| While I'm generally not a fan of opening with conference games, it's hard not to still get excited to see one. Particularly when it's not your team. Two teams that exceeded expectations in 2017, probably can't wait to kick things off and build on them in 2018. Plenty is at stake too. The winner keeps that momentum rolling, however the loser, already 0-1 in the division before most teams have kicked off, with Iowa and Wisconsin to come, may be out of the race for Indy before Labor Day. It kind of felt weird to say, considering Justin Jackson graduated as the 10th leading rusher in NCAA history, and those players don't exactly grow on trees anywhere, let alone at Northwestern, but even with his graduation, this felt like it could be the most talented team ever at Northwestern. They've had some great teams, some teams that maybe reached above what their ceiling should have been, but on paper this team is probably more talented than '95, '96 or '00. Then the Clayton Thorson injury happened. Fitzgerald rolled with Thorson as a freshman in 2015, when he really, really, really struggled at times, and was willing to grow with him, as his QBR went from 45.7 as a freshman, to 62.3 to 70 last year. Now all of that investment was supposed to pay off, he was being mentioned as a top 10 pick in the 2019 NFL Draft, and he tears his ACL in the Music City Bowl. Fitzgerald listed Thorson OR junior T.J. Green (Trent Green's son, if you want to feel old) as the starter. It seems like he should be healthy, but HOW healthy, and how rusty will he be after getting essentially no offseason. The defense could be really, really good, and Jeremy Larkin looks like a more than adequate replacement for Jackson, but the thing goes as Thorson goes. Purdue's year one results shocked everyone, and may have set the clock ahead a little too far. The rebuild in West Lafayette was major. However, the defense that Brohm inherited was far better than people probably gave it credit for. There was experience and NFL players everywhere, and it all came together last year. For an offensive guru, with two good to great quarterbacks, the Purdue offense was actually pretty terrible, and the defense was vastly underrated. In conference play the Boilermakers were 10th in scoring offense, but 4th in scoring defense. In Year 2 it's time for Brohm's offense to get going, because the graduation of 8 starters on defense, with a lot of bad Hazell classes behind them, means finishing in the top half, let alone top 1/3 of the Big Ten in defense seems like a very tall task. So the offense has to generate a lot more than 20.3 ppg. The overall numbers don't look bad, they just left too many points on the table. Dropped balls. Bad third down conversion rates. My thought is that they have to improve there from Year 1 to Year 2, and that Northwestern now is not the Northwestern we could have seen this year. We may see that Northwestern team later, once Thoron (hopefully) looks more like the top 10 pick he was projected as. But Week 1, on the road, in a conference game. Nah. |