PART TWO: Ranking the top Northwestern football teams of all-time
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Back at the start of the decade in 2020, the InsideNU community came together to rank the program’s greatest teams. With a new era proclaimed, a $35 million donation and a stadium near completion, along with the 24 days that remain before the 2026 season, we figure there is no better time than now to do it again.
This is part two of a three-part series, with four teams in each batch. Each article will have general write-ups for the teams involved to help aid your decisions, and the results of each poll across our social media pages will determine the seeding for our final bracket.
We began with the teams that predated The Lakefill in 1903, 1930, 1931 and 1936.
Now, we look at four squads that are defined by their bowl breakthroughs: 1948, 1995, 1996 and 2012.
1948: Northwestern’s Only Rose Bowl Victory
Record: 8-2 (5-1 Big Ten) | Rose Bowl Champion
Final AP Ranking: No. 7 | Head Coach: Bob Voigts
Northwestern finished the regular season 8-2, which netted them a second place finish in the Big Nine (the Big Ten’s name at the time) behind an undefeated Michigan team. Back then, the conference had a no-repeat rule for the Rose Bowl and thus, Michigan was barred from returning to the Golden State after winning it the season before, opening the door for the 1948 Wildcats to hop on over to Pasadena.
The invitation for the school to make its Rose Bowl debut prompted the school to cancel classes in celebration, with one witness comparing the reaction to “having Halley’s Comet collide with something.”
When that fateful New Years’ Day came, Northwestern would triumph over the No. 4 California Golden Bears by a modest 20-14 final score. Halfback Frank Aschenbrenner was named the Rose Bowl Player of the Game, although he only received that recognition retroactively when the award was created in 1953. All-American tackle Alex Sarkisian, grandfather of current Northwestern Athletics general manager Christian Sarkisian, served as team captain and was later inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
The deciding moment of the game became infamously known as the “phantom touchdown,” when on a one-yard rush, Northwestern’s Art Murakowski was ruled to have crossed the goal line before a fumble and a Golden Bears recovery, a call both California’s players and the Los Angeles Times’ next-day front page vehemently disputed. Field judge Jay Berwanger — who happened to be the first-ever Heisman Trophy recipient back in his playing days — upheld the call.
That seems like the type of judgement that you shouldn’t question.
The touchdown proved to be the difference in the final score, and as much as the LA crowd refused to acknowledge it, there is no true photograph or film from the game that definitively proves that Murakowski was not across the plane before losing possession.
Head coach Bob Voigts was only 33 years old at the time and had been an All-American himself at Northwestern a decade earlier under opposing coach Pappy Waldorf, who left the ’Cats after their two-win 1946 season to lead the charge at Cal. NU honored the 50th anniversary of the team in 1999 with 40 surviving members on the field.
This remains Northwestern’s only Rose Bowl victory to this day, and was the only Wildcat bowl victory for the next 64 years. Even with the emotional bowl wins of the 21st century purple and white, the 1948 trophy stands alone as most relevant piece of bowl silverware ever won by an NU football team.
Big happening: Northwestern’s entire Rose Bowl legacy, one appearance won, one appearance lost, rests on a disputed fumble from January 1, 1949. Despite the oldest of the Golden Bears’ faithful still not giving it up, it is probably safe to say that the proverbial statute of limitations is long over.
1995: THE Cinderella Season
Record: 10-2 (8-0 Big Ten) | Big Ten Champion, Rose Bowl runner-up
Final Rankings: No. 7 (Coaches) / No. 8 (AP) | Head Coach: Gary Barnett
The defining season in modern program history, and the one every subsequent great Northwestern team gets measured against.
The context makes it remarkable: Barnett went 8-24-1 in his first three years, and the 1994 team finished just 3-7-1. At any other power conference school, that mark would be completely unacceptable, but NU’s administration maintained such low expectations for the football program that Barnett’s job was nowhere near jeopardization. His foundation-up rebuilding strategy required immense leeway and patience anyway.
Ironically, the sole tie during that 1994 season was a direct result of another California-related disputed fumble call, when the officiating crew awarded Stanford’s Mike Mitchell a touchdown they later admitted he did not score.
