NU offense may truly be wild

If Northwestern's skill players thought new offensive coordinator Mick McCall was going to come in and tell them what passing routes to run, they were horribly mistaken.

While McCall authored the Wildcats' revamped playbook and installed the no-huddle attack that has the ability to start the next play within 10-11 seconds of the previous whistle, he won't be telling his receivers to, say, run exactly 10 yards downfield and curl.

"I teach concepts," McCall said. "And guys are going to have to learn to play everything."

What does that mean, exactly, as Northwestern gears up for its first practice on Aug. 4?

"He's very simple," said senior receiver Eric Peterman, who caught a team-high 66 passes last year. "He loves to throw the ball. He loves to put people in different positions.

"When he draws a play up, he'll put dots at each position (to represent the eligible receivers). You could be here, here or here. You have to know the whole concept of the route.

"That's what his whole system's based on. There's one word and that means the entire play. It's different from what we had last year, when we'd have '497 Orange Z Streak' or whatever and that tells every single person what to do."

McCall's insistence on teaching concepts - as opposed to rote memorization of routes - is one of the things that sold head coach Pat Fitzgerald during his coordinator search in January.

Fitzgerald loves the idea of throwing any conceivable set of skill players on the field at any time - especially considering the Wildcats retain starting quarterback C.J. Bacher, their top two rushers and five of their top six receivers.

"That kind of flexibility is a coach's dream," Fitzgerald said.

McCall, 51, has coached all over the map since spending the summer of 1980 with the Detroit Lions as a free-agent running back.

Immediately upon arrival from Bowling Green, McCall spent his first spring in Evanston trying to weld some of the elements of Northwestern's old spread offense with his concepts.

"He came in and I sat down with him and we went over the stuff that we did last year," Peterman said. "And he would look at something on film and say, 'You're running this route, but what about if you did this? Just kind of touch it up like this?'

"And I'd be like, 'Oh, that's a great idea.'

" 'And on this one, you see the defense rolling like this, what if you just did this?' And I'm like, 'Wow, I never would have thought of that.' He kind of blew my mind right away."