Chasing the (Go) Blue(s) Away; Plus Adonis Smith Transfers
By Lake The Posts on
Apologies to the LTP regulars, my mourning post is a full day late.
The following post was supposed to publish Wednesday morning:
I admit it, I pouted. As we rode the rail between ecstasy and agony in the waning moments of last night’s OT loss to #11 Michigan, I tried my best to stay positive. “What history?” I kidded myself. Reggie Hearn is an un-recruited walk-on playing at an all Big Ten level. Drew Crawford was obviously missing for most of the second half in this physical grudge match, but it seemed for awhile as though we were unfazed. Our #2 scoring threat and Big Ten top five scoring leader was out, but no worries, Davide Curletti was inflicting his “I come to play against teams from my home state” mantra. The student section was buzzing at perhaps an all-time high doing its best to will us to victory. Despite two major scoring droughts to open both halves, the ‘Cats were ballin’. I was really impressed with the heart, grit and insert cliche here – determination. It was a bigtime game and we were playing as hard as you could want a team to play against a #11 opponent.
Then it started. A terrible pass through the backcourt out of bounds. John Shurna toeing the out of bounds line. David Sobolewski travelled pulling up at half court to try and stop a pass that was already en route. I could feel the tightness setting in. Yet, just when it looked like we were in trouble, Reggie Hearn hit the biggest three of his life. John Shurna went in to a brief spell of “gimme that rock and I’ll score” mentality. With the score tied at 49-49 and Wildcat nation clutching anything it could, we had the collective mental bubble of “just this once – PLEASE”. You could do the math and know, barring an offensive rebound, Michigan would have one last shot. The Wolverines smothered us on “D” all night long and Beilein will be getting many calls on how to break the Princeton offense after he had his defenders switch on every single pick. It was game time right now, history be damned. Any coach and player will tell you that the last possession doesn’t win or lose a game. They’ll point to things like 16 turnovers to dilute the fan theory of the fact it was do or die time. Northwestern worked the ball around but seemed to be clogged up by the Wolverines. It screamed of a no flow possession. The shot clock started ticking towards that desperation zone of single digits. All eyes were on John Shurna. The cheesy sports movie version of this has cuts from the play going in slow motion to Northwestern fans around the world watching, biting their fingernails, praying, edging up from the couch in unison. Would this be the signature moment in Welsh-Ryan lore? Would a player be getting a Kain Colter @Nebraska pilon dive TD photo hung on purple mafia office walls across the country? Uhhh…no. JerShon Cobb found himself with the ball and time expiring and took what was a borderline desperation three that came up short. NU fans didn’t have time to even sulk as we went in to disaster mentality prevent mode.
This is where I must confess I went to the dark side. You just knew it would be Trey Burke to beat us. Visions of Glenn Robinson in 1994 and what’s his name from Illinois at the buzzer beating us began to wash over me. I uttered “we lost” out loud. Even when we fouled with :04 left, wisely, near halfcourt, I felt a DePaul desperation 1983 NIT game-winner coming at me. When Trey Burke launched an off-balance 35-footer and it missed, it was if we’d staved off history. We were going to win this game, without Drew Crawford. Then, our nemesis, Trey Burke delivered on a 3-pointer on what will become known as the Michigan pinball possession to spark a 9-0 explosion to start OT. Game over man. As PRR noted, we are not done. We’re not out of it. Fact is, Joe Lunardi has us still as a member of the Dayton play-in posse in his “Last Four In”. In typical NU fandom, our card carrying mantra to get in is “no bad losses”. This is the NCAA Tournament equivalent of double negatives. Not “we earned a bid”, but “we should be in because we have no bad losses.” Yet.
I didn’t want to write today. Heck, I wanted to put my head in the sand. Yet, everywhere I turn it is pain. I get up early to catch a flight to LA and the open to Mike & Mike was Greenberg just lamenting what could’ve been. Baseball contributor Buster Olney was talking trash and Golic was in console mode for NU fans. So much for avoiding the topic. I pull in to the parking garage at O’Hare – and I could not make this up – I parked next to Shon Morris – I managed a hello, but both of us didn’t want to be reminded of NU hoops on this day. I sit down on the plane and a woman decked out in head to toe Iowa gear has the aisle seat and I’m spending four plus hours in 29 b, the dreaded middle seat. The only thing that went right is the fact that an apparent mechanical issue with our plane that had me on the zipline to missing an important meeting, miraculously got fixed. I have no explanation for why it has to hurt this badly. Perhaps you were thinking of turning to me for solace. Some source of “hey, if we win the last three..it can be done”. Many are already lobbying for the 8-10 scenario. Beating Penn State will be no easy task. The amount of close losses this season is one that compounds each subsequent one. I know fans are up in arms about “Carmody this” or “Carmody that”, but I’m starting to believe in the cosmic forces at work here. I thought Coach Carmody had a sound gameplan, but you have to give a lot of credit to Michigan’s defense. They were fantastic, even if they got away with several hits on Shurna that were no calls.
There must be some grand plan for catharsis for NU fans. Right? Perhaps it all leads to one of those magical four wins in four day Big Ten Tournament runs that come along once in awhile. It’s all a set-up, a rope-a-dope and we win the Big Ten title? Dare I ask, what if there is not? Sorry folks, no solace here today. I’ll be back by Saturday. We always come back as fans. It’s not a choice, you’ve been selected for this.
RB Adonis Smith Transferring
Kudos to @NUTips, the Twitter account that broke this news and emailed it to me four days ago. Today, Pat Fitzgerald and Northwestern made it official with a press release – Adonis Smith is transferring from Northwestern. Smith, who seemed to live in the head coach’s doghouse, is departing after his sophomore season. It’s not too much of a surprise as Smith never got the touches despite a depleted RB roster. With two incoming freshman and a potential instant impact guy with Malin Jones, plus the return of Mike Trumpy, the RS freshman Jordan Perkins getting a shot, the backfield competition is pretty steep. Best of luck to Adonis.
too bad Adonis didn’t want to play DB.
Yet another painful loss in a season of painful losses. The Cats wilted in the final minutes, in much the same way they did against Illinois, Indiana, etc. The offense loses its flow, and the defense seems overmatched. The Cats looked — in essence — out-talented and a step-slow.
Removing emotion from the equation, it’s easy to appreciate what Bill Carmody’s done for this program. He’s raised it to NIT-level respectability. Yet, that appears to be his ceiling.
In theory, it should not be so impossible to bring the Cats to the tourney. It’s not like they have to win the Big Ten. They’ve just got to finish roughly in the top 5. I firmly believe there’s some coach out there that can accomplish that goal.
As I´ve said here before ad nauseam, just getting a new coach ¨aint-a-gonna¨ do it.¨
The proof that we don´t seem to want to face?: We´ve had some darn good coaches in the last 50 years or so, and none has been able to do it. The evidence is overwhelming!
We need some top notch new facilities and some kind of plan to provide academic help to marginal students.
Without this kind of administrative support, it will be 50 years more of the same, no matter who our coaches are.
can’t blame carmody for this particular game, would have won with drew crawford in, period
+1
A lot of games we can’t blame carmody for right?
When you blow a 4 point lead with 2 mins left, it isn’t drew crawford’s fault.
I just wrote a long reply to farmer that got deleted when the recaptcha didnt work. I dont have the energy to do it again.
The gist of it was that it was a lazy post. Our academic support is just fine, no one ever fails out, and our academics arent holding us back from being a top 68 team. The short bench is roster malpractice, and next year is going to be silly if that transfer doesnt work out, or godforbid turns his ankle or something completely unforeseen like that.
I respect what coach has done, i also envision having a real basketball program some day. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Please name me ONE loss it wasn’t Carmody’s fault……Every loss people come on this board and blast him….
hudaifa3, he has made a tremendous amount of mistakes. having six guys suit up is one, having no competant size is another. and yeah, when you dont run plays at the end of games and choke away leads while you sit on timeouts….you have some blame/ownership.
i guess we can blame the players for losing the 4 point lead before you could blink, but they ran nothing on offense and seemed oblivious to open 3 point shooters. And we had timeouts at the end of the game. This team needs active management, whether they should or shouldnt.
