Cooler at The Lake

EVANSTON I have made fun of the Temporary Lakeside Stadium as a desperate gambit after Northwestern failed to find anywhere else in the Chicago area to play and were forced to hastily pile up some bleachers on a soccer field in an attempt to have home games and not wander the country like they were barnstorming against 1920s religious cults focused on beard growth. But all it takes is a perfect late summer night with the golden hour sunshine fading over campus and the Chicago skyline shimmering in the background to realize that it is truly something. I was wrong. The stadium (which I have nicknamed “The Lake”) is an incredible setting for college football. 

Views from The Lake

I remain sentimental about Ryan Field, which had stood for more than 100 years at the same spot and was a very easy and convenient place to watch football, but after drinking a beer sitting on a rock on the shore of Lake Michigan before a game, it is hard to understand why Northwestern insists on playing football in a residential neighborhood that is made up entirely of professional Noise Lawyers. Sure, the tiny lakeside stadium lacks the intense wall of noise atmosphere associated with college football, but it’s not like anyone had anyone described Ryan Field as “rocking” unless it was Northwestern going on a silent count at home because opposing fans were complaining about uncalled holding penalties in a game they were winning by 32 points. I can also imagine that a game in cold, windy, rainy weather could feel like being on the deck of a nineteenth century whaling ship.

And yet while The Lake might be a unique and picturesque place to watch a bunch of teenagers run into each other's torsos, the stadium is also kind of a silly place to watch a football game.  The endzone bleachers, which contain the largest blocks of seating, feature views blocked by a series of gigantic poles, perhaps in tribute to the Wildcats' secondary alternative home at Wrigley Field.  The endzone seats also have no speakers, making it virtually impossible to hear what is going on, the referee warbles incoherently like a Peanuts adult, and I can't remember if I heard them play the annoying Wildcat yowl on an endless loop which is a vital part of Northwestern football's psychological operations.  I assume the experience is better in the sideline seats, although the end zone seats are already far more expensive than any Northwestern ticket I've ever bought; I am pretty sure that most people sitting through an Eastern Illinois-Northwestern game in years past were actually sentenced to be there by a Cook County judge. 

 

As big of a sign that you are in the Chicagoland area than the skyline

Putting a bunch of rickety bleachers on a practice field sitting on a wad of garbage hauled into Lake Michigan in 1960s was a weird and desperate move, but it's impossible to deny that it workd.  The temporary lakeside stadium rules.  The natural beauty of the lakeshore does a lot of heavy lifting here and there's nothing else like it in major college sports.  Perhaps this is appropriate for a sport that seems to be fueled by short-term thinking and last-second gambits and silly accidents that turn into traditions-- there's no better example than some drunken college students stealing a pig or driving a tractor into each other and then making it a rivalry trophy passed down for generations-- so Northwestern can go from trying to not play football on the streets of Sheridan Road to creating a stadium fans will remember long after they put up the new stadium with its Luxury Cabanas and Imagine Dragons concerts and lake of asphalt parking lots.

EASTERN ILLINOIS DOES A JUMP SCARE

Northwestern's heralded switch at quarterback looked like the wrong one.  The first half was winding down to its final minutes, and it appeared that Eastern was about to go up 10-7.  Northwestern had just had a kick blocked and Eastern had managed to nudge the ball downfield to field goal range.The Wildcats had to that point late in the half a total of 16 passing yards, many of which had bounced off the ground as if they had just invented a new variant of Australian rules football.  But then Eastern missed the kick, Lausch found a rhythm, and the Cats got another touchdown.  Then they absolutely torched the Panthers in the second half.  Lausch went 11 for 11 for more than 200 yards in the second half alone and unleashed A.J. Henning who was flying around the field.  The defense remained almost impenetrable on the ground and reduced the Eastern playbook to short passes because their run game was stopped and Northwestern rushers were dragging their quarterback around the field.  It is one of the most beguiling performances we've seen against an FCS team where they didn't lose.

 

Northwestern shoots off celebratory fireworks after the game that make it look like Arnold has just blown up the bad guy on the roof and then said "you-ah going oudt widda bang"

The Eastern game represented a relatively comfortable introduction for a new quarterback, but the Wildcats will get thrown into the fire for their first West Coast road trip in the new Enormous Ten.  Washington, their first conference opponent, represents a rude welcome.  The Huskies are coming off an appearance in the national championship game.  They've lost a large number of key players including star quarterback Michael Penix to the NFL and their coach to Alabama.  They're also coming off a tough home loss to bitter rivals Washington State, a team they abandoned to a dead conference that is currently clinging to the Mountain West before bursting forth from its chest to devour it next season.  The 2024 Washington Huskies do not currently appear to be the terrifying national championship contenders they were last season, but that does not mean that they are still not good enough to throttle Northwestern as the oddsmakers predict.

I suspect there will be a prolonged feeling out process between the new West Coast Big Ten members and the existing members of the conference.  I have no idea what to make of Washington Football other than enjoying watching Penix huck balls up to Rome Odunze last year and hoping they'd beat Michigan.  Washington fans, all of whom I assume have already assumed that this is a win, have not really had the experience of having their superior football team dragged down the Wildcat Toilet as the 'Cats attempt win or lose to subject opposing fans to the shittiest football game they've ever experienced.  This is a very exciting year as the vestigial stink of the Big Ten West still hovers over all of its proud former members who have an opportunity to really make these new teams question their decision to fly into the middle of the country and get rudely punted at for hours at a time.

History favors the Huskies.  Northwestern has never beaten them, although all three of their previous games took place in the Wildcats' early 1980s nadir where they started every football game by digging a giant pit in the middle of the field and refusing to leave until time had expired.  Washington quarterback Will Rogers is one of the most prolific passers in football and will test what has so far looked like a formidable Wildcats defense.  The Northwestern passing game is even more of an enigma than usual.  The Wildcats have also not yet played in a stadium that has a larger attendance than a Monster Jam event at Allstate Arena.  

 

It is very difficult at this point in the season to be able to figure out if a team is any good.  Washington is as good of a test as any.  Even if the 'Cats can't get their first win in this series, I'll be watching to see how competitive they can be against a good conference opponent, how Lausch fares in his second game, and, most importantly, how badly the Wildcats can manage to annoy Washington fans in their Big Ten baptism.

HUSKY STADIUM, SEATTLE WASHINGTON

This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.

Husky Stadium holds more than 70,000 screaming Washington football fans every week, but has its origins in a bitter dispute over football.  It was, according to my meticulous research, never meant for the sport at all.  Husky Stadium was built to support "Husky" Zeb Middyons's bear-fighting promotion.  Middyons, who claimed to be a mentalist who could control bears with his mind, barnstormed across the Pacific Northwest throughout the the early 1900s.  He set up a stable of bears calmed by salmon doused in vats of laudanum and, along with his accomplice Mars McMaster,* advertised the bear fighting as a demonstration of what he called "Brains-Combat."

*According to H.U.J. Holman's "Woods Men: The Pacific Northwest's Greatest Hucksters, Gamblers, and Shamanic Grafters 1880-1925, McMcaster was also known as "El Picador" and claimed to be from Spain, but was actually born Stan Oldlocz in Lodz.  He spent years using the name Bradley Morton that he stole from an army buddy who was killed in what official Army records described as a "moose taunting incident."  McMcaster was also known to use the names Brode Hohny, Horus Mangaarten, The Rev. Red Rogers, Stan Van Stan, and Hohnus Gravy, which he assumed while selling a canned gravy with "restorative properties for the man's Vigorous Area."

By 1918, Middyons, who had also profited from a wartime black market zinc operation, had enough money to being construction on what he named Husky Stadium, which he had sold as the "Paradise of Brains-Combat."  But, in the middle of construction, disaster struck.  Middyons was in a small town where he had a planned performance but the day before, a group of locals caught a wild grizzly that was rampaging through town and locked it in the courthouse.  The mayor and other town dignitaries begged Middyons to use his mental powers to convince the bear to leave.  For three hours, Middyons stood outside the courthouse touching his head and squinting (this is my interpretation. Other accounts, such as from Tred Millcox in Bear Court, suggest that he was also mumbling and possibly crying.  I have some serious concerns with Millcox's methodology and I want to just state on the record that his last article on bear attacks was held up in peer review because he kept insisting that the Port McNeil Maniac Grizzly had somehow fashioned what he kept referring as a "salmon nunchuk.")  When some angry residents began to question whether Middyons had the ability to manipulate bears with his own mind, Middyons told them that he the shape of the roof created a "mental curtain" that prevented him from achieving full control of the "ursine cortex."

That is when "Two Strap" Knagston, the leader of a strongman outfit coincidentally barnstorming through the same town who was known for his then-unorthodox two strap unitard, picked up Middyons and flung him into the courthouse.  No one knows what happens next, although his hideous screams echoed through the town within minutes.

Middyons's grisly bear death left his financial backers and the city of Seattle in a serious dilemma; they had no major attraction for their expensive new stadium.  Investors brought in all sorts of acts.  They first tried to recruit men from the lumberjack camps for a series of violent games including "trunk jousts," but the authorities shut them down after deciding that a "beard to beard" fighting event was "obscene on a level The Court has never thought possible."

