Northwestern won the Big Ten West by playing really good defense during the regular season, and they’ll play Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game in Indianapolis this Saturday. But being a great team requires a bit more than just playing good defense.
Northwestern’s the lowest-rated Power 5 division champion ever
But if they can drag the Buckeyes into ugly water and pull the upset, none of that matters.
Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports
For example, Northwestern is currently ranked 78th in the S&P+ rankings, a system that adjusts for efficiency and opponent in ranking teams, and tends to comfortably beat the spread each season.
That ranking makes the 2018 Wildcats a curious outlier.
Bill Connelly introduced S&P+ in 2005, and has created a retroactive version for seasons before then.
Since conferences started having title games in the 1990s, no Power 5 division champion had ever finished the season outside of the top 50 in Connelly’s rankings.
Well, Northwestern hasn’t been inside the top 50 since Week 2, when it checked in at No. 46.
The Wildcats went a respectable 8-4 this season, but the way they did it was pretty weird, and maybe a tad bit lucky. If the Wildcats can repeat all of this and hang with Ohio State, then maybe they’re the rare team that just breaks math entirely.
For what it’s worth, Fitzgerald’s teams have baffled the numbers for years. He’s earned the Big Ten’s 2018 coach of the year honor by having his most Fitzgerald season yet.
Northwestern is aware that it is perceived as being not very good.
They were an underdog on the road against 5-5 Minnesota, actually projected to lose. Head coach Fitzgerald wasn’t happy about Vegas that day.
“It was insulting, you know, we come up here as underdogs,” Fitzgerald said after NU’s 24-14 win in Minneapolis. “Are you kidding me? That’s a joke.”
As the line continued to move towards the Golden Gophers, the taste of disrespect lingered. Fitzgerald hammered the point home before the team flew to the Twin Cities.
“I made it very crystal clear that the the level of respect for the guys in that locker room is not very high because of a couple of games early in the year when we beat ourselves,” Fitzgerald said. “We want to earn respect, and let’s go do it.”
Those “couple games” still count, both in advanced power rankings like S&P+ and the ones Vegas uses, plus the public perception. Northwestern lost to an Akron that’ll likely finish 4-8 and to a Duke that finished with a 52-point loss to Wake Forest. NU also had competitive losses to Michigan and Notre Dame.
The Playoff committee remembers those bad losses as well. At No. 21, the Wildcats are the third-ranked four-loss team.
Another part of the negative perception: playing in a division that is rarely great, but was having a down year even by its own standards.
- Nebraska sputtered to an 0-6 start, including an overtime loss to Northwestern.
- Purdue lost to Northwestern in Week 1 by four points and ended up only a 6-6 team.
- Preseason favorite Wisconsin had one of the country’s most disappointing years, and played Northwestern with a sophomore quarterback making his first career start for an injured Alex Hornibrook.
- Minnesota bounced between really good and terrible all year.
- Iowa’s fine.
- Illinois is bad. Northwestern won by eight.
The Big Ten East has three teams in the top 11 of the S&P+ rankings this year. The Big Ten West’s highest-rated team is disappointing Wisconsin at No. 24 followed by Iowa at 26.
The weaker division in a conference will produce some perplexing division winners from time to time. It’s how the ACC Coastal sends Pitt, Duke, or Wake to the conference title game. Or how the SEC East went several years without sending really good teams to Atlanta.
While the West is the weaker division, cream often rises to the top, but that’s not what’s happening this year.
The West teams that made the Big Ten title game in 2015 and 2017 were one win away from Playoff berths. Wisconsin was No. 6 in the 2016 poll when it played Penn State in the Big Ten title game. This year, Northwestern’s been out of the Playoff race since September.
NW picked the perfect times this season to turn in bad games, and it did just enough in its eight other games (all in-conference wins).
Perhaps Northwestern could’ve won 2018’s ACC Coastal or Pac-12 South, though S&P+ (and thus probably Vegas as well) would’ve heavily favored Utah and even Miami over the Wildcats.
Fitzgerald said that the Wildcats aren’t getting respect because of a few early struggles, but that isn’t quite it.
Despite being nearly last in all of FBS in yards per play, 108th in scoring offense, 108th in offensive S&P, and 78th in red zone scoring percentage, Northwestern only has four losses.
Northwestern isn’t winning in convincing ways. They only won once by 10 points or more all season: 31-17 over Wisconsin. In that game, the Badgers turned the ball over three times, and the Wildcats started their average drive at their own 40-yard line. (As Miami has showed, relying on clutch turnovers isn’t a sustainable recipe.)
A look at the advanced box score from the Notre Dame shows how this inefficient offense fared against one elite:
Northwestern had four scoring opportunities (defined as drives that go inside the 40-yard line) out of 12 drives. That’s bad. What’s even worse is doing that despite an average starting field position of the 35-yard line, six yards better than the national average. That means that the Wildcats, on average, couldn’t drive the ball 45 yards in the most open portion of the field.
A bad offense is not a recipe for beating Ohio State.
Ohio State is a 14-point favorite, a spread that suggests the Buckeyes’ talent should win, but acknowledges the Wildcats’ ability to keep games close.
The Buckeyes just showed what their athletes can do to an aggressive defense/sluggish offense combo. The Buckeyes bludgeoned Michigan coordinator Don Brown’s elite defense and had probably their most efficient rushing performance of the season. Quarterback Dwayne Haskins is getting better as the season goes on.
To put it simply, Northwestern lost to a Michigan team that’s basically Super Northwestern. Ohio State just ripped Super Northwestern limb from limb.
However it got to this point, no one can take away what Northwestern accomplished this season.
If you haven’t noticed by now, 2018’s been pretty odd. NU’s just one of several surprise teams to show up on Championship Weekend, fitting 2018’s theme of chaos just outside the Playoff race.
Northwestern capitalized on the breaks, both on the field and on the schedule. Now regardless of how they got to Indianapolis, they’re 60 minutes away from Pasadena.
See More:
