TREMBLE, BIG TEN

The Northwestern "Wildcat" Football team has won a game. Tremble, Big Ten! After two disappointing losses, the 'Cats have taken on a team from the mighty Missouri Valley Conference and triumphed, showing yet another FCS team what it's like to play at the mighty Fortress Ryan Field unless they are that New Hampshire team coached by Chip Kelly. Pat Fitzgerald will stop at nothing to wring every advantage against a team psychologically bolstered by a phalanx of cheerleaders with inspirational placards reading "NECKS."
 
The Leathernecks ought to bust out their original "Rocky" mascot, 
shown here with an alternate mascot entitled "Dog Who Sees All 
the Secrets of Time and Space and then is Instantly Mummified"

Not taking any chances on a WIU field goal at the end of a tense first half, Fitz deployed all three timeouts in succession.  The 'Cats blocked the kick attempt, which somehow justified it and set Fitz on a course of madness.
 
"ICE DA KICKAH: FREEZE, FREEZE, WINTER COLD, WINTER ICE 
COOL COOL FREEZE FREEZE," Fitz said to the official before 
whirring away to halftime on his icemobile.

Northwestern may not have dominated the game, but still came up with a vital win before beginning Big Ten play this weekend against Penn State.  While it has been a grim opening to the season, there still may be hope for the Wildcats because the Big Ten is a frigid wasteland of broken dreams, as I wrote about last week in a guest post for Lake the Posts.  But Saturday's game is a tall order against an undefeated Penn State team in the jubilant throes of a modern college football team's greatest triumph: an end to NCAA sanctions.

WE WANT FRANKLIN SHUT UP OLD MAN

Northwestern faces off against new Penn State head coach James Franklin.  Franklin used to coach at Vanderbilt and led the Commodores to a minor resurgence.  This success did not extend to games aginst Northwestern, as the Wildcats beat them in a close-run away game.  The next year, Vanderbilt canceled the series, citing the shake-up of SEC schedules thanks to the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M.  This sounds perfectly reasonable, and a sound explanation so let's just

WAIT A MINUTE I'M TALKING TO YOU NOW PENN STATE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH JAMES FRANKLIN AND YOU LISTEN GOOD.  NOTICE I'M USING THE WRESTLATIVE TENSE, WHICH MEANS THAT I CAN ONLY ADDRESS A PERSON BY THEIR FULL NAME AND GIMMICK FOR EXAMPLE I CAN SAY I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY TO YOU HULK HOGAN AND ALL YOU HULKAMANIACS OUT THERE FROM COAST TO COAST: WILL YOU PLEASE PASS THE GREEN BEANS?  SORRY, PARDON MY REACH THERE, GORILLA MONSOON.  PENN STATE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH JAMES THE COMMODORE FRANKLIN, YOU CAN'T DUCK US ANYMORE.  YOU CAN'T RUN.  YOU CAN'T HIDE.  THERE'S NO SEC SCHEDULING LOOPHOLES NOW TO SAVE YOU FROM A RAMPAGING, UNSTOPPABLE WILDCAT FORCE EXCEPT FOR YOUR APPARENTLY VERY GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM, HEISMAN-CANDIDATE QUARTERBACK, AND 100,000 FRENZIED FANS OOOH YEAH.
 
Pioneer of the Wrestlative Tense The Macho 
Man Randy Savage shown here in press 
materials for the 1988 American Academy of 
Rhetoric and Piledrivers conference.  Savage's 
speech "I've Got Something To Tell You: Modes of 
Address, Semiotics, and the Ring, a Structuralist 
Reading," is still widely cited in academic papers
 and before sending a vice-provost through a 
flimsy card table

Northwestern has not beaten Penn State since 2004.  Actually, Northwestern has not technically played Penn State since 2004 according the NCAA, who has vacated all five of Penn State's wins since then, so all of those losses occurred in a shadowy alternate universe; perhaps in one Northwestern held their 21-0 lead against Penn State in 2010, perhaps in of them the NCAA negligently allowed players to use both endzones in the Wrigley, perhaps in one of them America has become a brutal future dictatorship run by Ron Zook with the standard greeting being an enthusiastic butt bump and a Gainesville-based resistance movement.