That is obviously not the big story.
With practically no warning, the 1995 Northwestern Wildcats went 10-2 overall and a perfect 8-0 in conference play. They won the the Big Ten outright for the first (and only) time since that 1930 season from part one. A whole 47 years after the aforementioned 1948-49 victory, they clinched the school’s second Rose Bowl trip.
The season kicked off with one of the biggest upsets in program history. The Wildcats took down No. 8 Notre Dame 17-15 as TWENTY-EIGHT point underdogs. Northwestern followed that with a 19-13 win at No. 7 Michigan, its first victory in Ann Arbor since 1959 and first win over the Wolverines at all in 30 years, a game in which linebacker Pat Fitzgerald had 14 tackles including two for a loss. These were two signature statement wins that not only defined an incredible season, but specifically stuck out considering the supposed rivalries with the Fighting Irish and Wolverines that had fallen flat for a long time.
They later beat Penn State 21-10 as well, completing a run through three programs that had treated Northwestern as an cakewalk for decades. Off the back of that win, RB Darnell Autry landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an unheard-of accomplishment for NU in and of itself.
Autry led the Big Ten with 1,785 yards and finished fourth in Heisman Trophy balloting, becoming just the second Division I player ever to rush for at least 100 yards in every game of a season.
Fitzgerald, then a junior, won both the Bednarik and Nagurski Awards as the nation’s top defensive player and was a consensus first-team All-American, despite missing the Rose Bowl itself after breaking his leg in the second-to-last regular-season game against Iowa.
Barnett had told people back in 1992, upon first arriving on campus, “We’re taking the Purple to Pasadena,” a phrase almost nobody believed at the time. Three years later it happened. Northwestern lost the Rose Bowl itself 41-32 to a talented USC team led by wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson, but the loss barely dented the season’s cultural impact.
The cultural memory of this team is remarkably well documented through InsideNU’s oral history project completed with Northwestern alumni back in 2015. Dozens of players, students, journalists and other contributors described a campus that had taken pride in futility before 1995, including one anecdote of a student writing “0-11. We suck.” on a window facing Sheridan Road and leaving it up all winter as a monument to the team’s previous struggles. And stuggles might even be a lenient way of putting it. Between 1972 and 1991, Northwestern won four or more games in a season exactly once, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s the team went four straight years without a single conference win.
Given that context, 1995 wasn’t just a great season. It was a total inversion of two decades of institutional futility against a backdrop of previous failures. The idea of “purple pride” could actually be an identity again, not just the ironic kind that satirized historic lows.
Big happening: Final score aside, the ‘Cats ascension from the bottom to the top in just one season was simply remarkable. The purple indeed did make it to Pasadena, and inspired Chicagoland in a way only comparable to the 2018 Loyola Ramblers’ March Madness run.
1996: Back-to-Back Champions!!
Record: 9-3 (7-1 Big Ten) | Big Ten Co-Champion
Final Rankings: No. 15 (AP) / No. 16 (Coaches) | Head Coach: Gary Barnett
The season after the big one is often underrated compared 1995 simply because it followed the more dramatic underdog story. That said, in some ways it was a harder accomplishment because it proved the previous year’s Wildcats weren’t a one-off. Northwestern finished 9-3 and shared the Big Ten title with No. 2 Ohio State. It was the program’s first time going back-to-back as conference champions since doing so in 1930 and 1931.
Mirroring that, the Wildcats topped Michigan 17-16 at home. That win netted Northwestern consecutive victories over the Wolverines for the first time since the 1950s. Since that game, NU has only topped the maize and blue two times, which further puts its magnitude in context.
Pat Fitzgerald, who was named senior captain coming off of his leg injury, truly anchored another defense. He repeated as the Bednarik and Nagurski Award winner, becoming the first player in college football history to win both awards twice. He was a consensus first-team All-American while also picking up the Jack Lambert Trophy as the nation’s top linebacker. He’d also be named Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year and earned the Big Ten Medal of Honor.
