COLLEGE FOOTBALL
A thinking man’s offense
Walker, Wildcats use brainpower in spread
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Rob Oller
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The success of Northwestern football starts at the top.
Not at the top of the university, although president Henry Bienen endorses the idea that the Wildcats can excel on the field as well as in the classroom.
Not at the top of the coaching staff, although Randy Walker has brought respect and surprisingly consistent achievement to Evanston, Ill.
Success starts at the top of the student body. The head. Inside that skull lies the secret to Northwestern’s spread offense, which continues to confound defenses with its perfectly executed schemes.
Not just any team could make Walker’s intricate offense work. The Wildcats rely on their smarts and ability to grasp detailed instruction to mold the spread from one opponent to the next. Then it’s up to quarterback Brett Basanez to modify it to the foe on the field, play by play.
"I don’t apologize for having bright kids here," said Walker, whose credentials put him among the Northwestern coaching elite, not quite the oxymoron one might think, considering Gary Barnett and Ara Parseghian once coached there. "A lot of people think (academics) is the reason why you can’t compete here. I happen to believe it’s the reason you can. We think we can handle a great deal of offense and be multiple in our sets."
Or, as Basanez put it, "You have to know stuff."
Without naming names, Walker said the Wildcats’ offense is more complicated than the norm.
"Our playbook is a lot bigger than some other people’s playbooks. I’m sure of that," he said.
Walker, a pretty sharp tack himself, would prefer to simplify things. The former Miami University coach and player is a believer in smash-mouth football. "I’m not a spread guy at all," he said.
But Walker knows that Northwestern’s advantage, at least as long as Basanez is under center, is to confuse opponents by constantly tweaking the spread to force defensive adjustments.
The Wildcats’ situation becomes more difficult on defense. "But you have to be pretty smart on both sides of the ball," Walker said.
Northwestern is, although you wouldn’t know it by the numbers; it ranks last defensively among 119 Division I-A teams.
Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, however, hinted that Northwestern plays smart even when it can’t match up physically.
"Their defense, you never see them out of position," Tressel said. "Sometimes you go into the game and say, ‘You know what, if we can catch them in this coverage we can hit a home run.’ That doesn’t happen much against Northwestern."
Until Walker arrived in 1999, losing didn’t happen much against Northwestern, either. Certainly, the 1995 and 1996 seasons under Barnett were huge positives — the ’Cats won the Big Ten title in 1995 and shared it in 1996 — but Northwestern couldn’t sustain the success, going 8-16 the next two seasons. Walker went 3-8 in his first season, then finished 8-4 with a Big Ten co-championship in 2000. The next two seasons were lean, with seven wins total, but Northwestern now has gone three straight seasons with at least six wins for the first time since 1931.
"They made the shift (to the spread) and it’s been dramatic since after the ’99 season," said Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, who watched Northwestern rally with two touchdowns in the final 2:10 to shock the Hawkeyes 28-27 on Saturday.
Still, the Wildcats remain the target of skeptics who wonder when the bottom will fall out.
"This year we’re bowl eligible already, but we still have that stigma," Basanez said. "Our history, there’s such a strong tradition of, er, unsuccessful events. They see us as more of an academic school. They see high SAT and ACT scores and the purple color . . . "
He didn’t finish his thought. Didn’t need to. For many, Northwestern is still Northwestern. Just don’t try telling that to opposing defensive coordinators.
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