HEY I'M PLAYIN' FOOTBALL HERE

The Northwestern Wildcat Football Team shrugged off a hideous loss to an FCS bottom-feeder and managed to defeat Iowa and the fetid rump of the Big Ten West to qualify for this, a mid-afternoon weekday bowl game played in a frigid baseball stadium against a Power Five opponent that is so angry about playing Northwestern that its fans have been complaining about Bowl Tie Conspiracies. I could not possibly be happier.

A long and costly investigation by the hard-bitten journalists of the Pinstripe Bowl website 
who spent days sleeping in cars and meeting with informants in empty warehouses overlooking 
waterfronts and surviving threats that show that they were getting too close to the truth finally 
reveals that both teams are excited to play in this bowl game

The internet hosts a smattering of maniacs who somehow oppose the rabbit-like proliferation of bowl games over the past few decades because I guess it taints the august legacy of for-profit amateur exhibition football.  This is insane.  There should be more bowl games.  There should be a bowl game for every American, each sponsored by a preposterous company or branch of the United States military, played in a weird frozen stadium in front of 85 people at 10:00am on a weekday and if you go to them there should be Official Bowl Events for each fanbase that include all of the pretentious pomp of major sporting events even though it's for the Amalgamated Belt Buckle Corn Dog Bowl located in a disused rust belt buckle factory complete with some obscure 90s band trotted out for an elongated halftime and a national television crew and the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle swaggering in for the Presentation of the Belt Buckle Trophy punctuated by streamers falling on the empty floor at what had once been the room where they custom embossed "BOSS HOSS" right onto the buckle except for the time they got an erroneous plate and had to recall all those BOSS HOSE belt buckles, but that was not the responsibility of this man, the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle, under whose stewardship the company has recovered and is now prosperous enough to host a Bowl Game.

College football is too large and too unwieldy for a single championship to cover, and to write off shitty bowls because they don't count also means writing off the vast majority of college football games.  Northwestern football games face the same criticisms as those leveled at shitty bowl games: low attendance, prominence of tarps, the involvement of the Northwestern Wildcats, and none of that has any impact on my own enjoyment of it.  When you strip all of the glittering grandeur and television talking heads discussing the playoff picture with the same breathless tones as the terms of the Yalta Conference, the end result remains the same: an entertainment product that holds precisely as much meaning as we allow it. And much like Northwestern football, the primary focus of shitty bowl games is to give us a few hours to pass the time, yell at people in a socially acceptable way, and make Big Ten fans angry on the internet.

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

Once, Northwestern owned a devastating bowl loss streak that stretched decades because the United States suffered through a horrifying paucity of bowl games and robbed us of things like the Dapper Dan Looking Good, Sport Pomade Bowl and also the Wildcats lost the vast majority of football games they participated in.  That all changed with the 2013 Gator Bowl, Northwestern's sole postseason victory in the NATO era.  Now, the Wildcats enter their bowl game as substantial underdogs, desperate to prove the college football experts wrong and come home with the Pinstripe Bowl Trophy, a statue of former Northwestern coach and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner ordering people to trim their beards like a baseball Peter the Great.

Historical woodcut of George Steinbrenner demanding that 
Goose Gossage cut off his beard before being allowed to throw 
baseballs at people

Pitt boasts an 8-4 record, victories over Clemson and Big Ten Champion Penn State, and a supercharged offense that last scored 76 points against Syracuse.  That game saw a record 137 points scored as both teams attempted to defend using only rhetoric.  The Panthers' offensive juggernaut comes as a bit a surprise since they are coached by former Michigan State defensive mastermind Pat Narduzzi.  Narduzzi gives the game some emotional heft, as he doubtless seeks to avenge his mentor Mark Dantonio who watched these very same Wildcats rampage for an unprecedented 54 points in East Lansing against a Narduzziless Spartans team that went from Big Ten East contenders to a 3-8 squadron of Purdue impersonators.