On the other side of the ball, junior running back Darnell Autry once again spearheaded the offense. He rushed for 1,452 yards, which at the time was the second-best single season in school history behind his own 1995 total. He finished in the top ten of Heisman voting two years in a row, was a unanimous First-Team All-Big Ten selection in 1995 and 1996, a first-team All-American by the American Football Coaches Association and closed out his legendary Northwestern career as the school’s all-time leading rusher with 3,793 yards and all-time leading scorer with 222 points, highlighted by a career-best 240-yard, four-touchdown outburst against Iowa.
Off the field, however, Autry’s interests outside of football began to clash with the system. As a theater major, he became a historic footnote in NCAA history when he sued the organization over amateurism rules so he could act in a movie without losing his football eligibility. While the NCAA initially rejected his request, they eventually relented with a waiver, preventing litigation. It proved to be an early skirmish in what would then become a decades-long fight over what college athletes are allowed to do with their own name, image and likeness.
Frustrated by the rigid NCAA restrictions and riding the wave of back-to-back historic seasons, Autry made the pivotal decision to forego his senior year of eligibility and declare early for the NFL Draft.
Before heading to the pros, Autry suited up one last time for Northwestern in the 1997 Florida Citrus Bowl despite battling a 101-degree fever, which was the program’s first-ever appearance in the game. The matchup against Tennessee quickly turned into a showcase for a young Peyton Manning, who threw for 408 yards and four touchdowns in his second Citrus Bowl appearance. Though Northwestern rallied back from a 21-0 defecit in the first half, largely off two Autry touchdown runs, Manning’s aerial assault proved too much to overcome. Wildcats quarterback Steve Schnur threw for 228 yards but was intercepted three times, including a pick-six, en route to a 48-28 Tennessee victory.
Because of Autry’s departure, how Northwestern would have done in the 1997 season remains a massive “what if” for the program in a world where he had decided to stay. The Wildcats cratered to a 5-7 record without their star playmaker, leaving fans and Autry himself to always wonder if a senior season from one of the school’s greatest running backs could have kept the golden era alive.
Big happening: Northwestern’s back-to-back Big Ten champions ran face-first into a generational quarterback at the absolute peak of his college powers in the Citrus Bowl, and the Wildcats would have to wait a decade-plus to finally win another bowl game.
2012: Breaking the Bowl Curses
Record: 10-3 (5-3 Big Ten) | Gator Bowl Champion
Final ranking No. 17 (AP) / No. 16 (Coaches) | Head Coach: Pat Fitzgerald
For over sixty years, Northwestern carried one of the strangest and most discussed droughts in college football: no bowl win since that 1949 Rose Bowl victory over Cal. On top of that, the Wildcats had made it to an unprecedented four consecutive bowl games going in to the season, but had lost all four. The 2012 team finally ended both streaks, beating Mississippi State 34-20 in the Gator Bowl, the program’s first postseason win in 64 years.
The offense ran on a two-quarterback platoon system that became a defining feature of the season. Dual-threat Kain Colter and pocket passer Trevor Siemian split snaps for most of the year, with Colter accounting for 8 passing touchdowns and 12 rushing touchdowns, while Siemian threw for 1,312 yards and 6 touchdowns in relief duty. Running back Venric Mark also had a breakout All-Big Ten season, carrying the ball 226 times for 1,366 yards and 12 touchdowns. The 2012 offense finished behind only Ohio State and Nebraska in scoring output across the entire Big Ten.
In the Gator Bowl itself, played in extreme heat (80 degrees at kickoff, climbing to roughly 95 degrees inside the dome by the second half), Colter and Siemian worked in tandem again, and Colter’s acrobatic three-yard dive for a touchdown, after an initial score was wiped out by an illegal-receiver penalty, was one of the defining highlights.
Fitzgerald, in just his seventh season as head coach, had built a program capable of double-digit wins for the first time since the Barnett/Walker era, and the win over Mississippi State officially retired the “hasn’t won a bowl game since Truman was president” storyline that had followed the program for over half a century.
Big happening: Years of bowl yips, spanning nine presidential administrations, ended on a Kain Colter touchdown dive in a sweltering Jacksonville dome.
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