A whole lot is going on with Northwestern football these days. Chip Kelly is the Wildcats’ new offensive coordinator. Former Michigan State and Oregon State quarterback Aidan Chiles is the Wildcats’ new projected starting quarterback. Ryan Field, Northwestern’s incredible new football stadium, is set to make its long-awaited debut on October 2 against Penn State. Did you also know that head football coach David Braun is about to begin his fourth season with Northwestern and that the Wildcats have gone bowling in two of the last three seasons?
As I said, a whole lot is going on with Northwestern football these days.
The Wildcats’ betting win total comes in at 5.5, per FanDuel, which would certainly be a disappointment for the 2023 Big Ten Coach of the Year’s fourth season in Evanston. If they win less than six games this season, it would continue the good-year-then-bad-year trend across Braun’s four seasons at Northwestern. The schedule is pretty kind to the Wildcats, though, as they should sweep their three non-conference games and all the games where they’ll likely be heavy underdogs are on the road, with those being Indiana, Oregon, and Ohio State. They get several coin-flip games at home, their new home at Ryan Field, against in-state rival Illinois, against Penn State, against Rutgers, and against Iowa.
Wake Forest Won Nine Games Last Year
The North Dakota State Bison and the Sacramento State Hornets will play in the FBS this fall. With their arrival, the FBS now has 138 teams to account for this upcoming season. The ethos of this newsletter is that it is for sports fans who want to know a little about a lot. With so many teams, and s…
If Northwestern accomplishes more than just going bowling for the third time in four seasons, it’s because the new combination of Kelly & Chiles clicks. For Northwestern to earn another trip to a bowl game this fall, Braun’s defense has to be around what it’s been in 2025 and 2023, a middle-of-the-pack unit in the Big Ten. We haven’t seen Northwestern in the top-3 in the conference in defensive yards per play allowed since 2020, when they went 7-2, but that was three years before Braun’s arrival in Evanston. The Wildcats’ defense has been mostly fine under Braun’s stewardship. It’s the offense, where his teams have finished 12th, 18th, and 12th, respectively, in yards per play in the conference. The Kelly and Chiles combination really needs to jumpstart this unit.
For Kelly, it’s been an odd last two years professionally, filled with extreme highs and extreme lows. The last time he was an offensive coordinator for a collegiate program, he won a national championship with the Buckeyes. The veteran elite offensive mind parlayed that success into a return to the NFL, only to be fired by the Las Vegas Raiders before he even completed his first season as the team’s offensive coordinator. It was a gamble that ultimately did not pay off for Kelly. However, the last offense we saw Kelly call at the collegiate level finished No. 1 in yards per play. They were No. 4 in all of the FBS in 10-plus yard plays. The offense was second in third-down conversion rate in all of the FBS. It was a well-oiled machine across the board with a talented, first-year transfer quarterback under center in Will Howard.
Enter Chiles, another talented, first-year transfer quarterback under center for Kelly’s first offense at Northwestern. Chiles followed his head coach, Jonathan Smith, from Corvallis to East Lansing. It was a rocky two years for the former four-star quarterback with the Spartans, but he showed some improvement last season, particularly with the frequency of his turnovers through the air. In nine games, but only eight starts, he cut down his interceptions to three. It was eleven the season prior. He also ran for six scores in those nine games, which could be huge for the Wildcats, particularly with new quarterbacks coach Jerry Neuheisel in the fold. The latter jump-started a UCLA Bruins offense when he took over after a brutal first third of the 2025 season, highlighted by their upset win over Penn State. UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava had three games in which he carried the ball more than ten times from the win over the Nittany Lions onward. For Neuheisel and Kelly, utilizing Chiles’ legs in the run game and limiting his fumbles, too, will be key to unlocking the talented quarterback’s full potential.
If all goes right for Northwestern this fall, particularly the Kelly, Chiles, and even Neuheisel additions click, the middle-to-upper-tier of the Big Ten could get interesting. Iowa and Illinois have new quarterbacks. Who really ever knows with USC and Nebraska? Minnesota could have a 2027 top-5 pick quarterback under center. Penn State and Michigan hired longtime Big 12 head coaches who have never faced the kind of win-big pressure they’ll now face in Happy Valley and Ann Arbor.
Braun and Northwestern have just been quietly hanging around in the Big Ten. This offseason, though, they got a lot bolder with Kelly, Neuheisel, and Chiles. It reminds me a bit of when Lincoln Riley fired longtime defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and hired D’Anton Lynn as his new DC. You still weren’t sure of the ceiling, but you felt a whole lot better about the floor. I don’t know if this will all work out for Braun and the ‘Cats this fall, but I appreciate the big swing with Kelly in particular. If it doesn’t work, it’s hard to get too upset if you’re a Northwestern fan. There are a lot of worthwhile gambles on this Northwestern team and this staff for this upcoming season. No question, though, that Year 4 will be hardest to project thus far for Braun at Northwestern.