All these years later, Gary Barnett admits he didn’t do all of his homework. At least not at first.
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Then Barnett visited Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It was an eye-opening trip, complete with a suit-adorned Barnett having to climb down an outside ladder, with the December winds whipping off Lake Michigan, because someone had turned off the elevator while his campus tour reached the stadium press box.
By the time he was on his way back to Colorado and his comfortable job at CU, where he had spent the previous eight years as an assistant under Bill McCartney, Barnett knew enough about Northwestern to know he had no intention of taking a job destined for failure.
A conversation with McCartney changed that outlook, and arguably changed the futures of the programs at Northwestern as well as CU. It’s a moment in time Barnett recently reflected upon as CU’s former head coach and longtime radio analyst prepares to call Saturday’s showdown between his two former teams as CU visits the Wildcats.
“I went in to Mac and said, ‘What do you think?’” Barnett told BuffZone. “When I went in for the interview, I realized it was a train wreck. I realized just how far behind they were on everything.
“(Mac) asked, ‘Are they going to offer you the job?’ I said they probably are, but I’m not taking that job. He said I had to take the job. Because they’re so hard to get. It’s a Big Ten job. And if things don’t work out, I can come back (to CU).”
Things did work out for Barnett at Northwestern. Amazingly so. And while he didn’t return to CU in the safety-blanket scenario described by McCartney, Barnett eventually did parlay his success in Evanston into a return to Boulder as the head coach at CU, where he led the Buffs to four Big 12 North Division titles.
Barnett ultimately changed his mind about Northwestern, and he inherited more than just a rebuilding project. Few power conference programs have ever reached the depths Northwestern football hit in the decades before Barnett’s arrival.
In 23 seasons beginning in 1972 through 1994 (encompassing Barnett’s first three seasons with the Wildcats), not only did Northwestern fail to post a winning season, but the Wildcats won as many as four games just three times. Barnett’s predecessor was his former teammate at Missouri, Francis Peay, and he went 13-51-2 in six seasons at Northwestern. Peay’s predecessor was Dennis Green, who went on to win 113 games as an NFL head coach. Green went 10-45 in five seasons at Northwestern.
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A premier academic university, Barnett recounted a time when Northwestern required academic admission before potential recruits could even visit the campus. One time, Barnett and his staff took 100 high school transcripts to the admissions office. Only 10 were approved to visit.
That backdrop is what made the run put together by Barnett and the Wildcats in 1995 so improbable. With a few recruiting classes in place, Northwestern finished 10-2 and advanced to the Rose Bowl for only the second time, and the first since the 1948 season.
Barnett returned to CU as the head coach in 1999. Regardless of his success at CU, Barnett was part of a staff that won a national title in Boulder less than a decade earlier. Reviving Northwestern from its abysmal depths was an unprecedented rebuild.
“It took me going through a season, maybe half a season, to really realize how much work we had to do,” said Barnett, who took part in the 30th anniversary celebration of Northwestern’s Rose Bowl team last year. “I hired a bunch of really great young guys to coach. At that point in time, we all could’ve gotten pretty upset and bitter and all that. But it took a direction where we knew what we could get in and what we can’t. We know where our parameters are. At that point, we decided we have to go nation-wide recruiting.”
CU’s visit arrives at a monumental moment for the Northwestern program. Saturday’s contest against CU marks the Wildcats’ final date in their temporary home at Martin Stadium. On Oct. 2 against Penn State, Northwestern will officially unveil its new Ryan Field, an $875 million state-of-the-art facility modeled after modern NFL stadiums.
Barnett recalled a pivotal November home date against Penn State in 1995 when the overflow crowd kept blocking the play clock. Northwestern football had never been in demand enough for crowd control to be an issue. The pending debut of Ryan Field in many ways is the culmination of the work Barnett’s crew turned in more than 30 years ago while putting Northwestern back on the college football map.
“This stadium, and it’s state-of-the-art, hopefully we get to go through it,” Barnett said. “After Michigan beat Ohio State and put us in the Rose Bowl (in 1995), I didn’t have any idea how big the Rose Bowl was. That’s how much I didn’t know about the Big Ten. We had flower roses on our front porch. We had cars driving around honking that whole night. I was overwhelmed by it.
“Careers are in steps and phases. That particular phase of my life and what I’d done so far, that was a pinnacle for sure.”
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