When people say college football is predictable they mean that Alabama and Ohio State are in the playoffs every year and the same half dozen programs are in position to win the big championship that ESPN cares about but they do not account for a scandal-plagued Northwestern team going up to Camp Randall against a Wisconsin team with one of the flashiest coaching hires of the offseason and absolutely beating their ass.
I don't recall any Northwestern team ever doing that up there. Usually if Northwestern beats Wisconsin it is because the referees have nullified several Wisconsin touchdowns while the student section rains snowballs on the field in disgust or because Wisconsin's coaches have seen their metric ton offensive line wipe the Wildcats across the field like a five-man squeegee but then let their quarterback who has been the same guy for 35 consecutive years throw a single pass that is so bad it causes them to instantly lose the game. I have never seen a Northwestern team go up there and shove the Badgers around like they are the dyspeptic trucker touching up Clark Kent in that part in Superman II when he loses his powers and has no idea how to fight anyone other than by getting repeatedly thrown into a jukebox.
The boos rained down on the Wisconsin team as they trudged off the field at halftime losing 24-3, and the sarcastic cheers came out when they scored with less than twenty seconds left to pull it to 24-10 and avoid the indignity of their worst offensive output at home since a 3-3 tie with Illinois in 1995, which I have scientifically determined is very close to the funniest Big Ten score line possible.
After years of running the data, Big Ten football scientists have determined that the objectively funniest score in a Big Ten game is Rutgers 2, Iowa 1.
Wisconsin has been in a recent tailspin with losses to a putrid Indiana team and a hollowed out Northwestern. New head coach Luke Fickell is trying something that is on its face completely insane: a transition from the school's proud tradition of unstoppable Oaf Football to a complicated air raid offense while the team is still made up largely of players that were recruited to shove people. It i like asking the Blue Angels to execute their precision aerial maneuvers except they are now all flying blimps.
It would seem rational for Wisconsin fans to give their new coach and his radical new system a chance to settle in, but I believe that I understand why they are so irate. For one, the Badgers have been in a steady holding pattern of boring competence for so long that it remains genuinely shocking for them to get thrown into a dumpster by the Northwestern Wildcats at home regardless of whether they are transitioning to the air raid offense or to Olympic Breakdancing.
Another reason why Wisconsin fans are so irate is because this is the last year of the Big Ten West and I believe it has driven the entire division insane. The Big Ten West has been the conference of dreams since its inception because every team in it has ranged from beatable to unwatchable while no one in the East has any hope of unseating one of the two big teams-- no team other than Ohio State or Michigan has ever represented the East in the conference championship game. Every program is desperate to win the Big Ten West this year before the West Coast teams come in and the easy path to Indianapolis disappears, and in that desperation every team seems to have grown more feral and Big Ten West-like as they develop more exotically repellent offenses and break new frontiers in cowardly punting. In its final year, the Big Ten West has reached its apotheosis as the most aesthetically disgusting collection of teams in the entire sport and possibly in the history of college football since the forward pass was invented and teams were no longer literally stomping each other to death in the mud.
Consider that nearly every Big Ten West team has the exact same record and that every game ends on a score of approximately 17-9. Consider that the division's standard bearer is Iowa, the most absurd winning team in the country that is so allergic to basic offensive competence that it has become some kind of bit in the same way that people in the early 2000s discovered that Christopher Walken being weird was funny and then every one of his roles after that was him performing as a caricature of Christopher Walken; this is exactly what happens when people make fun of Iowa football and its manifold Ferentzes and then you watch a game and they do actually punt that many times and throw passes exactly that badly in a way that is scarcely possible to believe is possible for an FBS team and yet they cannot be stopped.
An Iowa fan watching the team attempt a play on second and nine
Wisconsin didn't lose that game just from playing poorly; Northwestern looked fantastic. The offense shredded Wisconsin's defense in the first half with pinpoint passing and gouging runs that led to first down after first down. The defense shut down Wisconsin's run game stifled their newfangled passing attack. The unexpected and thorough destruction of Wisconsin finally gave the university an opportunity to take away David Braun's interim status and hand him the keys to the program. The team's performance has been so remarkable that it is almost shocking. I don't think anyone thought Northwestern had any chance of even being mediocre even in the generous confines of the Big Ten West. Nearly prognosticator before the season pegged them as the worst major conference team in the country. My posts from August and September still exist, and you can see I thought the future of the team was bleak: they would lose and lose and players would desperately try to escape while it would be nearly impossible to convince anyone to ever play here again. I thought the combination of the scandal and the fact that Northwestern historically struggles to be seen as a real football team with uniforms and everything would essentially kill the program as it no longer offers anything to the Big Money Big Ten. That may still be the case, but after the Wildcats wobbled on the precipice in the dying years of the Pat Fitzgerald Imperium, David Braun has somehow managed to keep this group together and has them tantalizingly close to qualifying for the Ahab and Sons Barnacle Solutions Bowl.
After seeing this graphic, I am crushed that I did not learn the news about Braun losing the interim tag from Dave Wannstedt Tonight
A lot of stories about Northwestern will frame this team as going through adversity and while the circumstances are adverse, this is the most self-inflicted trouble imaginable. This is not the Big Ten and NCAA coming in and threatening to suspend people because some goofus was going around doing Marine Recon Infiltration Maneuvers against Central Michigan but because the program tolerated an alarming amount of weirdo sadism among players for decades. We've learned that David Braun has something that players respond to and an ability to keep a team that seemed likely to break together. We've also learned he is, at the very least, much better at telling defensive players how to successfully tackle someone than Jim O'Neil, who was apparently showing players instructional tapes of hired goons surrounding Jean-Claude Van Damme and then ineffectually attacking him one at a time only to get victimized by The Splits. What remains to be seen is whether Braun can do something more important than taking the 'Cats to a bowl game which is finding a way for the football team to function without gross Shrek rituals.
NORTHWESTERN ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY PURDUE, OWN STADIUM
Northwestern can do the seemingly impossible and qualify for one of the infinite Dreck Bowl Games by simply beating the team in last place, the Purdue Boilermarkers. Purdue also has a very young first-time head coach in former Illinois defensive coordinator Ryan Walters taking the reigns after Jeff Brohm went home to Louisville. Purdue has only won three games this season but two of them have been offensive outbursts. Last week, they ran over a fading Minnesota team while P.J. Fleck desperately acronymed on the sidelines.
The records indicate that Northwestern has a pretty decent chance to win. But nothing is given in the Big Ten West, where records and statistics have no meaning from week to week and games tend to resolve themselves based on what is stupidest and most baffling. There are no easy wins in this division because every team is almost equally bad; for Purdue, Northwestern is also one of the most winnable games on their schedule.
There is one fascinating subplot to this game is that it is possibly the final game that will ever be played at Ryan Field. The stadium plan remains stalled in the grinding mechanisms of Evanston city government, but it at least seems likely that Northwestern will get its way and build one of the most inane and pointless stadiums in the history of inane and pointless stadium boondoggles. If the city approves the plan, Northwestern will spend several years wandering the Earth before they will cut the ribbon on their new football Xanadu for visiting fans. Of course, Northwestern is not a real sports team flinging its weight around because absolutely no one cares about Wildcat football-- it is possible that Evanston ultimately rejects the stadium based on the school's demands for more events than seven football games and a graduation ceremony, in which case it is important to note that the team being forced to return to a Ryan Field that has decayed into unimaginable decrepitude on the assumption that it would be torn down is in fact extremely funny.
While I would like to see a Northwestern win here, there is one force that it is making me uneasy. It has nothing to do with anything going on with Northwestern or Purdue or the players or the tactics. Northwestern and Illinois are both currently 5-5. If both Illinois and Northwestern lose (Illinois is matched up with the apparently indomitable Iowa Hawkeyes), next week's Hat Game will serve as a Bowl Game Eliminator Showdown. It seems impossible to believe that a game between Northwestern and Illinois to determine who gets to go to the Quick Lane Bowl will not be the glorious end that the Big Ten West deserves.
JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF MADNESS: RYAN WALTERS'S PLAYBOOK FOR SUCCESS IN LIFE AND BUSINESS
The following is repurposed from the journal and correspondence of film director Wolfram Krenkel relating to his unfinished documentary Journey to the Heart of Madness: Ryan Walters’s Playbook for Success in Life and Business before his mysterious disappearance in 2023.
Letter to the Institute of Wolfram Krinkel Studies, June 21, 2023
I was on location in a remote island I am legally not allowed to disclose filming a new picture called “Murders from God” when I got a telegram from the United States. The film was not going well. My entire crew was suffering from an ailment that translated loosely as “the devil’s rivers” that was known around the camp as “diarrhea 2.” Our financing had run out two weeks before when accountants noticed that the eccentric count who had lavished us with funds for the production was declared legally demented and his heirs were preparing to tear each other apart in the legal system. We were trying to get to the mainland to regroup. The leading man played by the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had been rampaging throughout the set for weeks in a home-made “reverse loincloth” that covered his entire body from the neck down except for his nipples, buttocks, and genitals. He menaced everyone he encountered after telling us he was beginning an intense biting regimen and was only held at bay with staves fashioned from tree branches. The telegram had told me that an American University in the midwest was offering me a substantial amount of money to make a film about their annual headbutting championship. I was intrigued.
Journal Entry, July 18, 2023
I have arrived in West Lafeyette, Indiana, but quite late. They were anticipating me flying, but I explained that I had instead chosen to travel with a group of steamship enthusiasts crossing the Atlantic in a homemade vessel. The seas were violent, and I spent most of it ill alongside most of the crew. When we were not vomiting, the steamship enthusiasts quarreled among each other about the authenticity of the rivets and whether the food on board was period appropriate. Every night, a particularly irate retired professor of train literature from Italy threatened to mutiny with much screaming and wagging of his elaborate mustaches. Finally, this man managed to successfully pull off his coup after we had arrived in port by getting off the ship first and declaring himself the captain to a baffled customs agent. The crew got into an intense shoving match that lasted four hours until police intervened. The university bursar who I told about my voyage in order to try to convince him that I had a valid reason for arriving late had no interest in hearing about the debased madness of man at sea.
Journal Entry, July 19, 2023
There are complications with the film. It appears that while I was on my sea voyage, I had missed some budgetary window to secure funding. The film professor who contacted me told me he had found some funds if I was willing to alter my project. It appears the football team was looking to document the activities of the team and had money for a film. I was instructed to meet with Lorenzo “Wayne” Kragg, the chief financier of the football team who somehow had no direct ties to the university but is instead a man who made his fortune selling decorative truck genitalia. I have no knowledge or interest in football but the professor was so apologetic that I felt I had to have a meeting out of politeness.
I was taken to Wayne Kragg’s mansion overlooking the scenic Celery Bog Nature Area. Mr. Kragg (“Call me Lorenzo “Wanyne,” he said) met me at the door and led me into the foyer. Everywhere I looked there were images of trains. On one wall, the famous nineteenth-century film “L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” ran on a loop from a projector while speakers blared train noises and whistles constantly. This agitated me greatly. I do not like trains, which I have always seen as the vanguard of man’s violent incursion against nature. Also I was told that my maternal great-uncles were all killed in separate and unrelated train accidents. One of them was bludgeoned to death, but it happened on a train. Lorenzo “Wayne” led me to a room covered in pictures of football players. He told me he had heard that I am a filmmaker of some international renown and he was honored to host me. I could tell he had not seen any of my films, not even my popular bird documentary “Shrieks of Hostility.”