Football fans demanded that they move the team into the new stadium, which abutted the university, but they made a powerful enemy.  Vice Provost E. Emmett Brudge had wormed his way into a powerful position at the right hand of the university president by mesmerizing him with elaborate conspiracies about plots forming against him among the faculty.  For example, the president's private papers contain an elaborate secret memo that Brudge had written suggesting that a geographer popular among the faculty been attempting to control the university president by putting psychedelic powders in his tea that Brudge described as "the dragon's tendrils."  Brudge, for reasons no one ever has confirmed, despised football, referring to it exclusively as "an Oaf's Holiday" or "the Devil's Pork Wrestling" and calling football players "Bovinous Beefs."

Brudge began planting letters and editorials in local papers, but everyone could tell they were by him because they had headlines like "Beware! Bovine Brawls in your Backyard" and "Ban this Farcical Pork Circus from our Beloved Bears-Wrestling Stadium AT ONCE."

Eventually football gained too much popularity for Brudge to hold it off.  The final straw came when Brudge's automobile, a model T that he painted himself a color called "accounting visor green" and called "Mrs. Plimstin" broke down in front of a field where Washington players were practicing.  They lifted the car with Brudge inside screaming "unhand me, you unseemly hippopotami" and carried him to the main administration building while a crowd of thousands gathered before dispersing into a massive riot.

Brudge had long suspected that his arch-rival Quill Quall had arranged the stunt in a series of "invidious machinations" to humiliate him.*  It worked.  Brudge lost the support of the university president and left Seattle.  He formed the anti-football organization "Manful Society Against Oafery" and toured the country convincing towns to ban football and instead engage youths in what he claimed were more wholesome sports such as "brain pushing" where youths stand forehead to forehead and recite useful facts at each other until exhaustion. Often he was chased from town on a railroad pushcart, scattering his pamphlets as a distraction and to deflect pitchfork blows. G.A. Rimsford's "Lumber Laughs: Touring Vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest 1918-1932" suggests that the popular Rolph and Dolph's Head Sport act was essentially a sarcastic performance of brain pushing, but I am sorry to say that his entire article is also based on Jean-Robert Mitaine's philosophy of "word construction" where it presents as instructions to fold a thin sheet of cardboard into various configurations in order to decipher the words in order as part of the School of Touch Scholarship and it is nearly impossible to determine the citation because my cardboard got too bent up.

*It is difficult to take Brudge's accusations seriously, but some university historians, most notably Katthy Cregg, have noted that Quall was an early automobile enthusiast who could have disabled Brudge's car easily.  Quall also benefited from the ascent of Washington football as he was often selected to tackle the opposing team's bursar before the game, which was a popular tradition at the time until a professor of medieval studies showed up in full armor and had to be subdued with a weighted net.

Within a few years, the stadium became the unquestioned home of Washington Huskies football.  Every few years, a small group of Brudge sympathizers emerges to denounce it a series of leaflets as a "Odorous Pig Sport" and prophesying that one day a mentalist will bring a horde of rampaging bears back to the stadium to reclaim it for its rightful purpose, but it has not happened yet.

Heartbreak At The Lake

One of my favorite Northwestern football relics is a poster from the 2005 season that says “Not Afraid to Work Overtime” and shows various Northwestern football players in a construction worksite wielding inexplicably inappropriate tools– the only job I can think of that would require multiple chainsaws and toilet plungers is probably Clue Murderer. The year before they won three out of four overtime games. In 2017, Northwestern set a college football record with three consecutive overtime wins. This is a program that has historically thrived in overtime and sought it out as part of a deranged obsession with subjecting America to additional Northwestern football. But the Wildcats’ occult overtime obsession failed them Saturday night as they collapsed against Duke sometime around midnight as the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy.

 

The business of big time sports has warped and distorted schedules to fill every crevice of the cable television and streaming schedule, and college football has changed from a metronomically regular Saturday product into one where it is impossible to tell when a game is taking place and what network it is on. In most years, a Northwestern and Duke game could be quietly tucked away into 11:00 AM Regional Coverage away from the prying eyes of national media, but now for some reason it was on a Friday night on West Coast hours and on national television, where too many people for my liking were exposed to the grimy punt-and-interception-based football that belongs in the shadows of a rust-covered Ryan Field.