Pat Narduzzi is on the prowl for the blood of the Wildcat in his operatic Bowl Game Revenge 
Narrative that I've just invented because we need something for this  bowl game rivalry these 
teams haven't played since 1973

Northwestern combines an unpredictable season with its tendency to turn its bowl games into a complete free fall into chaos where nearly every possible kind of football misfortune becomes possible.  Last year, the Outback Bowl descended into a miserable and boring blowout unbecoming of a Northwestern bowl loss.  The laws of Probability Science unambiguously declare that Northwestern is due for a bowl game that involves at least overtime, a game-deciding extra point return, a series of preposterous interceptions, and an incident where the entire crowd is distracted and then when they look down on the sidelines Pat Fitzgerald has been poisoned and a New York City detective must interrogate a stadium full of monocled professors all of whom hide a sinister secret.

BASEBALL STADIUM FOOTBALL

At last, the Northwestern Wildcats have returned to their natural home, a Stunt Baseball Stadium Experience.  The 'Cats played in a baseball stadium fairly recently, when they took on Illinois at Wrigley Field in 2010.  The game's most notable feature was its use of a single endzone after a meticulous Big Ten study of the field layout determined that it would be detrimental for football players to run face first into a brick wall.  The unidrectional play did not cause too many problems to the integrity of the game like it would have if they had taken away the hashmarks or the fifty yardline or the people dressed like anthropomorphic hot sauce bottles who are forced into brutal races for the twisted pleasure of braying fans.

Though the Illini only had one endzone, they were allowed to use all of their available Zooks

The game has shifted to Yankee Stadium in its second iteration.  Yankee Stadium remains haunted by the ghosts of great Yankees in the past like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, and a fictitious baseball player named "Mickey Mantle" invented by Bob Costas and Ken Burns as a massive prank on millions of American Baby Boomers who swear they saw him play when what they really saw were blurry photographs of dozens of actors in stirrups who could not even consistently remember to hit from the same side of the plate.  That stadium was demolished.  The Pinstripe Bowl will take place in the new Yankee Stadium which hosts legendary throngs of belligerent New Yorkers who are still screaming at Alex Rodriguez for some reason.

The Pinstripe Bowl's unique setting offers several amenities such as wind burn and the opportunity to see a sport played in a venue designed for another sport.  Imagine thinking to yourself, hey, that's where the mummified remains of Derek Jeter used to dive feebly at balls just out of his reach as you watch receivers dive feebly at balls just out of their reach.  I am sure the commentators have been working on their comparisons like these to inform the people trying to surreptitiously stream the game because it is on in the middle of a workday.  Imagine Jack Mitchell, unleashed in his natural baseball environment, winding up to split the uprights and hit the Scott Brosius statue in Monument Park as commentators Mike Golic and Mike Golic, Jr. (this is true, those maniacs) bellow that this one is for all the pinstripes.

Fans somehow figure out how to mock a guy for bobbling a ball in a football context and also 
repeatedly scream FUCK YOU at all and sundry

The Pinstripe Bowl, even by bowl standards that include a single bowl named after Beef O'Brady's and cryptocurrency, at least three bowls named for chicken restaurants as well as one named after a duck call so that you can shoot your own fowl to consume at your leisure, and unmitigated potato worship, is weird.  It's in an unconventional venue in a cold city where residents are spending the week bracing for an influx of people who are willing to stand outside for hours to be in the presence of Ryan Seacrest.  The setting is anomalous enough that it is ripe for the rarest of all bowl traditions: a Northwestern victory.

Week 14: Who Cares About the Playoff, They Got the Hat

High noon eastern time and the whole country is simultaneously tuned to Big Ten Country for the nation's greatest rivalry spectacle in college sports.  It has been impossible to find anyone with the remotest interest in college football who does not have an opinion on the titanic showdown between the Illinois Fighting Illini and their arch-nemesis Northwestern Wildcats with every snap watched by the selection committees for the Foster Farms, Pinstripe, and possibly Heart of Dallas bowls.

The bowl panels meet to decide the fate of Northwestern

I can't imagine a football game with more at stake: for Northwestern, a chance to secure bowl eligibility for real although they probably would be able to sneak in as a 5-7 team because there are now so many bowl games that teams will be forced to play themselves in brutal scrimmages while executives from Zaxby's bray for blood by waving chicken pieces at the players gang tackling their roommates.  For Illinois, all they had was the opportunity to diminish Northwestern's bowl chances and cackle as the Hat blotted out the sun and winds blew in from the Lake and shrouded Evanston in a year of hatless darkness.

In the end, the Wildcats triumphed.  Illinois, feeble against the run all season, had no answer for Justin Jackson and John Moten IV, who scored his first two touchdowns by flying past Illinois defenders.  The game was much closer than it appeared.  The Illini rallied from 21 down to within a touchdown thanks mainly to Wes Lunt's best game.  Lunt took advantage of Northwestern's soft coverage on the edges to complete the same eight-yard out route approximately 35 times.  The Illini also got a heroic performance from an injured Malik Turner who would come into the game, make some insane diving catch, roll around in agony, and then come back in to make another great play.

Illinois outplayed Northwestern for several stretches in the second and third quarters.  But every time they threatened, something went haywire.  The Illini fumbled the ball away three times, including one on the Northwestern eight yardline with a chance to tie and once on a punt return down only seven.  The most egregiously awful reversal of fortune involved an interception deep in Northwestern territory early in the game negated by a twelve men on the field penalty, an event whose cruelty was mollified only by the fact that it was extremely funny.

Bells rang out in celebration, ceremonial Hats were put onto every statue, and people poured into the streets to celebrate this incredible sporting event.  Lovie Smith and Pat Fitzgerald, old friends as Chicago Sports Icons, embraced on the fifty yard line while Smith waited. He'd have the opportunity to prise the Hat from the collective head of Wildcats next year in Champaign-Urbana, where he would now return and use the ceremonial key to the Illini's Hat Loss Brooding room with a full year to plan his revenge.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WEARABILITY OF THE HAT TROPHY

If there is one thing you can take away from your visit to this web log, I hope it is the insane and arbitrary decision to mount the Hat trophy on a base instead of allowing it to be worn by victorious players in triumph.  A recent tweet by Northwestern's athletic department caused some confusion on this position:

It's a #HAT. Of course you're supposed to wear it. #B1GCats pic.twitter.com/XzbWBI9vex

— #B1GCats Football🎩 (@NUFBFamily) November 27, 2016

How is this possible?  Has there been some sort of trap door allowing the base to be crudely worn in hat-like fashion?  Was I succumbing to Hat madness?

For hours, I poured over BYCTOM's detailed Hat Archive for any sort of schematics.  I interviewed top statuary haberdashers and scoured the most recent academic journals of hat science, including "(Base) Jumping to Conclusions" in Brims: The Journal of Hat Trophies and Hamburger Restaurant Advertisements and "That's All Pretty Convenient" in The Journal of Implausible Hat Conspiracies, but could not make any headway.

Eventually, with the help of digital photography from years of Hat Trophy photos, including several obscene ones involving Tim Beckman, I began to slowly chip away at the greatest Hat trophy mystery of our time.  You can see the shocking conclusion below:

Proprietary BYCTOM schematic

It appears the hat can, in a fashion, be worn by a player as long as his head is not so grotesquely bulbous that it envelops the entire hollow base area.  But that only raises a larger question and that is this: why?  Why create a trophy of a hat that requires some diabolical secret head chamber in order to fit on a standard-sized head so the only way it can be worn is approximately?  Was the base in mind initially to prevent players from corroding the trophy with their sweat-drenched noggins only to be foiled by the statue's only weakness, a base soaked in the head sweat of dozens of Illinois-based Big Ten football players?  Is there a heretofore unknown Lincoln habit of wearing a stovepipe hat attached to an unwieldy base, his spindly neck straining to keep the whole apparatus on his head while Stephen Douglas made rhetorical mincemeat of him?  I demand answers from government officials immediately on this matter.