He told me he wanted to make a motivational film about the leadership techniques of the program’s new coach. The coach was young and inexperienced and Lorenzo "Wayne" wanted to burnish his reputation and rally the other rich men who donated their money to the football team around this man. I told him I appreciated the attention, but I do not make those kind of films. I know nothing about football. In fact, I find the spectacle of violence and pageantry disgusting and anathema to everything I think about humanity. I am not opposed to violence, for example if a man is torn to pieces by a large, flightless bird. But the organized, symbolized warfare in American football is something I find odious and intolerable.
Then, I noticed something that changed my mind. In the corner, I saw a gigantic totem of a man wearing a football uniform and a hard hat. He is not quite a man. He is a grotesque caricature of a man, like if a person was drawn by a disturbed child like my school friend Dieter who was taken away and described as Bavaria’s youngest pyromaniac. This totem has gigantic bulging, dead eyes and a swollen, jutting chin. He carries a hammer. It is the stuff of waking nightmares. I asked Lorenzo “Wayne” what is this repulsive creature? He told me it was the school mascot “Purdue Pete” and he prowls the sidelines during athletic contests. I told him I must study this perverse abomination and the unhinged people that worship him. He said great, people here love Pete you can put him in the movie as much as you want. He also offered me enough money to restart my other film and hire a person specifically to restrain Kaspar from his normal course of biting and gouging attacks between scenes.
Journal Entry, July 20, 2023
I met the football coach Ryan Walters in his office. I told him I was there to learn his leadership secrets. I had already decided that my film would include none of the nonsense about leadership and I would instead investigate the twisted iconography of the terrible train goblin that had repulsed and intrigued me, but I needed to maintain the pretense. Coach Walters laughed. He told me that he thought that a motivational film about a first-year head coach was absurd, but he figured it was an easy way to keep Lorenzo “Wayne” happy, and he had to indulge him from time to time. Consider that his first Leadership Secret. I immediately liked him. I understood that you need to occasionally entertain the whims of maniacs in order to secure funding for your football program or film about a man who loses his mind trying to build a homemade spacecraft while you simultaneously try to build a homemade spacecraft as part of the filming process. Over his shoulder I noticed a smaller totem of the Pete grimacing at him and seemingly peering into my soul. I asked him what he thought about Purdue Pete. He told me that everyone loved Pete. I asked him why because he looked like he was a demon dedicated to murder. Walters’s face changed. “I don’t think it’s a great idea to make fun of Pete like that. People here don’t like that.”
I thought he was joking but he appeared deadly serious so I changed the subject. I told him that I noticed from the pictures on the wall in the facility that many of those who came before him seemed to have large mustaches. Perhaps he should consider growing a mustache. “I haven’t earned mine yet. Not until he says so,” Walters said. Not until who says so? Uh, not he, I meant them. The fans. The fans, he said. Then he told me it was nice meeting me but he had a practice to prepare for.
Journal Entry, July 21 2023
I went to the library to research the iconography of Purdue Pete. The librarian handed me a dusty book on past showing the evolution of the Pete mascot through the years. He told me to enjoy the book and flashed a sinister smile. It turns out that Purdue Pete had gone through several changes dating back to the 1940s. The book showed photos and drawings of earlier, cruder designs where Pete was somehow more menacing and more deranged. In one earlier incarnation, he has broad shoulders and a tiny pin head emanating malice. In another, he has rosy cheeks like an evil California hamburger mascot. I wanted to retch and recoil but I could not look away. I sat for hours staring at these photos lost in some sort of demonic reverie. An unearthly cackle seemed to bounce around my skull. Eventually I threw down the book and ran out as the librarian chased me and scolded me, but I could not bear to touch the book anymore. On my way out I passed a drawing of a Purdue Pete reminding students to return their books and I threw my knapsack at it in disgust, exploding the half a turkey sandwich I had saved from my lunch all over a poster explaining the Dewey Decimal System.