   

Northwestern may have turned over its staff, but they are still playing some Pat Fitzgerald-ass football out there. The defense looks fierce and whatever they are doing different on offense is indistinguishable from previous years' slopfests. It seems like there is some ancestral memory baked into certain football teams. On Sunday, we watched the heralded New Bears Offense revert to the same Bears garbage we have seen from the Litany of Bullshit Quarterbacks and the team had to win in the same grotesque special teams and defense configurations that it was grinding out with Jonathan Quinn out there.

 

  

The Apex of Bears Football

The offense had been shaky all game but fully collapsed in the second overtime.  With Cam Porter cutting swathes through Duke's defense, new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan decided to read from the cursed Bajakian Booke of Doom-ed Trick Plays and sent in a quarterback run on third-and-one that that went backwards for nine yards and basically ended the game.

This made it six consecutive losses against Duke in this quasi-rivalry series.  I don't know how other Northwestern fans feel about Duke other than noting it is another small private school that was historically bad at football and also makes the NCAA basketball tournament, but losing six games to any school is annoying.  Northwestern has not had the luxury of many heartbreaking losses in recent years-- they were so lousy the past few years and started last year from such a horrible place that it was mildly surprising they were able to field a team let alone rattle off eight wins-- but the last truly gutwrenching loss I can think of was to Duke in 2022.  The 'Cats won't have a chance for revenge anytime soon since the Blue Devils vanish from the schedule for the foreseeable future, but I don't think anyone minds taking a break from this series and meeting them again when college football coalesces into a single superconference for the biggest teams and relegates the Dukes, Northwesterns, Stanfords, and Vanderbilts of the world into their own sad conference where squads of rowdy ultras attack each other in pregame brawls wielding copies of US News and World Report. 

 

The loss also strikes a major blow to Northwestern's bowl hopes.  Northwestern's conference schedule, shorn of the bowling bumper comforts of the Big Ten West, is brutal and the 'Cats need every win they can get if they want to be playing in a mid-December bowl game that passively plays out on sports bar televisions at four in the afternoon.  The fact that the game came down to a question of whether a few of a Duke player's shin molecules had grazed the turf after a fumble that would have let Northwestern seal the win is also unfortunate.  But this is what happens in the post-replay sports world where a fumble that looks completely obvious to the fans, players, and officials at the time and has the recovering team doing the excited Fumble Recovery Jump Point goes to an off-site computer lab where it is zoomed and enhanced until the question moves from was this a fumble to what technically constitutes a "ball."  This type of fine-grained analysis is slow, annoying, and robs big game-swinging plays of their immediate excitement as everyone knows we will be staring at replays for five minutes while the referees pause to take the necessary psychadelics for their epistemological inquiries, but as irritating and detrimental and widely loathed as replay is in every sport that uses it I think we can all agree that it is a necessary and useful when the outcome favors Northwestern.

EASTERN PROMISES

Northwestern faces off against Eastern Illinois at another night game on The Lake. I have decided to call the temporary lakeside stadium The Lake, as in "Northwestern suffers devastating loss to Duke at The Lake" or "The Wildcats must defend The Lake from Eastern Illinois."  I also considered "on The Lake" but that is not literally true even though the site of the stadium is technically on a mound of garbage used to expand the amount of land jutting into Lake Michigan because "actually we are on what would have been Lake Michigan in the early 1960s" would be cumbersome to explain every time I say it.

 

David Braun will try to kick start his offense by making a change at quarterback, replacing Mike Wright with Jack Lausch. Lausch made several appearances last season as a change-of-pace running quarterback. You might think it reeks of panic to desperately change quarterbacks after two low-scoring games, but I prefer to see it as an opportunity for the coaching staff to confuse and beguile the opposition. You will often see a two quarterback system where one is a passing specialist and one is a running specialist like Northwestern in the Kolter-Siemian season, but imagine a system where Northwestern deploys a running quarterback and another running quarterback and defensive coordinators are forced to decide which is the true running quarterback and which one is the passing running quarterback as they flip through laminated play sheets in an increasingly frenzied reverie before losing their minds in the third quarter and then spending the rest of the game attempting to write extensive novels that are based entirely on acronyms. I would send this suggestion to Braun’s coaching staff but I don’t know if they are still using the Northwestern football email address Hashtag I Don’t Care.

 

One thing I do know about the quarterback change is that announcers are going to be very excited to call the game because Lausch was a standout baseball player, and announcers love when they can say that a person playing one sport is actually playing a different sport, what is referred to in the business as Greg Paulus Syndrome.  You can imagine a producer's eyes going wide the first time Lausch slides.  Lausch, for his part, is getting in on the action by telling reporters  "The best practice for the fourth quarter of a football game is hitting with two outs in the seventh inning with guys on base."

