Everything from the House settlement to the wide receiver room.
There are those out there who lambaste the Northwestern football team for the limited information available heading into the summer. I agree with many of these grievances.
For one, I’d love a traditional spring football game. I was raised an LSU fan, and whenever I’d ask my dad what he thought about the Tigers’ latest basketball recruiting class, or the national championship chances for Paul Mainieri and LSU baseball, he’d first remind me that there are only two sports that matter in the bayou: football and spring football. Spring football at Northwestern probably slots in around the mid-teens.
Students from NU’s Big Ten peers get up for these games every spring, and with the gem of the stadium by the lake, the lack of a spring game feels like a major missed opportunity. Make it an event! Let’s get some tailgates in the frat quad, a Lake The Posts-style party boat on the water and an appearance from the marching band. Open spring practice was great, but 9:30 am warmups come with a major sacrifice in the pageantry department. That event is marketed to Northwestern sickos and boosters — no student who is a casual fan is spending their Saturday morning watching 30-minutes of 11-on-11 action spliced between offensive line drills.
If Northwestern decides to keep the lakefront structure in some form after the new Ryan Field is completed, I suggest a return of some Purple vs. White action at Martin Stadium on the first weekend over 70 degrees. Michigan has run a Blue vs. Maize game for as long as anyone can remember, and if Connor Stallions’ team isn’t worried about revealing state secrets with extended 11-on-11 action in April, Northwestern shouldn’t be either.
To Savannah Wood, the newly hired Chief Communications and Branding Officer for Northwestern Athletics, it’s not that hard. I will put my Inside NU editor-in-chief title on the line with a guarantee that students would show up to a 1pm kickoff on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in April. Add in some $5 hot dogs and sandwich platters from D&D’s, and I bet those West stands are packed by kickoff.
That’s all to say that there are ample questions surrounding Northwestern football heading into the summer. Most (maybe all) wouldn’t be answered by a spring game, but it’d give Northwestern fans a little more to chew on in the dog days before August 31.
Back to the product on the field. Here are a few of the biggest questions that we will be monitoring throughout the summer:
Who will be the WR2?
My favorite stat of the summer is that South Dakota State transfer wide receiver Griffin Wilde had more receiving yards against FBS competition in 2024 than the rest of Northwestern’s wide receiver room, despite playing 14 of his 15 games against schools from the FCS.
Braun told reporters that he did not view wide receiver as a position of need in the spring, even after Calvin Johnson II entered the portal in early April. Johnson, who had 11 catches for 121 yards as a junior in 2024, would have been Northwestern’s leading returning receiver — though he’d still fall behind Wilde in terms of yards against FBS competition.
Wilde will be the unequivocal WR1, but the question here is who will take the reps behind him. Preston Stone spread the ball around like 2006 Steve Nash as the starting quarterback at SMU in 2023. Seven different receivers caught over 20 balls from the Dallas-based gunslinger, and the leading Mustang wideout, Jake Bailey, caught just 42 passes for 528 yards. To give some context, Stone’s 3,197 passing yards were good for fourth in the American Athletic Conference; Bailey’s 528 number was good for 17th.
Frank Covey IV is probably the leading candidate to take on the WR2 mantle. He amassed 98 yards in just five games last season as a redshirt freshman and was on the way to breaking the first-year record for receiving yards in a game against Purdue before suffering a season-ending injury in the second quarter.
Sophomores Hayden Eligon II and Ricky Ahumaraeze will give Covey a run for his money. Eligon was one of just two Wildcat freshmen who didn’t redshirt in 2024, and while he caught just four balls for 83 yards, his two circus catches against the Illinis were evidence enough that there is a role for him on the 2025 roster. Ahumaraeze is 6’4 and spent his spring turning heads on the Northwestern coaching staff.
What will be the roles of the transfers on defense?
At least four of Braun’s eight transfers on offense will be plug-and-play starters against Tulane, but that confidence doesn’t translate to the four guys brought in on the other side of the ball.