Lincoln discovered in a rare photo wearing a gigantic wooden recessed box underneath his 
trademark stovepipe hat while guys with standard non-base hats look on sullenly, reaching 
into their pockets for a notebook so they can write down reminders to buy bulky wooden hat bases

COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IS A LUDICROUS CIRCUS

While Illinois and Northwestern waged their titanic struggle in front of dozens of tarps at Ryan Field, a minor Big Ten squabble took place in Columbus.  There, Ohio State managed to prevail in an overtime game filled with controversy, the best possible result that throws the playoff rankings into chaos and has prompted a Million Michigan Man march on the Capitol where they will read their manifesto entitled "This Manifesto Uses The Phrase Dereliction of Officiating Duties" from You Sir, the News Letter of Michigan Football Harrumphsmanship.  

The playoff picture remains in disarray.  The Committee will have to figure out how to justify including an Ohio State team that did not even qualify for the Big Ten Championship Game over a Penn State team that has a chance to win the conference and already beat the Buckeyes head-to-head; an undefeated MAC team; and potentially a Big 12 champion with a loss that hinged completely on an erroneous referee decision and a minor miracle.

The task of naming a college football national champion remains the most delightfully arbitrary and absurd ritual in sports.  They have tried to do so through polls run by disparate media organizations which means that a large amount of college football history involves a process of claiming championships and defending them through postmodern deconstructionism.  They have tried to do so with computers, which is a sound attack on the narrative-driven insanity of college football.  And now, they try to fit exactly four teams into a playoff, but do so with an unaccountable committee that meets with the solemnity of a papal conclave.  

White smoke by the Playoff Committee signals a triumphant De-emphasis 

of Conference Championships

All this week, people have been attempting to make logical arguments to fill the three non-Alabama playoff spots.  Conference championship upsets this weekend can occlude the picture even further. But logical arguments and opponent defeat flowcharts have no place in this process.  The Playoff is set by the Committee that has its own gonzo decision-making processes that have previously involved things like Body Clocks.  There is no way to know what they value or what sorts of formulae they use.  They could, for all we know, pick teams by throwing knives at walls or basing their selections entirely on the result of human hungry hippos while they hurl goblets of wine and hoot things like "you call that gobbling, you inadequate artiodactyl."

This twisted spectacle is how your college football playoff field is chosen, probably

College football sells itself as a mythological journey where teams rise up and meet challenges by upsetting high-ranked rivals or winning conference championships or even going undefeated in a minor conference and hope that their deeds prove them worthy of inclusion in the Playoff.  Instead, the only mythological elements are a class of powerful, capricious individuals with their own conflicts and agendas that can wipe all that out at a single stroke.  If you are lucky enough to follow a team good enough to aspire to playoff contention, all the college football season does it add increasing opportunities for you to get mad.  And, as fans of college football fans melting down on the internet, we could not have asked for a better system.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern finds itself at the mercy of unaccountable committees when they meet to decide which bowl game they will be inflicted upon.  The two main possibilities are the San Francisco bowl, which has has turned over sponsors as often as a postwar Italian government and is now played at the Niners stadium located 2,000 miles outside San Francisco and the Yankee Stadium Hey I'm Playin' Football Here Bowl, which offers Northwestern fans the opportunity to see football played in a baseball stadium with more than one operational endzone.  

The game and the opponent do not matter.  The Wildcats clawed back from the portents of a miserable year to enter the postseason.  They boast the Big Ten leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks.  Austin Carr will have one more opportunity to bamboozle defensive backs. Northwestern has a chance to end the season with a winning record.  This will all be clearer when the bowl fatcats have emerged from their estates with their scrolls.  Until then, we can all luxuriate in the retention of the Hat in all of its mysterious, semi-wearable glory.