Chris Collins doesn’t want you to think that he’s getting reflective. Not yet. He’s “in a fight,” his focus locked on nothing but Wednesday night’s contest against Indiana.
But the 13th-year Northwestern head coach can’t help himself.
“No one’s more self critical of their team, of themself, than me,” Collins said when asked what’s he learned through the challenge of managing a deeper rotation than he has had in the past. “There’s things I’ve not done as well this year that I’ve got to be better at as we move
forward.”
Barring a Big Ten Tournament run of miraculous proportions, Northwestern will miss the NCAA tournament for the second consecutive season after going dancing in 2023 and 2024. In his decidedly non-self-reflective mood, Collins spoke of “trying to continue to build our program,” to get back to “where we’ve been over the last three years.”
Three years, not two. Collins thinks that last year’s group was good enough to make it to March, thwarted only by an awful run of injury luck that saw Northwestern lose both two of its three leading scorers —Brooks Barnhizer and Jalen Leach — for the season in the heart of Big Ten play.
The 2025-26 Wildcats never had it. Collins couldn’t crack the “puzzle” as he put it, of a roster that featured the most newcomers that he’d seen in his 13-year head-coaching career.
“We had Nick,” he said postgame, “but other than that, everybody else was kind of an unknown, in terms of what offseason they had, how they would come in.”
Collins waded into the murky water of the offseason briefly, but for the most part, Northwestern pushed back the hard questions with its 76-66 win over Penn State on Tuesday night to open up its Big Ten Tournament campaign.
It was an especially feel-good win, as a regular 24-point performance from Nick Martinelli was supplemented by a series of big showings from the Northwestern supporting cast.
Justin Mullins finished with seven points off the bench, his highest scoring total since he hit four threes against Howard on Dec. 30. He hit two 3-pointers last night, his first since that win over the Bison. Jayden Reid posted one of his more complete showings in a Wildcat uniform, scoring 14 and tying a season-high with nine dimes. Reid led the Northwestern offense to warp-speed in the second half as 10 Penn State turnovers saw the ’Cats run away with the game in transition.
True freshman forwards Tre Singleton and Tyler Kropp held up a undersized front court missing 6-foot-11 Arrinten Page, helping Northwestern contain 7-foot Penn State center Ivan Jurić and finish with a 28-22 advantage on the glass. Jordan Clayton hit another three, bringing his 3-point percentage over 40% on the year after finishing at 28.0% and 8.3% in his first two seasons.
“Justin, Jordan, Tyler, all of them coming off the bench really gave big contributions in a lot of different areas,” Collins said. “Not just scoring, but energy.”
Martinelli did not score for a more than ten-minute stretch that extended from the 14:06 mark in the second half to under-four minutes remaining. During that period, Northwestern outscored Penn State 17-12, extending its lead from six to 11.
“I thought they did a great job…going to the basket, being aggressive, spitting out to shooters,” Martinelli said when asked about those ten minutes. “We had a ton of guys step up.”
Northwestern’s locker room postgame lacked any existentialism less than 24 hours before a must-win contest with Indiana that the ‘Cats are expected to lose. Miami Heat forward Bam Adebayo was finishing up an 83-point explosion against the Washington Wizards in the minutes after Northwestern handled Penn State, passing Kobe Bryant to claim the second-highest scoring game in NBA history, and we heard a few shouts of, “What the f*** is happening?” as the Wildcat roster caught the final minutes.
Martinelli, however, could not ward off the gravity of the impending moment as he nears the end of his collegiate career.
“I was super nervous before this game, knowing that it could be my last time” he said. “That senior energy really is different.”
