The Northern State football team has experienced exhilarating highs and frustrating lows the past few seasons. As the Wolves start their new campaign this season, coach Mike Schmidt would like to see more consistency each week as they battle Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference foes.
“If you’re consistent you’ll have a shot to win this league,” Schmidt said. “If you’re inconsistent, you will never have a chance to win this league. That’s just the way this thing goes.”
Northern is coming off a 6-5 season, but Schmidt said a handful of plays prevented that record from being much better.
“Even though we were 6-5, this isn’t the Grand Canyon to be 9-2. It’s really not,” Schmidt said. “It’s a handful of plays, made by a handful of players.”
Two years ago, the Wolves ran up and down the field on offense with one big play after another. Last year, it was the defense that proved to be the team’s strength. Schmidt would like to see more of a combination of both this fall.
The Wolves know they have to get back to producing the big plays which were lacking a year ago.
“We lived without that for a year and we said, we can’t live without that,” Schmidt said. “We need to fix this.”
He expects the explosive plays to return to the offense with wide receiving playmakers up and down the roster featuring the return of Dewaylon Ingram and Dakota Larson, and the addition of transfers Bradyn Oakley, Nick Kennewell and Jack Oedekoven.
“You have to be explosive on offense. The name of the game is explosive plays. That’s all that matters at this point now in college football is how can you eat up chunks?” Schmidt said. “There’s only two ways to score. You score from close to the goal line or you score from far away from the goal line, so you better be good with explosive plays and you better be good in red zone offense. And if you’re not good in those two those things, you’re not going to be very good offensively.”
While Northern will look to produce big plays on offense, it will attempt to prevent them on defense.
The Wolves return nearly all of their players up front including All-American lineman Ian Marshall.
“We feel really good about our front seven,” Schmidt said.
The defensive secondary will be bolstered by transfers Corey Scott and Donovan McConnell.
“We’re hoping those guys are answers on the outside to deter those big plays,” Schmidt said.
It was those big plays that caused some issues a year ago.
“We were really good in the red zone last year, we were a really good rushing defense, we were the leading scoring defense per game in the NSIC,” Schmidt said. “Now we have to figure out a way to eliminate those big plays. In any game we lost we gave up big plays.”
The Wolves will start the season how they typically end it, against powerhouse foes Bemidji State and Minnesota Duluth. Northern is at Bemidji tonight and hosts Duluth next weekend. Schmidt is looking forward to the challenge, saying those games will be good barometers of where his team is at.
“You get a season opener at Bemidji and you get a home opener against Duluth. Man, how much fun is that?” Schmidt said. “But the most critical game of the year is week three. Because no matter if we’re 2-0, 0-2, 1-1, how do you respond coming out of those two games?”
Schmidt understands how challenging the NSIC is and that no opponent can be taken for granted. He also knows that the Wolves have the potential to be right in the thick of things.
“You never want to look ahead in this league. You can’t. We’ve learned that the hard way in some cases these past few years,” Schmidt said. “I mean we had four teams in our conference make the national playoffs and we went 2-2 against those teams last year and outscored them in those four games. That’s pretty darn good. We had a good enough team to do that, but our consistency wasn’t there.”
Schmidt believes the Wolves have the ability to be as good as anybody in the NSIC. Now, it’s just a matter of finding the right ingredients each week.
“We have certainly an ability to play with any team that’s going to show up on our schedule. The key part is how can you do that for 11 weeks?” Schmidt said. “We haven’t done that, yet. We haven’t figured that out, yet. Hopefully, this year’s recipe and formula is a little bit better.”
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