Last game: 45-42 loss to Kansas after giving up a game-winning touchdown with nine seconds left.
Record: 1-1
Returning starters: Eight on offense, three on defense.
Keep your eye on: Quarterback Chandler Harnish – 39-52, 510 yards, seven touchdowns.
Ranking: Unranked.
Despite having a former Wisconsin defensive coordinator as head coach in Dave Doeren, Northern Illinois is light on defense and heavy on offense.
The Huskies have scored 49 and 42 points in their two games so far this season, gaining an average of 485.5 yards per game along the way.
The offense is led by Chandler Harnish, a fifth-year senior quarterback who, in addition to passing, can run the ball effectively. In two games this season, Harnish has ditched the pocket for 169 yards and four touchdowns, averaging 7.7 yards a carry, tops on the team.
As a redshirt sophomore in 2009, Harnish engineered a late-game comeback in Camp Randall Stadium versus the Badgers, only to fall short 28-20. In that game – against a defensive coordinator Harnish is now calling head coach – he completed 15 of 24 attempts for 174 yards.
Senior Jasmin Hopkins leads the team with 185 yards this season on just 27 attempts, good for an average of 6.9 yards a carry.
The Huskies are 17th in the nation in scoring, but, as seen last week in a shootout versus Kansas, they need all the scoring they can get due to their defense.
Northern Illinois concedes 471.5 yards per game. The passing defense has been decent (193.5 yards per game) but Wisconsin is a bad team to go up against when the defense is allowing 278 rushing yards per game.
What Northern Illinois might be able to gain some kind of edge on is with Doeren’s knowledge of the Wisconsin program, where he coached for five seasons and recruited some of the Badgers’ best players.
That’s all speculation at this point, however. Wisconsin will surely attempt to mask or avoid using anything that Doeren would be expected to recognize.