True, they don´t flunk out. But the main point is the extra guys we need can´t get in in the first place.
That´s why we lack and always will lack the necessary bench strength to finish key games without our starters becoming exhausted and losing their critical skills in waning moments of games.
That´s our tradition, and it won´t change simply by getting a new coach.
I agree with a lot of that…but not everything. Certainly ‘simply’ changing the coach doesn’t change anything and as I said might even fail. But to argue that they should not consider changing coaches when we have finished at .500 in conference once in 12 years is an aggressive position on your part. We fed some BS stat to the TV guys last week about how proud we were about 6 win seasons (.333), and that carmody has done that a bunch of times. That’s embarassing.
And I refuse to believe that a more energetic and thoughtful recruiting effort couldnt get another guy or 2.
I´m not saying we should not change coaches. I´m just saying that this alone will not fix our 50 year problem.
We´ve tried it many times, and it has never worked.
We need a new coach, new facilities, and some way to get admitted (and give special tutoring) kids that good schools like Michigan will take but we won´t.
Do people look down on Michigan academically because they take these kids? No way.
And they won´t us either.
The time for change is here and now.
We´ve got to get off our academic-snobbery high horses. Or we´ll pay the price of another 50 years of basketball no man´s land.
Off point but funny:
Saw this comment on Facebook:
¨I don´t always talk to Ohio State grads. But when I do, I always ask for large fries.¨
Hahahaha +100
I needed that laugh today. Thanks Farmer.
Speaking of getting off our academic-snobbery high horses…
Compared to OSU´s standards, we would to have drop ours tons below Michigan´s to lose our right to be academic snobs.
Did you compliment him on his tattoos?
I say this not to defend osu but when getting uppity one should probably spell correctly…
My goodness, seems like yesterday the Kool Aid was flowing on this blog and out of the football offices per two California running backs that were going to be difference makers in the program and provide NU top tier talent… As it was– Fields saw the greener field playing baseball at LSU and Smith seemingly is a transfer… I’d suggest neither Fields or Smith hung on to the ball particularly well, but, they were no doubt the best athletes we have had at that position since Sutton left…
LTP- Maybe in lieu of spinning how deep the competition is with a guy like Trumpy and a couple Freshman, you might want to investigate a disturbing trend in the recruitment and development of the running back position at NU… That is the real story…
Running backs that make more than 1 cut don’t mesh with our style
Fields was quick but too easy to knock down. I didn’t think Adonis Smith was all that athletic (at least, he didn’t show flashes of it on the playing field). Trumpy doesn’t have break-away speed, but he has great vision, patience, and feel for the position, always able to get that extra 2-3 yards in traffic. As a running back, not an athlete, but a running back, he’s by far the best we have had so far since Sutton.
Now why Jacob Schmidt got all those carries is a pertinent question.
Smith was plenty athletic to my way of thinking particulary by NU Football standards…
The Adonis Smith story is a bit of a mystery. It was either the Michigan or the Iowa game where he had a very solid game, then seemingly did not get any significant time the rest of the way. Why that happened is a mystery to me. I thought he had a decent burst and the ability to finish runs. I wish him all the best at his next stop.
Let’s hope we’re not sitting here next year talking about Perkins as the third straight California-bred RB transferring. Hopefully either he, Trumpy, Green or Jones will become the horse for the next few years and the others will be willing to stick around on the team.
A question for those in the know, followed by a comment: is there some issue with the way that NU conditions its football and men’s basketball players, or at the very least, does anybody else sense that this whole medocrity plateau might be the result of insufficient conditioning? Both teams seem to have problems “finishing” games, yet the topic of conditioning is rarely mentioned here, it seems. Herb Brooks famously helped will the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team past the Soviets, in part because, though there may have been a raw talent gap, he was hell bent on having the best conditioned team in the tournament. He did (by far, some would say), and they “finished.” Yes, guys like Persa and Kafka have spent inordinate amounts of time in the weight room, but I’m starting to wonder if the general conditioning program lags behind where it needs to be.
