Northwestern coach Randy Walker emerged from the crowd outside his team’s locker room Saturday, and there waiting for him was his wife Tammy. He reached out and grabbed her hand, took a few steps and then leaned down to give her a soft kiss. “Oh, man,” he said as he resumed walking. “I don’t know what to say, and that’s hard for a guy like me. I usually know what to say.
“I’m almost speechless,” Walker reiterated moments later, now standing behind a lectern and in front of countless cameras. “I know for some of you that’s hard to believe.”
He was correct. Yet Walker being speechless was no harder to believe than the game that had just ended, a wondrous, amazing game that finished with his Wildcats beating No. 12 Michigan 54-51 at sold-out Ryan Field.
The analogy is overused and often abused, but here it is appropriate: This was a battle between two talented heavyweights who staged a bloodletting worthy of a championship fight.
Both loaded up right at the start, and from the moment Northwestern took the opening kickoff 85 yards for a touchdown, they whaled on each other with a series of withering blows. Noses would be bloodied and knees would buckle and each would take a turn down on the canvas, and then came the counter-punching that assured matters wouldn’t be settled until the very end.
It was fitting, then, that only 1 minute 44 seconds remained when the climax began to play itself out with Michigan leading 51-46. On fourth-and-goal from the Wolverines’ 12-yard line, NU quarterback Zak Kustok faked a sweep left to Damien Anderson, then rolled right as Anderson, unattended, loped unnoticed toward the left flag. Kustok, under a heavy rush, threw him a Texas Leaguer.
Anderson had been superb all afternoon, finishing with 268 rushing yards and two touchdowns. But here, all alone, he dropped Kustok’s pass at the goal line, and now the ball belonged to Michigan.
“It was a great play by Michigan,” Walker said, absolving the mishap. “They came with heat and Zak had to throw a lot faster than he wanted to.”
Said Anderson: “I had to make an adjustment on the ball and I lost it a little bit in the lights. But that’s no excuse. It hit me in the hands. I have to make that catch.”
The Wolverines had been lethal all afternoon, scoring seven touchdowns and kicking a field goal on 11 previous possessions. Quarterback Drew Henson had been spectacular and finished 23-of-35 for 312 yards and four touchdowns. David Terrell and Marquise Walker torched the NU secondary, each catching nine passes, and running back Anthony Thomas rushed 37 times for 199 yards and three touchdowns.
Now, on second-and-3 from his 19, Thomas took a handoff, burst through the line and prepared to accelerate into an open field. But as he did, Wildcats safety Sean Wieber dove at him from the left and swiped at the ball, knocking it free. “All I had in mind was the first down, but I tried to get a little too much,” a crestfallen Thomas said later.
“I thought the A-Train was gone,” Wieber acknowledged. “I think what happened, he came through the hole and no one else was there, I think he saw 80 yards in front of him and probably started swinging his arms a little too much. I just dove at him and got a hand on the ball.”
NU safety Raheem Covington pounced on the fumble. “I was surprised when he dropped the ball, but I thought, `They’re not going to get it from me. They have to rip my arms off to get it from me,'” Covington said.
With the ball at the Michigan 30, Kustok dumped a pass to Anderson for 5 and then hit Teddy Johnson on a quick slant from the left for 14 more. All through this day he had matched Henson’s magic with some of his own–he finished 27-of-40 for 322 yards and two touchdowns and scrambled for 55 yards and two more touchdowns.
Now, on first-and-10 from the 11, he dropped back for the final time and threw a dart toward Sam Simmons, who was breaking toward the post. He collected Kustok’s throw a step into the end zone to put the Cats up 52-51 with 20 seconds left.
“We were getting outside coverage in that scoring zone and that’s pretty sound defense,” Walker said. “It took real good timing and real good placement to make that shot. It was a tight window.”
The catch was Simmons’ 12th for 124 yards. “When they called it I could see it was open,” he said. “The defensive back was outside and the linebacker was nowhere. I just knew I had to run it almost vertical.”
Said Kustok: “We’d been going to the boundary [the sideline] the whole game, so I really think they were guarding the boundary. I saw Sam with an open lane in the middle and just squeezed it in there.”
That was the play that served as the exclamation point, and all that came now was mere denouement. The Cats’ two-point conversion, Kustok to Johnson; two Henson completions that carried the Wolverines to the Northwestern 39; and the botched hold on what would have been a 57-yard field-goal attempt by Michigan to tie the game and send it into overtime.
They were like after-dinner mints to a sumptuous dinner, and when it was officially over, Northwestern fans stormed the field and tried unsuccessfully to bring down a goal post. “We need to get some of those students in the weight room,” Walker joked.
He could afford to after Northwestern (7-2, 5-1) kept itself in the Rose Bowl race. Michigan (6-3, 4-2) fell out of it.
“You don’t want it to come down to that,” Covington said. “You’d like it to be easier. But when it does come down to it like that, you can’t control yourself. I can’t, anyway.”