Journal Entry, July 21, 2023
Last night I was unable to sleep. I had a vision that I was trying to move but was unable to because I had ingested some sort of psychedelic or poison that prevented me from using my limbs. I was affixed vertically on some sort of plank like I was standing up and could not see below me but I felt a rattling. I was able to move my eyes enough to see that my plank was mounted to a railroad track. I heard a blood-curdling bellow that sounded like someone trying to make a train whistle. That’s when I saw it coming. A shadowy figure was pumping one of those old time railroad vehicles and heading straight towards me. There was a blinding lantern mounted on it but I could see it also had a battering ram shaped like a Purdue Pete head. As it came closer, I could see the figure pumping was a malformed Pete, a sort of hideous amalgam of all of the historical and discarded Petes. The pump car was increasing speed and coming straight for me. Right when it was about to collide with me, I woke up screaming.
In fact, I had actually faced this exact situation when I was filming "The Grim Melánge" with the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden. We were in the desert and had run out of Kaspar’s favorite sarsaparilla brand. One night, I awoke to find myself lashed to a train track and Kaspar coming at me with a similar hand cart. His eyes were wide and he was singing passages from "Salome" in an agonized shriek. He rammed me thirteen times. My ribs were badly bruised. I could hardly speak and the doctors told me that if I laughed I would collapse into agony but fortunately I never laugh.
Journal Entry, July 24, 2023
I arrived at the football facility to get practice footage. The players are engaged in inscrutable drills and the coaches are bellowing out an indecipherable array of football jargon. During breaks, I filmed short interviews with whatever players were around. I received very few usable answers. My line of questioning was simple and straightforward: what do you think about nature’s indifference to man’s thoughts and suffering? Most of the players simply laughed or said "I don't know" or asked me who I was and what I was doing there. One player told me that “I am the indifference of nature to man’s suffering, on the football field.” I was so disturbed I had to leave.
I tried to interview Coach Walters on film. It took me several hours to light his office. The Purdue Pete on his shelf still stared at me, and I ended up covering it with a camera case. But when it was time for him to start, an assistant told me the coach was too busy. I began to pack my things. As I put away my camera equipment I thought I heard something stir at the door. I looked up but no one entered. Then a piece of paper shot under the door with my name on it. I opened it. There was a hasty and careless scrawl that only said “Pete Says Stop.” I opened the door and looked to see anyone who could have slid the note, but the hallway was empty. The door slammed behind me and locked with all of my equipment inside. I had to try to convince a janitor to let me back in, but he had to talk to three different people in the football department to find someone who had heard of me until I found someone who had recognized me as the villain from the action movie "Operation: Cobra Strike: A Jack Kicker Film."
As I headed back towards the hotel, I noticed something strange. A startling number of people I passed had large, blond mustaches. I thought I had noticed a slightly larger number of people you ordinarily see with a blond mustache, but now I was seeing them everywhere. And every person with a blond mustache seemed to look at me, if even for a second, and glare at me. I have only seen that look of pure hatred once in my life, and it was when the insane actor Kaspar Bullenhoden had chased me for three days through the Cambodian wilderness with a homemade nunchuk because I had told him to say “excuse me” instead of “pardon me” in a scene.
Journal Entry, July 25 2023
It is the middle of the night. I have heard a nonstop rattling in my room for several hours. I initially thought it was the air conditioner, so I turned it off and the room immediately became impossibly warm and humid in the steamy Indiana night. I am soaked in sweat. I tried to call the front desk but no one answers and the humidity seems to have swelled my door closed and jammed. A storm has rolled in and the rain pounds on my window while the thunder bellows outside. I pound on the door and scream for help but no one answers. Perhaps I am going mad. But I have suffered from the entire scale of filmmakers’ madnesses in my career: desert madness, jungle madness, and space madness, and this does not feel like any of them.
I look outside the window and see only my own face reflected in the window, but when a flash of lightning illuminated the courtyard I could swear I saw the face. The eyes. The chin. I thought I should
The journal ends there. Wolfram Krenkel has not been seen since.
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