As bulletin board material goes, it seemed fairly tame.
What Northwestern coach Gary Barnett said was that preparing for Rice’s option offense was “a wasted week of practice.” What he meant was that, because the option was so different than any offense they would see the rest of the season, the game would do little to help the Wildcats improve defensively.
By the time Rice players were finished dissecting, parsing and peeling back the words, they were pretty sure Barnett had questioned the legitimacy of their Y chromosomes.
“From the quote of Coach Barnett, it was a wasted week of practice,” Rice quarterback Chad Nelson said. “I don’t know how serious they took us. That was something that definitely (ticked) me and everybody else on this team off.”
Apparently. Rice picked up 539 yards of offense Saturday at Ryan Field and had the ball for 40 minutes 36 seconds.
Oh, and Northwestern couldn’t tackle a laundry bag.
The result, a 40-34 Rice victory, was shocking only in how befuddled the brainy Wildcats looked in solving a daylong problem.
“We had guys at times in position to make plays, and we didn’t make them,” Barnett said. “We must have missed 100 tackles on the quarterback.”
The danger in the option comes when the quarterback turns in and pitches out. The Wildcats did a good job of shutting off the flip to the backs. However, they tackled Nelson as if he were a leper. He rushed 26 times for 178 yards.
But then, he was motivated.
Northwestern fell to 2-2, and what had looked like a light schedule heading into the Big Ten Conference season has exposed the Wildcats as an average team, at best, with lots of growing room.
It all started so well for the Wildcats. They stopped Rice on its first series. On Rice’s second series, linebacker Barry Gardner, who finished with 18 tackles, picked off a Nelson pass. On the next play, Tim Hughes hit Brian Musso on a 46-yard TD play.
It was false advertising.
Rice’s spread option began to churn, and even though the two teams battled back and forth in the first half, there was something foreboding about the way the Owls (2-1) were picking up large chunks of ground. By halftime, it was tied 17-17, but Rice had dominated the clock.
It turns out Northwestern’s intuition was correct. Something was very, very wrong. Nelson hit a wide-open Michael Perry on a 44-yard TD play in the third quarter, but even that was understandable. A pass play in the option can catch you off guard.
Now the Wildcats struggled on plays they knew were coming. Rice forced them to punt, and then drove the ball down their larynx. Backup quarterback Jeremy Bates scored on a 2-yard run up the middle to make it 31-17.
Northwestern bounced back on John Burden’s 24-yard touchdown reception and Adrian Autry’s 10-yard run. It was 34-31 Rice. Musso returned a punt 48 yards, leading to Brian Gowins’ 47-yard field goal. Tie game.
But what looked like momentum for Northwestern turned out to be motion sickness. The Owls took off on an 11-play, 77-yard drive. After running after Nelson all day, it looked as if Keith Lozowski might get him on third and 5 from the Northwestern 7. Just as he was about to, Nelson pitched to Perry, who ran in untouched.
So it went. The game. The season?
“That’s an offense, if it’s executed right, you can’t stop it,” Barnett said. “They executed pretty close to right, and we didn’t stop it.”
NU had one more chance, taking over with 1:19 left. It ended on fourth and 14, when Hughes tried to hit Autry with a short sideline pass and missed.
Barnett was left with an empty feeling. As much as anyone, he knows how to stop an option. He coached it in high school and at Colorado.
“If the plan didn’t work, and we didn’t have people to the ball, then I’ve got to take a lot of the responsibility,” he said.
According to Nelson, more than Barnett knows.