Penn State is 4-0, but has not exactly looked dominant.  They beat Akron and UMass, but struggled against Central Florida and Big Ten newcomer Rutgers.  The Nittany Lions can be excused for that last game as it is clearly a deadly rivalry game.  I can only dream that one day fans of a rival team can hate Northwestern enough to express their disdain via hastily-stenciled sheet.  Nevertheless, Penn State are heavy favorites against a Northwestern team that has struggled at times to move the ball.  Pat Fitzgerald has assured reporters that the Wildcats will play better because he is doing things like enthusiastically yelling at practices, and a solid effort in Happy Valley will be an encouraging sign for how they can play against other crappy Big Ten teams.

UP IN THE AIR

I've recently been reading Atlantic Fever by Joe Jackson about the 1927 race to be the first to fly the Atlantic.  The race, set off by New York hotelier Raymond Orteig's $25,000 prize, led to a confluence of explorers, daredevil aviators, magnates, engineers, and all of the types of people you would imagine would be willing to strap themselves into a flying lawnmower and travel several thousands of miles over the vast, unforgiving expanse of ocean in the name of science, patriotism, and lucrative endorsement opportunities.

The race was won by Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis, but Jackson and Bill Bryson, who uses the spring air chase and Lindbergh's nation-wide adulation tour to frame One Summer: America 1927, discuss Lindbergh's colorful rivals.  These aviators included René Fonck, the French World War I ace whose attempt in in 1926 ended in a crash.  Fonck and his crew overloaded their plane with mahogany chairs, a hide-a-bed, and a fancy table for a victory feast; essentially, they were attempting to transverse the Atlantic in a flying nineteenth-century gentleman's club, missing only an ancient, decrepit man in dozing in the corner with a newspaper clinging perilously to muttonchops and life.  Though Fonck survived, three of his crew members perished.  Another French team led by WWI ace Charles Nungesser and François Coli  attempted the first crossing in 1927 from Paris.  Their plane, L'Ousseau Blanc (the White Bird) disappeared over Canada.  Frontrunners Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, Americans fueled by a patriotic desire to beat the French across the ocean, died during a test run of their American Legion. The ill-fated flights cast a somber pall over the race.  In all, eighteen people died in 1927 attempting the feat. 
 
Nungesser (l) was ravaged by injuries sustained in the 
First World War, and Coli flew with an eye patch.  The 
two are shown here looking like the  platonic ideal of 
people who should be flying primitive airplanes

By the time Lindbergh set off, there were three other teams close to beating him.  One, led by polar explorer Richard Byrd, crashed before takeoff and was delayed by his financial backer, the spectacularly named Rodman Wanamaker.  Wanamaker was greatly moved by the deaths of Nungesser and Coli, and was hesitant to send Byrd and his crew out until he could explore every safeguard possible.  The Columbia team became embroiled in a heated contract dispute the day before the flight that led to a legal injunction against the plane's takeoff.  Charles Levine, who owned the grounded Columbia and had no flight training before 1927, took off with pilot Clarence Chamberlin and flew to Germany two weeks after Lindbergh landed.  Byrd's team eventually made the journey into horrible weather, and was unable to land in a heavy fog surrounding Paris; eventually they crash-landed in the ocean.  As Jackson notes, some kind of altercation happened on Byrd's America during the flight, but the events remain shrouded in mystery.  According to one account, co-pilot Bert Acosta attempted to hijack the plane and turn it around before Byrd stopped him by hitting him with a flashlight.  Another tale involved engineer George Noville and Acosta getting drunk together during the flight's most hopeless moments-- in this version, Byrd knocked them both out with a wrench.  A third unconfirmed version had Colonel Mustard pummeling all three of them with a lead pipe.

