It’s never too early to start to look ahead to next season. Over the coming weeks, we will examine what comes next for each team in the Power 5 conferences and also those outside the Power 5 who could make noise on the national stage. Today: the Northwestern Wildcats.
Wins come slowly. Charm has its limits. If there's one surefire way to generate immediate optimism in a new college hoops hire, it is for that coach to succeed on the recruiting trail in his first spring and summer at the helm. We see it fairly often with schools and coaches of all stripes: One big commitment gets folks fired up.
Northwestern coach Chris Collins got his big recruiting boost just a couple of months into his first offseason in Evanston, Illinois. That's when top-100-ranked South Holland, Illinois, native wing Vic Law called Collins and told him he would be a Wildcat. Law was a major get by any standard, a player who could have chosen to play for a handful of more successful basketball programs, and a player who was turned off by Northwestern when former coach Bill Carmody slow-played the team's interest. As SI's Luke Winn detailed at the time, Collins resurrected that relationship and sold Law on his necessity. The payoff was Collins' first real win as a head coach -- the textbook catalyst for new-coach optimism at a program whose fans very much needed it.
But this wasn't just any program. This was Northwestern. And Law's decision was much bigger than textbook.
At a normal Big Ten school, earning commitments from top-100 players is the baseline recruiting requirement. At Northwestern, it ended a streak: Law was first the top-100 prospect since Evan Eschmeyer in 1993 to make his collegiate hoops home on the North Shore. Twenty years!
The majority of those 20 years passed on Bill Carmody's watch. Some seasons were better than others. After just one winning season in his first seven, in the late aughts Carmody's teams flirted with the NCAA tournament bubble just often enough to make his job status a matter of ongoing debate. The Carmody years drove fans insane, and the reasons were varied in scope.
In the obvious macro sense, all of those John Shurna 3s and Juice Thompson heroics still didn't get Northwestern into the tournament for the first time in program history; the Wildcats have been playing college basketball since 1905 and are still the only power conference program never to dance.
In the micro, Carmody almost seemed determined to make his own life more difficult. His teams ran devout Princeton offense -- complete with 1950s-era dribble spin moves on ball reversals to initiate passes to the wing -- and 1-3-1 zone defense. Undying loyalty to one of the greatest systems ever concocted on a court is totally fine ... if the system is populated with actual Division I college basketball players. Carmody seemed to have a distaste for even the most cursory glance at recruiting. Instead, he populated his rosters with obscure names. Even as Northwestern's football program proved the school's academic restrictions needn't limit its competitive ability, those years without a top-100 player, or an NCAA tournament bid, kept piling up.
Which brings us back to Law, the academically inclined top-100 player who was at one point more interested in Northwestern than Carmody was in him. That Collins was able to immediately break one ignominious Wildcats streak by merely doing what coaches are supposed to do -- actually asking good players if they maybe want to play for you -- bodes well for the imminent downfall of that other, more infamous, record.
What the immediate future holds: Though the wins and losses (15-17, after a 14-19 finish in 2013-14) might not show it, strides were taken toward that goal last season. Law was on the floor, and while offensively raw, his athleticism immediately made him a valuable defensive rebounder while hinting at greater things to come. Three-star classmate Bryant McIntosh was even better, forming a solid ballhandling (and perimeter shooting) duo with junior guard Tre Demps.
In 2013-14, Collins scrapped most of the Princeton stuff outright, to mostly disastrous results. Last season, he reinstated some of the vaunted scheme's more universal concepts, and the Wildcats jumped from 309th in adjusted offensive efficiency to 94th. Unfortunately, the Wildcats' underrated 2013-14 defense regressed almost as much as the offense improved, allowing a Big Ten-worst 1.11 points per trip in conference play. Even so, Northwestern undeniably improved, as its huge number of close losses and 5-3 finish after Feb. 15 displayed.
It would be reasonable, thanks to sheer experience and stylistic cohesion alone, to expect more improvement from Northwestern in Collins' third season. That the coach is bringing in a top-100-ranked freshman -- four-star power forward Aaron Falzon -- is another obvious reason to expect the Wildcats to take a step forward.
Anyway, in two seasons, Collins has done twice what his predecessors failed to do in the preceding 20. The talent level is rising accordingly. The need for quirky systems is receding. The macro is no longer so maddening. Slowly but surely, Northwestern basketball is becoming the one thing it has never been able to call itself: normal.