Also, regarding the drought (the men’s basketball one, not the bowl one), there is something that I keep in mind that helps me sleep at night, despite the fact that I am a fan of the only major conference team not to ever make the Tournament. If you look at the 64- and now 68-team fields year by year, at least during the last three, I think you can feel quite confident that NU would beat the vast majority of 8/9-16 seeds. This is not a team that is too mediocre or too talent poor to succeed in the Tournament. It is simply a team that is not good enough to make the tournament coming from the Big Ten. I know that this is a cop out and, in some ways, a worthless distinction, but I think it is one worth making. I stand by my belief that it is time for a change at head coach, but I also firmly believe that, were we to make the tournament, the Sweet 16 would be well within reach, given our nonconference record and the teams that we might be likely to play the first couple of rounds.
We have no depth on our basketball squad. They could be the best-conditioned players in the world, but when they’re playing their 37th minute vs. guys who are playing their 27th minute, it makes a big difference.
I attribute our second half troubles in football with our coaching staff not being able to make adjustments in schemes during half time (it’s one of the most glaring weaknesses of Fitz’s staff).
I have asked that same question on conditioning on this board in the past re football and promptly gotten a smack down that I did not know what I was writing about. with you on the wondering. have heard from a high school parent that our program needed modernizing.
Lilja left as the strength/conditioning coach before last season but there was never any explanation of his departure. (Although when Assistant Coaches leave there often isn’t unless they’re moving up at another school.) I do know that the 2011 football season was one that resulted in a losing season when I thought the team would do much better.
Larry Lilja was one of my high school teachers thirty-three years ago. He accepted a teaching post after he graduated and attended several NFL camps without being signed. This was before he completed his M.A. degree in education (at Northeastern Illinois) and before he turned to Northwestern to work in the Athletic Department. Maybe he simply retired.
He certainly had the years in to do so. Hell, his son, who was on the football roster, had even graduated from NU quite a few years back.
I think it’s a question worth asking. I don’t know enough about the structure of the athletic department to know whether or not there is any link between the conditioning programs across the various sports. I know others here would be able to answer that.
There was a very nice “Legends” documentary on BTN last night about Kelly Amonte-Hiller and the meteoric rise of women’s lax at NU. One thing I found interesting was the fact that Hiller’s strategy revolved around conditioning–basically being the strongest, fastest, best conditioned team, because she knew that they weren’t the most skilled in lax fundamentals. It appears to have–um–worked, if, you know, ***six national titles in seven years*** is any indication. I also got the sense from the documentary that Hiller basically runs her own conditioning program, rather than farm it out to NU’s other strength and conditioning coaches.
Unless I’m misreading, or reading from the wrong location, Lunardi hasn’t updated his projections since 2/20, which of course was before our last game.
He actually did a late-night update on Tuesday. Cats were still in “Last Four In”.
Ok – the close loses this year are driving me nuts as much – likely more- than most. But I am convinced that two more wins and some fortunate seeding in the Big Tournament will allow us our first invitation to the dance. By that I mean if we can stay clear of OSU and WI until the third game we might get in. Yes I said might – but I am not giving up yet.
Regardless, I believe with the new facilities program and our continued improvement in recruiting, we will break through to the next level with Carmody. We all thought without Juice we would be dead – Sobo could be an upgrade. We all mourned the loss of Coble and Shurna has become the man of all time in the program. Reggie has been an amazing growth story. Crawford could have gone many places but choose NU & Bill – same with Demps (both with good NBA connections). And BTW the “Wildcat ” offense is producing points and the freedom kids want in choosing a program.
These close loses need to become just one single big win and the break through will be like a geyser. I hope it is a win in the next week or two. But I believe it will come.
Let’s hope they are focused and deliver Saturday night in PA.
Gocatsgo!
Well said. I couldn’t agree more.
Who is the frontline on the geyser next year?
