As it should have, since Northwestern had not won in South Bend since 1961. Their faith was that deep-seated.
These were all essential steps, but that still left the actual winning of games. In Barnett’s third season, 1994, the Wildcats split their first seven games, 3-3-1, before losing their final four contests. They finished the season last in the Big Ten in offense, last in defense, and last in turnovers—but first in punting.
Barnett told them, “Keep priming the pump. The water is about to come up.” The players believed it long before their fans did. That summer, fifty players decided to stay in town to work out through the sweltering heat wave, more than double the usual number.
The Wildcats opened 1995 against ninth-ranked Notre Dame. Before the game, Barnett told his team that when they won—not if, but when—they were not to carry him off the field because they had bigger games ahead.
It worked. Northwestern pulled off the upset, 17–15—just as Fitzgerald’s recruiters told him they would—then went on to sweep the Big Ten en route to the Wildcats’ first Rose Bowl appearance since 1949.
Everyone loved the ’Cats because they were the embodiment of the little engine that could, besting the traditional football machines at their own game.
• • •
Almost two decades later, the Wildcats’ revival remains one of the most popular stories in the history of college football. The team’s turnaround was unforgettable—but the effect that team had off the field might have been more dramatic.
The Monday after the Wildcats clinched the 1995 Big Ten title, I camped out in Evanston for the week to write a story for the Detroit News on the impact this meteor of a team had had on the campus and the town. It didn’t take long to recognize how a successful football team could energize even the normally dour Northwestern students, the restrained town of Evanston, and even the stodgy faculty, who started discarding their stoic silence for adolescent yelps of joy not heard in these parts since . . . well, ever.
“It’s finals week and people are more concerned with Rose Bowl tickets than finals,” one sophomore told me, “and that’s never happened around here.”
Case in point: On the Friday before the season finale against Illinois, in a highly competitive chemistry course with over two hundred students, an acclaimed professor produced a beaker full of a bright, orange solution. While explaining the chemical principles that governed his experiment, he stirred up a second, blue solution in a flask. When he finished, he poured the blue solution into the beaker of orange solution, which just happened to be Illinois’s color, and—shazam!—the two solutions suddenly burst into Northwestern purple. The lecture hall erupted in cheers.
The football team’s success even had a salubrious effect on the school’s relations with Evanston and Chicago. Town-gown relations here have always been a bit rockier than in other Big Ten towns, partly because Northwestern is the league’s only private school, and the hardest for the locals to get into. Its campus sits on a large chunk of Lake Michigan shoreline, which can make the relatively small town envious, particularly of the school’s tax-free status.
But, during the 1995 team’s unprecedented roll, every storefront in downtown Evanston, from hair salons to antique stores, put purple in their windows. As longtime resident Donna Streibich Curtis observed, that one glorious season “has done something to this town.”
It had also done something to Chicago, which had been searching for a college team to call its own for decades. Chicago is twice as close to Evanston as Detroit is to Ann Arbor or East Lansing, yet for years both Michigan and Michigan State had a stronger gravitational pull on their state’s biggest city than Northwestern did on Chicago. In the midst of Northwestern’s great 1995 season, however, the same papers that used to give more print to a Notre Dame loss than a Wildcat win were devoting half the front page to headlines like “Cats Win Big Ten.”
“Our identity’s done a one-eighty, and we’re just sitting here in the middle watching it spin around,” said Jennifer Brown, a first-year student in 1995 from San Diego. “The ripple effect is amazing. It’s affecting everything.”
The evidence was everywhere at once. The Northwestern Sailing Club found it could solicit more corporate support because of the football team’s success. “They know who we are now,” said Beth Holland, a sophomore who called on those sponsors. “I had to learn [star tailback] Darnell Autry’s football stats just to talk with these guys.”
Rebecca Dixon, who was in charge of admissions and financial aid, told me applications for “early decision” were up 23 percent from the previous year. And every Monday after football games “our phones are ringing off the hooks,” she said.
It was surely ironic that the bigger the senior football players, the higher the freshmen applicants’ SAT scores. One junior admitted, “I wouldn’t want to be in next year’s applicant pool.”
The 1995 Wildcats accomplished all this without making any deals with the devil. The academic standing of incoming Northwestern football players was second only to Stanford’s in Division I-A. True, of the seventy-one players from the 1995 Northwestern team who’d declared majors, twenty-two were enrolled in something called “organizational studies,” and a few others listed majors such as “psychological services” and “communication studies,” which will not be confused with computer science. But they won’t be confused with the traditional jock loopholes, either, because Northwestern doesn’t offer them.
“It’s been just a miracle kind of season,” said Ken Kraft, the associate athletic director who’d seen enough Wildcat campaigns to know. “Even if you make two holes in one, the second one’s not as much fun.”
And that’s the catch: everyone knows it’s simply impossible to re-create the magic of 1995. The perennial loser overcoming all odds is not a story line you can repeat, and Hollywood has yet to make a film about an admirably average team. So the question becomes, How much of the magic from that unforgettable season can Northwestern keep alive—and at what price?
• • •
Sixteen years after Pat Fitzgerald won his second Big Ten title as a player in 1996, he would embark on his quest for his first as a coach, with fifty-five returning lettermen, thirteen returning starters, and all his specialists coming back.
The 2011 seniors had won more games than any other Northwestern class and had gone to four straight bowl games, a first. And there was this surprising statistic: since 1995, only Ohio State, Michigan, and Wisconsin had won more Big Ten titles than Northwestern’s three—and Wisconsin had passed the ’Cats only the year before. You could win a lot of bar bets with that one, even in Chicago.
To win their fourth title since 1994, the Wildcats would have to battle division rivals Michigan, Michigan State, and Nebraska, but they would not have to face Ohio State in the regular season, nor in the title game, since the Buckeyes were ineligible for postseason play. They had to travel to Penn State, but most experts were predicting the Lions would throw in the towel before the Wildcats got there in October. If there was a year the stars were aligned for the ’Cats to grab another banner, 2012 was it.
But even if the Wildcats fell short of exploiting this rare opportunity, Northwestern would still be Northwestern. “Academically,” Fitzgerald said, “2011 was an unprecedented year for us.” The team had a 3.04 GPA, a 94 percent graduation rate—higher than the student body’s—and thirty-two players on the Academic All–Big Ten team, a record even for Northwestern.
“But most importantly,” Fitzgerald said, “we take great pride in being the number one school academically in the Football Bowl Subdivision [for APR]. So we believe we’re the number one [football] school academically in the country.”
Northwestern’s 107 football players on the 2012 roster were pursuing twenty different majors, including seventeen in economics and eleven in engineering. Offensive lineman Patrick Ward runs six feet seven and 320 pounds, “but his most impressive stat is his 3.94 in mechanical engineering,” President Morton Schapiro
told me. “I’m hoping he goes to the NFL, but if not, he’ll be the world’s largest engineer.”
Patrick Ward aside, most Wildcats can’t simply bowl over the corn-fed boys at Wisconsin and Iowa, so they have to outwit and outwork them. But Northwestern is a good place to attract the kind of players who can do just that.
“I think everything about us is unique,” Fitzgerald told me. “So why stop on campus? The way we recruit is unique, too.
“We approach it as a challenge to find the right fit. How do we define that fit? It starts off the field. I want leaders. I want guys who want to be a little unique. When they’re the captains of their high school teams, that usually requires them to step out of the box a bit and be a little bit more mature, which typically leads to a better academic kid—and that fits in here.
“And we like finding winners. An overwhelming majority of our players played on league-champion, sectional-champion, even state-champion teams. And they led those teams.”
Fitzgerald was recruiting a mind-set first, a body second.
“So we don’t get a dozen five-star kids. Whose opinion is that? What do I care?
“There’s a young man out there right now with offers from every school in the Big Ten. But when we watched him play, he was injured early in the game, so he went back to the bench, put a towel over his head, and sat there the rest of the game. Didn’t cheer for his teammates or talk to anyone. I don’t know if he even watched the game. So, right now, every school in the Big Ten wants him—but not us.”
It’s not hard to see what Fitzgerald saw in the quarterback he actually recruited, junior Kain Colter, a three-star player out of Colorado. His father, Spencer, played safety for Colorado’s 1990 national championship team and went on to become a high school football coach. Kain’s mother, Stacy, is a legal analyst for Chipotle.
“My parents definitely preached to me, ‘Get your education,’ ” he told me, wearing a white, button-down shirt, a navy-blue tie, and a gray sport coat. “You want to make your degree count.”
Football, then, was sold to him as a means to an end. He received offers from Air Force, Arizona State, Nebraska, Texas Christian, and Colorado, among others. But, he said, “I really didn’t want to go to a program with a whole lot of tradition. I wanted to go somewhere where they were going to build something. I liked Stanford for that reason. I was committed to Stanford my whole junior year, but I ended up getting hurt, and they brought in another quarterback.”
That’s how Colter became the Wildcats’ quarterback—and how he got his nose bent out of shape, which is virtually a prerequisite to play at Northwestern.
“I wasn’t a four- or five-star guy coming out of high school,” Colter told me. “None of us were. But the guys we get for our team haven’t been told how great they were, how amazing they were, their whole lives. They come to college with a chip on their shoulder. They want to prove they can compete at this level, and they want to work for everything. They’re going to do anything for the team—so many guys on this team change positions, without complaint—and those are the guys we look for.”
That included Colter himself. When Northwestern’s 2011 quarterback, Dan Persa—who had been considered a preseason Heisman Trophy candidate—was healthy, Colter played tailback and receiver. But when Persa went down with a freak ankle injury, Colter filled in at quarterback. He did all three jobs so well—running for 654 yards and 9 touchdowns, catching 43 passes for 466 yards and 3 more touchdowns, and hitting 55 of his 82 passes for 673 yards and 6 more touchdowns, against only one interception—that in 2012 Colter was Northwestern’s leading returner in passing, receiving, and rushing, surely the only player in the country who could claim that.
