[NU Sports] Persa/Colter/4th quarter

[Alan Abrahamson]

Ok, I'm going to disagree with all of you who say we should have left Dan
in.

This is no knock on Dan. He is, in a word, great. I admire the hell out of
what he has accomplished at Northwestern.

This is my opinion:

For long stretches of the game, our offensive line was awful. It was clear
when Dan was in the game that we were passing. A&M was teeing off on him.

Sitting in the stands in the third quarter -- the false-start penalties on
our OL and the repetitive sacks were just brutal.

The change in pace that got us going was when we put Kain behind center.
That's when we regained our offensive rhythm. Yes, we put Dan in for some
critical third downs. But putting Kain in for some runs gained us some
yards and got us going.

As for the defense and the critical third-down stops that we needed late in
the fourth quarter -- because if we had gotten them I'm absolutely certain
we would have come back and scored again -- sigh. As Brad Wilson says, we
are s-o-o-o close.

That's what Kain Colter said, too. In today's Chicago Tribune.

But as Teddy Greenstein noted in the last line of his story -- which in
journalese is called a kicker -- close doesn't count.

All of us are tired of moral victories. Nobody knows moral victory like a
Northwestern football fan. But that's the way this season ended. The good
news, really, is that we are not that far away from being very, very good.