Other aviation pioneers broke barriers adjacent to the Orteig Prize.  One of the most fascinating was Francesco de Pinedo, the "Lord of Distances."  De Pinedo flew a seaplane thousands of miles around the world, making numerous stops.  He crossed the Atlantic from Buenos Aires on a quest to fly across four continents.  De Pinedo faced numerous challenges, but perhaps none were as harrowing as the capricious patronage of Mussolini, who supported him but demanded results.  All of his movements were politically charged; an appearance in New York City sparked a riot between anti-fascists and Mussolini supporters.  His plane was destroyed in an accident in Arizona, which carried accusations of sabotage from Rome.  De Pinedo failed to complete his tour, running out of gas and needing a tow to the Azores.  After he returned, Mussolini sent him to a diplomatic post in Buenos Aires.  Ruth Elder attempted to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic in October of that year, becoming herself a media sensation.  She and co-pilot George Haldeman safely crash landed more than 2500 miles from New York.  Frances Grayson, an ardent feminist, attempted the crossing in late December, but her plane vanished before reaching Nova Scotia.
 
Francesco de Pinedo, Ruth Elder, and Frances Grayson

Both Jackson and Bryson are fascinated not only by the sheer derring-do of the flyers, but also the media frenzy that surrounded them.  The Oreteig race blew all of the participants up to daily front-page news, and test flights and appearances brought out thousands of spectators.  Lindbergh, who projected a blank slate of monomaniacal determination to fly solo, made him a blank canvas for the media to shape into whatever narrated they wanted.  While the flight made Lindbergh rich and unimaginably famous, he found himself haunted by his inability find quiet and outside of the skies.  Eventually, Lindbergh transformed his intense desire to be left alone into a geopolitical philosophy, becoming an outspoken voice against American participation in the Second World War.  Byrd took solace in the Antarctic, at one point living for months in a frozen hut alone in the tundra. 

PENN STATE CLASH

Saturday, Northwestern hopes to set its own season on a course.  Perhaps they will manage to upend the favorites.  They may take flight against the Nittany Lions, they may crash and burn, or they may get involved in some sort of mysterious altercation involving wrenches and flashlights before being rescued by a friendly lighthouse-keeper.  The Big Ten (except for Indiana) (exclamation point) is a laughingstock, but Northwestern will fight to remain in the middle of this particular pile of garbage.  It will take courage, heart, and hopefully as many timeouts as humanly possible to ice a kicker and bring about a winter of discontent what killed da dinasawas, de ice age freeze freeze freeze ice pun, I'm sorry it has been 17 years since that movie came out and this is still funny to me.

Let's All Freak Out About Football

At one point in the second quarter, Northwestern had shown signs of life as Cameron Dickerson scampered into the endzone. A despondent Ryan Field woke up. The band struck up a chorus of Go U, the Cal lead narrowed to a manageable ten, and the listless Wildcats seemed poised for a comeback. Cal got the ball back, and on the first play from scrimmage, Jared Goff found Trevor Davis with a few miles on the last defender, leaving every single player behind him as irrelevant as the fictional Batman football teams swallowed by a chasm. Ryan Field deflated. The pockets of Cal fans erupted. Northwestern fans turned into sentient tarp. This is Wildcat Football. 
 
There are some teams for whom a nine-win season is an unmitigated disaster that demands the sacrifice of a head coach and a bevy of deranged alumni staring unblinkingly at creepy flight-tracking websites. There are programs in the throes of misery that get scraped off the field every week. And then there is Northwestern, a team that wins upsets, perseveres with moral victories, and suffers horrifying losses, usually all within the fourth quarter of a single game.  

north·west·ern 
adjective \-ˈwes-tərn\ 
in, toward, or from the northwest
of or relating to the northwest
 
verb
to lose a football game in a spectacular manner in the fourth quarter or overtime by hail mary, quick field goal, interception, treachery by the inopportune defection of the offensive line, fundamental rule change to the game of football that applies only to Northwestern at that moment in time such as the abolition of the forward pass, or playing profoundly badly.

