The Burning Rose Bush : No. 5 Northwestern Might Not Reach the Promised Land of Pasadena, but Gary Barnett Has Taken the Mild Out of the Wildcats

Northwestern coaches and players were beginning an 11-day preseason training camp at the University of Wisconsin Parkside in Kenosha, Wis., when down the aisle walked Moses.

The bearded one shuffled along in sack cloth and sandals, his staff preceding each step, and before raising his arms to the heavens, he slapped a tape of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes” into a boom box.

“You have been lost in the desert for 40 years, and it is time to get out and find the promised land,” said Moses, otherwise known as Steve Musseau, 72, former football coach at Mater Dei High, Orange Coast College and the University of Idaho who now presents seminars on self-esteem.

Moses parted the Red Sea. Musseau’s task was going to be much tougher--training Northwestern football players to visualize victory.

“I had them sing along with Sinatra,” Musseau said. “At first, they were reluctant.”

Now, three months later, the players open and close each Thursday practice crooning “High Hopes” together.

“It was all about faith,” Musseau said. “They had to believe in themselves. They had to believe as a team. They had to believe it could happen with no history to indicate otherwise.”

Now, three months later, the sign still adorns the locker room door: “Believe without evidence.”

“We gave them some exercises on visualization and goal-setting,” said Musseau, who lives near Seattle. “They wanted six wins--enough wins to go to a bowl game--but they also had a main goal, a goal to go to the Rose Bowl.”

Now, three months later, Northwestern has won eight games, and for only the second time in the 113 years they have been playing football, the Wildcats are expected to go to a bowl game.

One slip by Ohio State, and Northwestern could be playing in the Rose Bowl--Holy Moses!--the greatest story to be told in college football this season.

“I knew they were going to beat Notre Dame to open the season,” said Musseau, who joined the team on the sidelines for the game. “I knew it, just knew it. And when they did, I stayed behind on the field. I stayed for more than a half-hour on the field to bask in all the glory.”

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These are Coach Gary Barnett’s chosen people. They have been recruited on the premise that they will be the ones remembered forever for turning around Northwestern’s football program.

“That’s what he told us,” said junior linebacker Pat Fitzgerald, the Big Ten’s leading tackler. “But the first couple of years here, I’d go to class and maybe one or two people would know I was a football player. No one would notice if I missed a class. Now you skip a class and the professors are calling: ‘We missed you. Where were you?’

“When Coach Barnett recruited us, we were all nobodies, no blue-chip All-Americans, no flashy players. But now people ask, ‘How did Penn State let you go? Why didn’t Notre Dame sign you?’ Everything has changed, and that’s Coach Barnett. That’s the difference.”

This is Gary Barnett’s miracle, beginning with the imagination-defying declaration five years ago--”Expect Victory”--and continuing with relentless recruiting, caps and sweat shirts adorned with hokey sayings and a contemptuous disregard for history.

“It’s hard to talk to Coach Barnett about Northwestern football without coming away thinking one of two things,” said Steve Schnur, one of Barnett’s first recruits and the team’s starting quarterback. “Either the guy is completely crazy, or he’s pretty damned determined. I chose No. 2; that’s why I am here.”

That still does not begin to explain college football’s most dramatic renaissance. This is Northwestern: Expect Overwhelming Defeat. The facts are staggering:

--The Wildcats have not had a winning season since 1971, have not won more than four games in a season since 1971.

--Since 1964, the team has had a 75-252-5 record.

--Coach Ara Parseghian went 0-9 here in 1957, with his team scoring 57 points.

--Coach Rick Venturi left after compiling a three-year record of 1-31-1.

--Coach Dennis Green has taken the Minnesota Vikings to the NFL playoffs. At Northwestern he won 10 of the 55 games he coached.

--Coach Lou Saban lasted a year. His team finished 0-8-1.

--The 1981 Wildcats were outscored, 505-82.

--Northwestern lost 34 consecutive games before thrashing Northern Illinois in 1982.

“After that game, the students tore down the goal posts, carried them down the street and threw them into Lake Michigan,” said Bill Jarvis, equipment manager for the last 20 years. “That win was a relief. This is a celebration.”

This is something extraordinary. No longer do the students pelt their marching band with marshmallows to remain entertained on game day. No longer do they chant at opponents:

That’s all right ,

That’s OK,

You’re going to work

For us some day.

“There was always a sense of pride about going to school here,” kicker Sam Valenzisi said. “But football is the last piece of the puzzle. Now you have the alums pulling out their old sweat shirts and wearing them with pride.”

Purple everywhere. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Northwestern No. 13 academically in the nation. This week’s Sports Illustrated cover features the No. 5 football team in the country.

“The former president of the school was being introduced the other day and they were talking about all his academic achievements,” Barnett said. “So when he gets to the microphone, he says, ‘See, we weren’t always a football school.’

“Yeah, it probably is a great story what’s going on here, and when the last game is over I will probably be able to enjoy it. But not now. It’s the way you live your life; it’s the secret to life. It’s the movie, ‘City Slickers’ when Curly holds his finger up.”

Curly , the aging cowboy played by Jack Palance, holds up his index finger and tells Mitch (Billy Crystal), the dude cowhand, “You know what the secret of life is? This. One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean . . . “

Barnett’s voice rose with emotion. “That was a defining moment for me,” he said. “When he did that, yeah, it was during a dumb movie, but I almost came out of my chair because he was absolutely right: You do just one thing in life and you do it well. “

Local columnists have already speculated that Barnett will move on to coach Michigan after this season, but Barnett’s holding up that one finger again.

“I don’t have career aspirations,” he said. “If you have career aspirations, then I don’t think you do enough of the things that it takes for what you want to be right there.”

