Get ready for the “Who’s the third best team in the Big Ten Bowl?”
It’s the Northwestern Wildcats versus Michigan football in a top-20 matchup featuring a pair of the Big Ten’s best defensive units. The Wildcats are coming off of a shutout win against Minnesota, and have only allowed three touchdowns in five games this season. They yield just five points per game on average.
This Michigan football team also blanked their opponent last week with a 28-0 win over pathetic sad sack Maryland, making it back-to-back shutouts for the Wolverine defense. Northwestern’s ranking in the AP Poll is its highest since 2000, while Michigan jumped to their highest ranking since September of 2013.
SPREAD: Michigan football -10 (over/under hovers around 34-35, seems a little high don’t you think?)
TV: BTN 2:30 Central
That spread is ridiculous. Sure, UM should be favored, but not by that much. Yes, it’s been a great Michigan football season thus far. No shame in losing by a touchdown to Utah, who look like a top 5, top ten team in the country right now. But Northwestern has had their tough Pac 12 test too. They passed, with flying colors. NU was a ten point home underdog versus Stanford, yet they won handily.
Here’s my weekly segment for 1620 The Zone previewing the Northwestern vs Michigan football game and Illinois vs Iowa football game embedded below:
The undefeated Wildcats have the respect of the polls, now they deserve the respect of the bookmakers and the fans. Ryan Field looked close to 40% empty last Saturday, even though NU was undefeated ranked #16 in the country. Yes, the weather was gloomy, but it was warm enough and not raining.
You could have watched NU get Medieval on Minnesota.
With their stout defense, and stellar running game NU should never be double digits to anybody this season, and they should be selling out every home game. So let the comparisons to the magical season of 1995 begin.
“I have every chapter of that group in ’95,” Northwestern football Coach (and best defensive player on the ’95 team) Pat Fitzgerald said. “I’m not ready to even put this group in the same category. We have a lot of chapters left to write. But if they continue to progress, I think it has a chance to be much better. It’s much more athletic; it’s much deeper.”
“The challenge is: Will we continue to put weight on the bar, so to speak? As you go up in Big Ten play, it gets heavier and heavier and harder and harder. The potential is there to be something we’ll be very proud of.”
Fitzgerald recently told the media a truly fantastic war story from his playing days. You can check that out at this link.
Apologies for the game previews and predictions being so late this week. As it’s mid-season, we had to start our bowl projection aggregation articles for each teams (Here’s the link to Northwestern’s), and of course the Chicago Cubs in the postseason jumped the editorial pecking order. Next week, we’ll have the previews posted by Tuesday morning, Wednesday at the latest.
Prediction: Michigan football 17, Northwestern 13.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and sometimes writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. The website is also featured on News Now.
Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes to the Chicago Tribune RedEye. He also appears regularly on numerous talk shows all across the country. Catch him Tuesdays on KOZN 1620 The Zone.
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