Purdue transfer Yanni Karlaftis has the surest pathway to the first 11 at the WILL linebacker slot, boasting a resume that includes 112 tackles in 24 games with the Boilermakers over the past two seasons, but he will find fierce competition from Iowa State transfer Jack Sadowsky V and junior Brayden Brus.
I projected Utah State transfer Miguel Jackson to start the season on the second unit of the Northwestern defensive tackle group behind team captain Carmine Bastone. Yet Bastone, who has made 15 starts on the line since 2024, battled injury throughout last year’s campaign, and there could be a window for Jackson to compete for that fourth slot on the line.
In the secondary, Jacksonville State transfer Fred Davis II will likely spend his summer locked in a battle with Ore Adeyi for the second starting spot at corner. Michigan State transfer Dillon Tatum has a clearer path to the starting lineup given the lack of proven options behind him, but the redshirt junior did miss most of 2024 with a lower body injury. I could see either Garner Wallace or Robert Fitzgerald giving Tatum a run at strong safety.
How will Zach Lujan use his tight ends?
Tight ends Thomas Gordon and Marshall Lang were Northwestern’s third and sixth leading receivers respectively in 2024. The two seniors combined for a total of 367 yards last season, which is by no means a staggering total, but one that Northwestern will have to find a way to replace. Northwestern has just one tight end on its roster who had a catch in 2024 in Hunter Welcing. New Mexico State transfer Alex Lines put up some solid numbers at the JUCO level in 2023 but didn’t record a grab for the Aggies last Fall.
It should be an open competition between Welcing, Lines, Camp Magee and Chris Petrucci for first team reps against Tulane. Lines is probably the betting favorite, but I wouldn’t take him at anything lower than +300 (if you find betting odds for the Northwestern starting tight end, please send them to me).
How will the House settlement impact roster limits and NIL?
I buried the lede here a little bit putting this question last. The Wildcat athletic department will have to grapple with questions surrounding the ramifications of the House v. NCAA settlement for the foreseeable future.
The first question in the football world is roster limits. The final agreement included provisions to protect “Designated Student-Athletes” (DSAs) who either were cut or would have been cut from a roster due to the settlement. Northwestern football has an estimated 116 players on its roster as of publication, though any DSAs would not count against the cap.
The NCAA sent a list of guidelines to the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and Pac 12 on June 13 designed to help answer key questions regarding the settlement, including roster limits. That document defined a DSA as “an individual who a member institution attests was or would have been removed from the institution’s 2025-26 roster due to the implementation of roster limits.” Schools that opt-in will have to “prepare and submit, in good faith, a list of all Designated Student-Athletes by July 6, 2025,” and as long as an athlete is on that list, they will not count against the roster-cap for the “duration of their athletics career.”
For Northwestern, that means we can say with confidence that Braun will NOT have to cut 11 players by the Tulane game as long as he lists them as DSAs by July 6.
NIL is a little less clear, and I will for sure be writing more about the new landscape throughout the summer. From what I understand as of now, there is still a major role to be played by the Northwestern “TrueNU” collective even in the revenue sharing world. Michael W. Goldman at the law firm Keating Muething & Klekamp specializing in sports business, put together a graphic that does a pretty good job of explaining the future roles of collectives.
Keating Muething & Klekamp Law
That last graphic is the key one here; schools can still source NIL deals through their collectives as long as the “Third-Party Sponsor” is supplying the money. The new Deloitte clearinghouse will be monitoring these transactions to make sure that the deal matches up with the market value for service provided.
For example, Deloitte would likely flag Northwestern if the Ryan family paid Preston Stone $200,000 for a 30-minute public appearance. Stone is phenomenal, but those are Travis Scott numbers (for the uninitiated, think Eminem 20 years ago). Deloitte would be more likely to approve a $200,000 contract to make 10 hour-long public appearances that include, say, allotted time for autograph signing and pictures.
To put it simply, it looks like there will still be ways for Northwestern to funnel money to its top guys outside of the $20.5 million cap, but TrueNU Executive Director Jacob Schmidt and his team would have to do a better job proving that deals sourced by the Northwestern collective pay Wildcat student-athletes a reasonable amount for their services.