But just who is this football coach who figured out how to win at Northwestern?

“What you see is what you get with Coach Barnett,” Fitzgerald said. “He does what he says, and he has made believers out of every one of us.”

Barnett, 49, worked for 11 years as a high school coach at Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and two more years at Ft. Lewis College before a disagreement with the school’s president prompted him to move on as an assistant coach at Colorado under Bill McCartney.

With each stop, however, the program improved. During Barnett’s first year on the job, Colorado went 1-10, a fact that would later stand out as a resume highlight for the head hunter agency that identified him as Northwestern’s savior.

“When I got here, I saw how these kids got barraged by negative stuff,” Barnett said. “That’s why we started taking these kids to Kenosha before the season. We could plant the seeds that we wanted planted, fertilize and bring it along before they had to come back on campus.

“Once on campus the student newspaper starts writing about how many losses they are going to have. The president of the university would make crummy comments about the football team at freshman orientation.”

But while loaded with new ideas and expectations, Barnett was left with players better able to handle double majors in political science and economics than Penn State’s rushing attack.

Northwestern went 3-8 in Barnett’s first season, 2-1 to open the 1993 season before falling to 2-9, and then 3-3-1 last year before finishing 3-7-1. Two years ago, the Wildcats went 0-8 against Big Ten foes.

“It felt like I had a pencil stabbed in my eye and with each loss, someone came along and jabbed that pencil a little deeper,” Barnett said. “It just takes time to get people to change, and if they don’t, you change the people and get new ones.”

This season Barnett had his people in place, and they opened with a stunning victory over Notre Dame.

A week later, still giddy, they took a 21-point lead into the fourth quarter at home against Miami of Ohio--and lost, 30-28. So nothing had changed. As everyone knows, youngsters attend Northwestern primarily to get an education, not to play football.

“You got to be careful there,” Barnett said. “If you recruit those kind of kids, that’s all you are ever going to play with. If there is one thing we have done here, it’s recruiting players that are athletes first and students also.

“Football has to be the most important thing to them. Now academically, the community doesn’t like to hear that, but as long as they can do the work and excel at both . . . it’s OK to come here for music and play in the band and pursue that. It’s got to be OK for football too.”

The pursuit of quality football players has not damaged Northwestern’s reputation as an academic fortress. The grade-point average for incoming Northwestern football players this year was 3.21, ranking them No. 1 in the Big Ten. Their No. 5 standing in the football polls, however, has drawn more attention.

“The kids weren’t getting any strokes here for their athletic accomplishments,” Barnett said. “All their strokes were in academics, so that’s where they spent their time and gave their heart. Now they are getting strokes for athletics and that’s where they are giving their heart.”

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Nebraska, Ohio State, Florida, Tennessee, Northwestern.

“Ask people everywhere what is wrong with this picture and everybody gets the answer right,” Schnur said.

And yet, they still wouldn’t understand the full magnitude of this dramatic overnight transformation:

--Northwestern, with the smallest student body, 7,400, in the Big Ten, is the only conference school that does not have an indoor practice facility.

--Students here can respond to a biomedical engineering query, but ask them about Northwestern’s football traditions and they are stumped.

--One day before the Wildcats were set to begin practicing for this season, their top recruit--a redshirt freshman quarterback who was competing to start--quit because he was tired of playing football.

--A month before training camp was to start, a talented sophomore defensive back was accidentally shot to death.

--After last season, Darnell Autry, the team’s starting running back, demanded to be released from his scholarship so he could return home to Arizona to play for Arizona State.

--Valenzisi, still the NCAA’s leader in field goals per game this season, leaped into the air to celebrate a successful kickoff against Wisconsin and blew out his knee, ending his season.

“At my first coaches’ meeting, I said we’ve just got to find a way to win six games,” Barnett said. “We had so many things go wrong at first. You are overwhelmed, but you just gotta believe and keep moving on. I learned that from Mac [McCartney]. He’d come in every day and something would go wrong with the administration and he’d say, ‘They can’t make this place too tough for me.’ ”

Barnett refused to release Autry from his scholarship, and so the theater major stayed in school and has now run for more than 100 yards in 10 consecutive games.

Lloyd Abramson, the nation’s second-rated prep quarterback from the state of Michigan, is home and can now watch his former team on TV most any week.

The death of Marcel Price brought the Wildcats closer together, and to this day they will tell you that when Notre Dame quarterback Ron Powlus went down untouched near the goal line, it was because he was tackled by Price.

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Northwestern defeated Cal in the 1949 Rose Bowl, 20-14, and, except for being ranked No. 1 for one week in 1962, has been lost ever since.

But when Barnett arrived, he ordered a Tournament of Roses flag for the football building and put a fabric rose on his desk as a constant reminder of where his team was headed. It will be a problem, but Northwestern will arrange its schedule around that of the Chicago Bears to have an indoor practice facility to prepare for a bowl game at season’s end.

“I hope it wasn’t prophetic,” Musseau said, aware of the irony in his preseason performance before the team. “Yes, I know, Moses didn’t get to the promised land. Joshua brought them in. Moses got them right to the edge.”

Right on the edge is where Northwestern sits. The loss to Miami of Ohio will be the deciding tiebreaker if both Northwestern and Ohio State go undefeated in Big Ten play. Instead of the Rose Bowl, the Wildcats, who play host to Iowa on Saturday, might be headed to the Citrus Bowl.

“They’re going to a bowl game, and who thought they would do that?” Musseau said. “They have already gone beyond what anyone thought they could do. They beat Notre Dame, Michigan and Penn State. How many people out there just feel good because of what is happening here?”