@db,
You are usually so sound in your comments – this surprises me.
The geyser discussion and a reference to a front line NEXT YEAR are truly a disconnect from my post.
1) We have no front line this year!
2) Reference to a front line is inappropriate for this scheme. Anyone over 6-7 who has the mix of skills to execute this offense and the match up defensive man or the 1-3-1 is a bonus
3)The geyser is a reference to a break through unrelated to specific personnel
This team has developed beyond past NU teams on many levels, but has not won that last possession game. It will. And when it does, or the next team does, it will be a break through.
Guys like Sobo are assassins. They will sieze the role and we will be expected to close the deal – not wait for the fatal let down.
Let’s hope like hell it is 2012!
To you, db, hang in there – you are a Wildcat!
Gocatsgo!
My bad, mis-read the post…I thought you were going with the PRR angle that if/when we make the tournament that our roster is going to magically turnover and our future prospects will flip over night.
I do wish at the end of the game they would just give the ball to sobo and let him create, get the D moving, and he can rack it or kick to a shooter or loosen up crawford’s guy. I dont understand the dribble handoffs at 35 feet that we use in our last possessions. Also, John isnt a 1-on-1 guy from 20 feet. If he is the guy they need to give it to him in the low or medium post. For a genious play caller Carmody really doesnt get any late game execution. It doesnt even look like they are trying to do anything.
By facilities do you mean on campus training center and tweaked renos on WR and Ryan field? We cannot fill either house until we start winning Bowls or at least getting to the NCAA’s..
The specifics of facilities I leave to those who study what attracts recruits and supports winners – way above my pay grade.
I should clarify “big win”. MSU was a big win, but not a buzzer win. A win we steal or a win we take with the last possession. Those come from confidence and conviction. They become self perpetuating as well. They become expected by players, fans and opponents.
Gocatsgo!
What type of program is in place at NU for the Zekes and Reggie type walk-ons? Do they leave NU owing student loans? If so is there anything that can be done without violating the rules. Off subject just curious..
We need a new bball facility. Ours is worse than most high school stadium. What top-notch recruit would wanna play there? Nobody. Football stadiums fine till we start selling out games.
Totally agree. Keep the football stadium clean and in good repair, but let’s shelve the idea of a new football stadium until the games begin to sell out on a consistent basis rather than once every two or three years.
Props to Iowa, particularly Gatens, for battling this year. They just followed up their IU win by knocking off UW tonight to sweep the series from them.
At 7-8 in the conference, Iowa has some quality wins: Michigan, Indiana, UW (2). They also have some absolutely terrible losses including Clemson, PSU and Campbell all at home. They didn’t beat anyone of consequence in non-conf. Anyone know if they have some injuries / personnel issues earlier in the season?
They have a legitimate path to 18-13, 10-8 with remaining games at Illinois (anything left to play for?), at Nebraska and home against our Wildcats. Iowa City could be rocking for the finale. Less than ideal.
C’mon…why did we go to Northwestern if not to occasionally get on our academic high horses and take ‘em for a spin!
That one was supposed to be a reply to a thread way up there but had to try it like 4 times to go through and by then I guess it had me entering this as a new comment…stupid recaptcha. LTP, can we turn that thing down a notch?
I went to NU for a lot of reasons (location, financial aid, education, Big Ten sports) and none of my decision making was motivated by attempts to prove that I’m better than someone else. It’s not even true that Ohio State students aren’t intelligent, it’s a major research institution not a community college. I understand that the joke was all in good fun and I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but I’m hesitant to embrace humor like that because I don’t want Northwestern to be associated with arrogance. I know I wouldn’t want someone from a school perceived to be academically superior to Northwestern to make fun of my intelligence.
i don’t think you’ll have to worry about that
(sorry, too easy)
I’m assuming you meant to say that I SHOULD worry about that. That’s the line that would imply that I was dumb; you actually complimented me. How embarrassing for you.
Read what passes for humor, wit and civility on other B1G discussion boards. Northwestern folks are fairly mild and polite in comparison to most other B1G conference fans.