perfect, sometimes making risky passes that could have been picked off by tougher opposition or being slow to run, his display Friday night was more reflective of the player Braun trusted to be the starting QB from the jump.
From the way fellow transfer Wilde — who led all receivers with 94 yards — raved about Stone’s leadership postgame to Braun’s constant praise of his starter, it’s clear that the locker room sees more in Stone beyond what happened in Tulane.
“Our entire team’s got his back,” Braun said. “It would be really easy for Preston to hang his head and feel sorry for himself. And I mean, he was buzzing around on Monday, confident, resilient, excited to bounce back for his team.”
Sparks flew beyond quarterback play and spread through the entire team. The running back trio of Porter, Caleb Komolafe and Joe Himon II all had meaningful carries. The secondary was lights-out for the most part, only allowing WIU starter Christian Irvin to complete five passes while breaking apart many of his attempted ones. Josh Fussell and Fred Davis II were standouts in particular, with three broken passes apiece.
The highlight of the night came from backup quarterback Ryan Boe, who stiff-armed Western Illinois DB Justin Richardson and leaped into the end zone for a 58-yard rushing touchdown. After appearing in brief flashes in Northwestern’s final game of 2024 as a redshirt freshman and then beating out Virginia transfer Gavin Frakes for the backup spot over the summer, he was introduced to big-moment football on Friday.
“For him to take off that way and finish it the way that he did, you could see the excitement on his face. You could see the excitement out of his teammates,” Braun said of Boe’s run.
But Northwestern knows that its win is not the end-all, be-all, and for good reason. Despite the secondary performing well, Braun thinks that deflected passes need to be converted more into interceptions. The team had its moments offensively too, like a second quarter that was scoreless until the final two minutes, a fumble recovered by Western Illinois in that same quarter and two Luke Akers field goal drives that came as a result of some questionable play-calling and incompletions — a reminder of Northwestern’s red zone struggles from the year prior.
Perhaps the biggest concern is the status of Porter, who went down in the third quarter with a lower-body injury and didn’t return, getting taken off the field in a golf cart. Braun didn’t have an update on his status, but says he’s “staying optimistic” for his sixth-year running back. However, a significant absence from the captain could pose problems for Northwestern.
These issues and areas of needed improvement will be critical come Sept. 13, when Northwestern transitions from its easiest opponent to one of its hardest, as No. 6 Oregon comes to town. And while Braun emphasized an “all-about-us” mentality in his approach to the Ducks, the reality is that mistakes made against Western Illinois will be magnified tenfold if they happen a week later.
“Gain confidence from the win that we had tonight, but don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Stone said of his mentality headed into the new week. “Don’t assume that we’ve got it made, keep our head down and keep working.”
But Oregon is a problem for later. This week, Northwestern had one job, and it was one well done.