Because the other ten players on Northwestern’s offense usually aren’t bigger or faster than the guys across the line, it’s especially important that Northwestern get a quarterback who fits their system: a smart, quick, coachable leader who can run the spread offense, a system designed to help smaller teams compete. When the Wildcats find their man, they are surprisingly dangerous. The 2012 Wildcats knew Colter would be the key.
If that was Colter’s principal mission in Evanston, it would be enough, but Colter was determined to make the most of his opportunity, majoring in psychology with an eye toward medical school. That meant time-consuming labs—so many, he had to miss off-season workouts and seven-on-seven drills his first two years to attend them.
“It’s tough. It’s really tough,” he told me. “Labs are usually later in the day, and those take three hours, so it’s really tough to get that in. Sometimes I just want to give it up and focus on football, but you have to look at the long run: all of us in this room will have our football careers end sooner or later. You definitely have to have a backup plan, and that’s something that Northwestern really helps you with.
“But if you want to be a great football player,” he added, still turning it over in his mind, “you have to do a lot of extra work—lifting, watching film, doing drills. If you want to go to the NFL, there’s only one time to do that, and it’s now.”
He’s also received a bit of fame—but only a bit. Once you’ve “made it” as a college football player, you can look forward to being depicted in EA Sports’ college football video game. (You can also look forward to EA Sports, the NCAA, and member schools keeping all the profits.) Having started most of 2011, Colter figured he had to be in the video game this year—and he was, on their national third team.
“I was excited!” he said with a laugh. “I bought the game, ran home, opened it up, and put it in—and I ended up being a white guy with red hair.”
Only at Northwestern.
• • •
Every head coach I talked to cited his team’s academic standing, underscoring how seriously his program took the student side of the student-athlete equation, and they were utterly sincere, with the numbers to back it up. But Northwestern was alone in arguing the team’s academic success was central to their success on the field. It was not simply a matter of declaring, “We take school seriously, too,” but “Because we excel academically, it helps us compete on the field.”
When I asked Fitzgerald about this, he straightened his back and set his jaw like he was warming to a familiar fight—one he’d already waged as a Northwestern recruit and player, and now as the head coach. “So I want to know, why do these people think we can’t win with bright guys? We win because they’re bright guys! We think we’ve got the best leaders and the brightest guys in the Big Ten. That’s how we win! And this school helps us recruit them.”
If the NCAA wanted a spokesperson to explain how its core values actually translated to victories, Fitzgerald would make a fine selection. You could argue, however, that more than other coaches, he could afford to put values before victories.
“We can do that here,” he told me, “because our president, our AD, our trustees, and our fans have the right kind of compass. They understand who we are, and they embrace it, with no excuses.”
Everyone in Evanston still credits President Bienen for his pioneering support of Northwestern football, and his successor, Morton Schapiro, has cranked it up another notch. A former dean at USC, and president of Williams College, Schapiro immediately impresses visitors with his uncommonly engaging manner, his incredible memory and voracious curiosity, and the breadth and depth of his interests. One of those interests is varsity athletics.
“Morty,” as he introduces himself, made this manifest immediately after being named Northwestern’s next president in December of 2008, nine months before he would assume the office. President Bienen was nice enough to invite him to the December 29, 2008, Alamo Bowl, against Missouri. Schapiro eagerly accepted and stayed in San Antonio for the entire week, meeting everyone and addressing the team two days before the game, starting a tradition that continues to this day.
“Morty gives us great talks when he visits practice,” defensive end Quentin Williams told me. “He’s very impressive, very charismatic, an
d a great speaker. It goes over very well.”
“What Morty’s meant to this program,” Athletic Director Jim Phillips told me, “you can’t measure. He’s been unbelievable.”
“The whole [athletic] ramp-up started with President Bienen,” Vice President of University Relations Alan Cubbage said, “but when Morty shows up at the games, for all our teams, it’s a clear demonstration of institutional commitment.”
Schapiro is an unapologetically avid sports fan—especially of the Wildcats, of course—but not as an end in itself.
“I was in New York talking to our alumni last week,” Schapiro told me on a rainy April day in his office. “Northwestern—it’s not the kind of place where the first question you get from the alums is about football. But it comes up, every time. They wanted to know about the bowl game, and about our new basketball coach. They take a great interest in our teams and can keep in touch with the school this way,” something that’s harder to do through an econ class.
Athletics also keeps the school in front of future students, especially since the Big Ten Network started broadcasting games coast to coast. “When a Northwestern tennis match is being shown in San Antonio,” Cubbage said, “it helps our coaches recruit, but it also gets our name out there for everyone. BTN has broadened the reach of the schools.”
But at its roots, Schapiro stressed, if athletics aren’t for the people on campus, something’s amiss. “The faculty and staff take a lot of pride in our teams,” he said, “and it’s a great part of the college experience.”
That is something Schapiro takes seriously. He still teaches an economics class twice a week, he accepts dozens of invitations from students to dine at their dorms or fraternities or apartments, and he attends every varsity competition he can—usually a few each week. It’s all part of building a sense of community on a campus where more students come from both coasts than from the state of Illinois.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 17