Its an NU Win! [Updated]

The NU Wildcats snapped out of the doldrums as the Defense stepped up and both Jason Wright and Noah Herron had 100 yard rushing days against the Duke Blue Devils. Updated - Here's NU Coach Randy Walker's Post Game Comments...

Northwestern Head Coach Randy Walker talking with Ted Albrecht on the WGN Post Game Show...

As I told them, we don't get a couple of "self inflicted wounds we get a shutout. We had a couple of dumb penalties, kept their drives alive but I'll take that passion any day.

I think our kids played with passion today, we got 'em rev'ed up again and that looked like the defense I saw in the first two games. As I told them, I thought we could be an awfully solid defense this year and be real special.

Jason Wright talked about intensity - we've got to take it to our opponents. I haven't seen a defense fly around like this in a few years.

I thought all along that we could be a real good defense, make some real strides. I thought we were on track to that the first weeks, again last week I'm just going to view that as an aberation, the best thing we do is we leave that behind. We got saddled back up and we quit worrying what everyone else was saying and worried about how well we could play.

And we can be a good football team, and we can be a darn special defense. I think we displayed that today, and now we embark on some real challenges and go to the National Champions.

Lets talk about the first quarter...the offense really came to play in the first quarter.

We got off the blocks swell, and really, other than a bad field position or two and some things at the end of the half, we just really couldn't keep it going. But every time we had a chance to execute it and play ahead of the chains like we like to do on offense, we moved the ball all day.

Like I told them, we take the mistakes out of our football, out of our offense, and we score a couple of more.

I don't think you had any negative first down plays in the first half.

They [Duke] were playing pretty assertive against us, you know, they were coming down hill, we got ahead, our linemen were doing a good job, and our backs ran awful hard, like I said, the thing that got us in the 2nd quarter was we got behind the sticks a little bit, we had a penalty, got in bad field position, but other than that, I think we played pretty well.

How about having 2 rushers over 100 yards.

I tell you what, we need to rush the football, we were awful disappointed as a football team and as a football family about how it went last week. We know we're better than that. But you have to show up on Saturday and do it. We came to play and rush the football, I thought we came off the ball pretty well, we were wearing them down as the game wore on and I thought our conditioning level showed up and made a difference.

Next Week its the Shoe - the Big 10 Season Starts.

Well, you know we start the Big 10. That's what all these kids came here to do is play Big 10 football. I like the way this 4 game start has finished, obviously we'd like to be one game or two games better but I like where we're at as a football team right now, I believe we can be an awful good football team.

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Copyright 2003 WGN Radio

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