A WRISTBAND RAPSCALLIONSHIP

Northwestern did manage a comeback in the second half, tightening the defense, moving the ball, and using a super cool double pass play. The 'Cats had several opportunities to tie the game before some ill-timed drops and a backbreaking interception ended the game.
 
We're unsure what this game augurs for the Wildcats' season. In the first half, they looked unprepared and unmatched by the remnants of a 1-11 team before rallying in the second. Part of it involved preparation. InsideNu discovered that Northwestern defenders had incorrect play-calling wristbands, which Pat Fitzgerald dismissed as a "typo." This goes deeper than simple uniform confusion. What Fitzgerald does not want you to know is that the wristbands were switched with elaborate early modern battle maps that left the NU defense less than prepared to stop the Cal offense but in excellent position to siege Constantinople if it was the fifteenth century.


Wildcat defenders are confused when they are unable to locate their siege towers 
and sapping equipment
 
While we can be heartened that Northwestern played far better in the second half, the loss has significant implications for the team's bowl hopes. Assuming they can pull together and defeat Northern and Western Illinois (scheduled by an apparently self-referential athletic department), Northwestern will need to wring four wins out of conference play and Notre Dame in order to qualify for the postseason. Better prognosticators than me will have to figure out where those are coming from (aside from a surefire Hat Defense), but it is going to be a rough and exciting Road to Pizza City this year.

Crunching the numbers on Northwestern's Bowl Position
 
The first week of the season, especially when the game is not against Chicago Dental College or the Institute of Football Losing Science, is unpredictable. Maybe Sonny Dykes has righted the ship and Cal will be far better than last year. Maybe Northwestern's lapse was a product of Mark's departure and Christian Jones's injury. Maybe Tim Beckman's Legion of Evil Abraham Lincoln Impersonators successfully switched the wristbands before melting away, unseen, into a landscape of license plates and pennies. Regardless of the reason, the 'Cats will have to improve to win in the Big Ten, to make it to a bowl game, and to finally drive us all to the brink of insanity at the end of each game.
 
NORTHERN ILLINOIS MUST FALL
 
The demoralized 'Cats will return on Saturday against Northern Illinois to rescue their season. This is fitting. Northwestern defeated the Huskies in 1982 to end their ignominious record-breaking streak of defeats. They have, in fact, never lost to Northern, and at 6-0-1, they have dominated them more thoroughly than any other opponent that is not a high school, YMCA, dental college, or other group of Spanish-American War-era football enthusiasts.
 
Northwestern owns a 0-0-1 record against Kentucky's 
Transylvania University, which was founded in 1780.  
Transylvania University's law faculty at one time included 
future Secretary of State Henry Clay, shown in the standard early 
photographic pose where subjects were asked to look like they 
wanted to murder every man, woman, and child who has ever 
lived and will live in future times. There are no other jokes to 
be made about Transylvania University
 
Northern is coming off of a 55-3 thrashing of Presbyterian College. They lost their All-American Heisman candidate quarterback Jordan Lynch who graduated and was last seen wandering from NFL city to NFL city offering to football. Nevertheless, the Huskies are more than a one-player team, and have been the scourge of the MAC West for the last four years. They were certainly the best college football team in Illinois last season. The stakes for Northwestern are serious. A loss would effectively end their hopes at bowl contention (barring a miracle Big Ten run), obliterate their unbeaten record against Northern, and lead to the Huskies putting up a series of garish billboards along the expressway declaring themselves Chicago's MAC Team, and then entering a float denigrating Northwestern into the annual Sycamore Pumpkin Festival. This is Northwestern's Waterloo.
 
BASEBALL INTERMISSION
 
The Chicago Cubs are alive. Not in the sense of having any hope of making the playoffs or achieving any concrete thing in baseball. But they have recently swept the AL East-leading Orioles (using a variety of former Orioles in the pitching staff) and the erstwhile NL Central-leading Brewers and have done so with an arsenal of exciting young prospects that would in theory lead the Cubs to glory in a universe where the Chicago Cubs were not the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs have gone from the basement to the sub-basement. They can realistically overtake the free-falling, injury-cursed Reds to finish in a position above last for the first time in a few years, and I could not be more excited.
 
