Can Northwestern Be 'Everybody's Second Favorite Big Ten Team?'

When Chris Collins was introduced as the new Northwestern basketball coach Tuesday, it wasn't surprising one of the first questions he had to tackle was his perception of Welsh-Ryan Arena.

Collins was upbeat in his response, glowingly remembering last time he played in the gym during the Illinois high school playoffs in the early '90s. He recalled the arena was packed and loud, then added that if Northwestern is winning, the Wildcats will have a home court advantage, despite Welsh-Ryan's lack of amenities.

“I know there has been a lot of talk about what we don’t have and what we need and all that stuff," Collins said. "My goal for Welsh-Ryan is, let’s make this a heck of a home court advantage. I want to get on campus and I want to get the students excited. Let’s see what it is like if you have 8,000-plus people going crazy for Northwestern basketball.”

With that attitude, Collins is going to try and replicate the success that his new counterpart in football, Pat Fitzgerald, has achieved by complying with the school's stringent academic requirements and bringing respectability to the program. How that will be done with the facilities in place while trying to increase attendance is the challenge for all NU officials.

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Less than 20 years ago, "NU athletic success" was a contradiction in terms. A 34-game football losing streak that lasted from 1979 – 1982 spotlighted athletic futility. There was even talk that NU should abandon big time athletics. All that changed with the Rose Bowl berth following the 1995 season. Ever since then, the football team has established a solid presence on fall Saturdays, capped off with the Gator Bowl victory in January that stopped a bowl game futility streak extending back to 1949. The NU women’s lacrosse team has won NCAA championships seven times in the last eight seasons. Now the hope is that Collins will be able to get the team their first ever NCAA Tournament bid.

The triumphs on the field have led to success both in attendance and finances. NU Athletic Director Jim Phillips notes that there have been major season ticket sales increases in both football and men's basketball, plus a spike in corporate sponsorships. Therefore the athletic department is now looking to figuratively and literally build on that success starting with the almost omnipresent “b” word in today’s business parlance.

“The branding of Chicago’s Big Ten team is a very good brand,” NU President Morton Schapiro said of the program’s marketing effort.

Schapiro, who took the reins in Evanston in 2009, says he wants Northwestern's appeal to extend around the Chicago area.  

“We have a lot of Big Ten alums in the Chicago area,” he said. “We want the Ohio State alums to say when Ohio State is playing, 'We are going to be wearing red, but if Northwestern is playing Michigan, we are going to root for the local team and we will wear purple.' We have been making great inroads into that market. We want to become everybody’s second favorite Big Ten team if they went to one of the other (schools).”

One aspect of that reaching out to Chicago fans will be using Wrigley Field. Looking to continue the interest that occurred in 2010 when NU hosted Illinois at Wrigley, the Evanston school will make the Cubs ballpark a secondary home for the next few years. First up will be a baseball game when NU hosts Michigan later this month, then there is women’s lacrosse scheduled for 2014. In what will likely draw the most interest, at least five NU football games will be played at Wrigley Field (one per season) in Novembers over the next few years. (All sides are looking to avoid a repeat of the 2010 fiasco when the field was deemed too small to play and both teams were forced to go in one direction.) Soccer and field hockey could possibly played there as well. Look for a lot of Cubs signage in Evanston and plenty of purple signs in the city as both organizations try to bring in each other’s fans.   

“You have to be innovative in today’s world,” Phillips noted. “This is a changing marketplace.”

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Then there is the traditional meaning of the word “build.” The one with bricks and mortar attached.

Last year NU announced a campaign to build a $220 million complex on the campus for all student athletes. Schapiro and Phillips are now saying that approximately one third of the money has been raised for the construction of the building on the northern part of the campus near the lakefront. Optimism abounds that ground can be broken in 2014.

As for giving Welsh-Ryan Arena or Ryan Field a facelift, neither Schapiro nor Phillips rule out the possibility, but don’t look for it to occur anytime soon.

“It’s not going to happen until we get the lakefront facility up and running,” Phillips said.

Schapiro says he was never concerned that the perception of Welsh-Ryan would be a roadblock in terms of finding a new coach.

“It never hindered anything in football and we have a great program that is getting better and better," Schapiro said. "We were able to raise a lot of money in a short period of time. We have a lot of confidence that we can do the same thing in basketball.”

Still, as much progress as NU has made in the last generation, both on the field and off, Evanston is still hardly a hotbed for college sports. In 2012, the football team came close only twice to drawing capacity crowds, and that was due to their conference opponents, Iowa and Nebraska, which have substantial crowds that follow them. The pattern was similar in hoops as teams with huge followings such as Indiana and Illinois were the only times Welsh-Ryan drew capacity crowds.

Phillips is cognizant of that reality. “We’ll always be the tiny undergraduate school in the Big Ten and we will always have 8,000 students," he said.

Another main reason for the attendance problems at least for football is the fact that the team's first games in September are played before students to return to campus, due to NU being on the quarter system. “We’re never going to benefit from the students missing three or four games,” Phillips acknowledged. “We’re always going to play football in late August and early September and that is never going to change.”

Those challenges aside, no one can deny the NU athletic department is light years ahead of where it was a generation ago. That came from a realization of the way the world works at the top of the NU hierarchy, without an abandonment of principle, according to the president.

“We do great medical breakthroughs and they make the world a better place but in terms of shining the spotlight on all the excellence at Northwestern, nothing does it like athletics,” Schapiro said. “But you have to do it the Northwestern way. We don’t feel like we need to make certain concessions in athletics either to get them in or to get them out.”