EVANSTON, Ill. — One swing of the leg in the second quarter changed the course of an entire football game.
Cooper Garcia hit his 30-yard field goal attempt low and into the flailing arms of Northwestern’s Joe Gaziano. The ball bounced around on the grass at Ryan Field until Chris Bergin scooped it up and weaved his way 85 yards for a touchdown. A UMass drive that had started late in the first quarter after a Josh Wallace interception ended with the Wildcats scoring points.
The Minutemen forced three turnovers against Northwestern on Saturday, but came away with no points. UMass squandered its chances to put some early pressure on their Big Ten opponent. Instead of extending their early lead, the Minutemen fell behind and could never catch up in a 45-6 loss.
“In a game like that where your defense is giving you the ball and you have a lot of opportunities while the game is close, if you want to have a chance to win, you have to capitalize on those opportunities,” senior quarterback Randall West said. “They got us on some looks, but most of them were self-inflicted and a lot of that was on me.”
West was at the helm of the offense to start Saturday’s game, but looked shaky on the opening two drives. His best pass of the first quarter came on a play that ultimately didn’t count when his 11-yard touchdown pass to Samuel Emilus was negated by a penalty for an illegal man downfield. Otherwise, he struggled to connect with open receivers and missed out on several chances for big plays
UMass (1-10) crossed the Northwestern 25-yard line four times with West in at quarterback, but scored just six points. Those drives ended with two field goals, the blocked attempt and a turnover on downs.
“Some of that was on me not putting the ball in the position it needed to be in front of guys in the red zone,” West said. “We need to convert those and I need to be better in those situations. … The defense gets a turnover and we get the ball on the (21), those are the ones we have to have when we get down there. Against a good team like Northwestern, we need to make them pay for those mistakes.”
The lack of offensive execution wasted a season-best effort from the UMass defense, which showed plenty of grit against the Northwestern (2-8) offensive line. The unit kept the Wildcats in check on the opening three possessions, forcing a three-and-out to start the game before intercepting Aidan Smith on back-to-back drives. It was the type of start the Minutemen would have scripted in a heartbeat if they could have as they held the Wildcats to just 86 yards on those possessions.
Coach Walt Bell said not being able to score on the opportunities the defense provided was tough already, but made even more difficult to process given how much the defense has been through in recent weeks.
“Pick an adjective: frustrating, disappointing, disheartening, there’s a million of them,” Bell said. “More than anything else, for as maligned as our defense has been, for them to rise up and us not be able to help them as an offense, for our football team, for our defense to go out and give us a chance to play a good football game, that’s the thing that hurts the most.”
After surging to a 21-6 halftime lead on the heels of a pair of long rushes, Northwestern’s physicality began to take a toll on the Minutemen. The depleted defensive line started to wear down against the Wildcats’ relentless rushing attack and the holes began to open for Evan Hull. Still, the Minutemen held their own until the fourth quarter when the Wildcats scored 21 points in a blink of an eye behind Hull.
The freshman scored on rushes of 46 and 31 yards within the first six minutes of the quarter then was pulled with the game out of hand. He finished with 220 yards on 24 carries, but just four of his rushes accounted for nearly 75 percent of his yardage.
“(We) started to wear down in the back half of the game,” Bell said. “The lack of third-down conversions, having a really young, really thin defense as it is on the field for an extended amount of time. We go into the second half, have one decent drive coming out then it’s three-and-out, three-and-out and those guys are getting left out there for an extended time. The Big Ten football started to wear on us a bit.”
Junior linebacker Mike Ruane said he thought the Minutemen were fine physically against the Northwestern offense, they just never adjusted to how the Wildcats attacked the defense with the rushing game. The Wildcats started to run more outside zone plays with Hull and used their receivers and offensive linemen in different blocking schemes to open up one-on-one matchups. That is when the tackling issues that have plagued UMass all year returned and Hull was able to scamper mostly untouched into the end zone.
“A lot of it comes down to mental focus,” Ruane said. “It’s not the physicality, we can play with these guys even though they’re a Big Ten team, we just need to dial in on the focus. … They just kind of wore us down mentally because we were out there and we were grinding. Mentally, we just lost our focus and got our eyes off our keys.”