The most impressive addition has been Jorge Soler, a Cuban free agent who has hit everything since coming up last week. The more intriguing prospect, though, is Javier Baez. Baez already has 7 dingers in his first 30 games. He also has struck out 51 times in 129 plate appearances and his hitting .179 with a .217 on-base percentage. This is because Javier Baez swings hard. He wants to hit a baseball so hard it will simultaneously hit all of the baseballs made from the same hide. If it was possible, he would take a running start into his swing from the dugout. His swing starts from the origin of the universe and, on the rare instances when he makes clean contact, he hits the ball it into the next era of geological time. 

The Pacific Coast League demanded that pitchers throw balls to Baez with the Pioneer plaque
 
In addition to Baez and Soler, the Cubs have had excellent seasons from Anthony Rizzo and even Starlin Castro, whom I've spent the past several seasons maligning. Reinforcements including Addison Reed, Kris Bryant, and the sublimely-named Albert Almora are cooling their heels in the minors. It is a tremendous time to be a Cubs fan because it is way more fun to imagine Hypothetical Future Good Cubs than to deal with the inevitable September collapses, October collapses, and even possible November apocalypses that are the best-case scenario for this forlorn, hopeless team.
 
LET'S GO OUT TO THE HIPPODROME
 
College football is here again. It is an unalloyed spectacle of the absurd, of crowds braying for barely-controlled violence that is vaguely connected to educational institutions, of goofy mascots and bands dressed like Edwardian bus drivers playing 1970s jazz rock, of people falling upon hunks of meat in parking lots and college students letting the streets run sort of yellowish with vomit, all of which is covered by sports networks with the gravity of an international arms summit. It's a mutant cousin of the NFL, which oversees a similar menagerie with the gravity of the end of the world.

AIKMAN: Joe, I've just learned that the Pacific Northwest has just vanished under 
a mushroom cloud.
Aikman: Joe, San Franciso and Vancouver have gone, and no one has heard 
anything from a major city outside North America.
AIKMAN: Joe all we can do is try to defense ourselves and our loved ones
AIKMAN: Joe
AIKMAN: Joe
BUCK: There's no excuse for that in the National Football League
 
Yet, watching young people collide for our amusement while stuffing ourselves with nachos is just as ridiculous as any form of mass entertainment spectacle we've come up with in the last century. London's Hippodrome in the Edwardian period, for example, hosted elaborate variety shows, some of which required hundreds of gallons of water for aquatic extravaganzas. These included divers, polar bears, and ramps for elephants to slide down and fall gracefully into the water while spectators looked on. As football stadium experiences become more elaborate to hold the crowd's attention during an ever-expanding roster of television commercials, perhaps we too can turn them into elaborate variety shows with breaks for synchronized swimming, animal ventriloquism, and people getting embarrassingly removed from the premises with robotically controlled vaudeville hooks.

A reproduction of the hippodrome, attended crowds in their top-hatted finery, 
no doubt shouted things like "I say, sir, that is tip-top elephant sliding."
 
IT IS NOT YET TIME TO GIVE UP
 
One game into the season, and Northwestern remains a team shrouded in mystery. It is still possible that the best is yet to come for the Wildcats as they shake off the rust. Pat Fitzgerald's perfect streak of openers is shattered, but we can continue the streak of invincibility against Northern Illinois University. And, in case you don't get official e-mails from Northwestern football and doubt the team's ability to mean-mug their way through adversity, let this prove you wrong:

I've stared at it for hours, and there is nothing that can be included in this image 
that is funnier than the phrase "Official E-mail of Chicago's Big Ten Team."
 
If there's one thing we can be sure of one game into the season, it's that Northwestern will continue to play the most exciting games in college football until there's no one left sink to their knees in full Heston in the fourth quarter. Northwestern may yet Reverse Northwestern itself to glory, its football team basking in an unending parade of fortuitous bounces, incomprehensible opponent gaffes, and a 35-lateral trick play that makes up for the entirety of last season.