 

The Wildcats are heavily favored against their FCS opponent.  Northwestern blew out Eastern in their two previous meetings in 2011 and 2015, and this should be a final tuneup before having to face the dragons of the Enormous Ten.  Northwestern's defense has looked stout against two good FBS teams; the hope is that the quarterback shift does not look like a complete disaster.  These types of games have very little upside-- anything other than a very convincing win will feel bad and a loss represent the functional end of the season with the only solace that it is kind of funny when that happens.

CONFERENCE RE-RE-REALIGNMENT

This week, the PAC 12's remaining two members announced that they are bringing back the conference by poaching four members of the Mountain West.  Oregon State and Washington State filled out their schedules with Mountain West games as part of a loose association.  Now they repay that loyalty by stealing four schools, forcing the Mountain West to scramble and letting other conferences know that the PAC 12 is going to start trying to find at least two more members.  This, to me, seems like a rude betrayal by the two schools who immediately backstabbed a friendly quasi-conference.  It reminds me of when the Big Ten and ACC formed The Alliance against the SEC and then the Big Ten immediately forgot about it, raided the PAC 12 for four more schools, and left the ACC as an also-ran power conference with Clemson and Florida State attempting to sue their way out of it except they both kind of stink now.

 

A lot of the story about realignment has been about TV money and geography and tradition and how no one knows what conference any team plays in anymore but I think one thing that requires further elaboration is how all of these people ostensibly in charge of a university are all backstabbing each other.  I would like to read a long feature about how these schools are arranging these moves.  In my imagination, they are happening in torchlit antechambers and the Big Ten is announcing that UCLA has joined by firing a flaming arrow through the offices of the PAC 12 and the provost of Oregon State awakens to see that someone has dropped a poisonous asp into his office and it is writhing and hissing all over his folders full of accounting documents as a warning.

New Arizona State president Armand Jean du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu meets with Big 12 officials

If anyone wants to make a very expensive serial drama about conference realignment that somehow takes place in 17th century Venice and involves British character actors screaming "YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH THIS" at the cackling President of USC and his scheming athletic director dressed in his signature colorful robes, I would definitely watch it if it wasn't on one of the twelve streaming networks I don't pay for.

Any time I see how quickly and heedlessly these moves happens, I of course get a little nervous because it seems like Northwestern's time in one of the two most important football conferences despite being literally Northwestern football and struggling to fill its 12,000 seat stadium is limited.  But for now, Northwestern somehow remains in the epicenter of college football, playing at The Lake and hopefully crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers.

Potemkin Stadium

  

At some point they must have played a football game. But at Northwestern’s opener against Miami on Saturday, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the hastily-constructed pop-up stadium built on a soccer field. I have been skeptical about what seemed to be a desperate and hare-brained scheme that had Northwestern scrambling to find somewhere to play the majority of its home games despite the fact that they had been planning to tear down Ryan Field for two years and had been locked in legal combat with a lawn sign army the entire time. And yet, by all accounts, they seemed to have pulled it off. They played a football game there and the bleachers did not collapse, the turf didn’t roll up, and no gangs of bloodthirsty pirates besieged the stadium with cannon fire, boarded the stadium, and menaced David Braun with a cutlass.

The temporary stadium looked spectacular on television. The game kicked off on a picture perfect late summer afternoon with the sun shining, the lake shimmering, and the sky clear enough to see the skyline of Chicago, the city that I would like to remind you that Northwestern is the official Big Ten Team of. It is wild that it sits so close to the lake. Cameras showed boats cruising on by carrying Northwestern and Miami flags. The stadium is close enough to the water that it is possible for a team to literally take a boat to the stadium. I am not sure about the logistics of transporting nearly one hundred of the largest people that we can produce on a fleet of ships, but I think that would be a spectacular entrance, one that would only be matched by running out of a blow-up tunnel that features an annoyed-looking partially deflated panther and some smoke machines.

PJ Fleck learning that he doesn't play Northwestern this season and can't literally row into the stadium

The stadium looked so good that I immediately started to see calls for Northwestern to abandon the ridiculous $800 million sarcophagus that Pat Ryan is building to carry his name and permanently stay on the lake in a cozy little stadium. This would be a disaster. 

 

The fact is that Northwestern is not meant to play in a fun lakeside stadium any more than a brand new palace on the ashes of the old Ryan Field. The school already had its own ideal stadium: a dilapidated shithole. Northwestern is not somewhere fans should be able to go watch football and marvel at the views. It should be a half-filled pit where no one would ever want to set foot. 

Northwestern will never play Big Ten home games– I don’t know how small of a stadium you would have to build to stop Chicagoland’s tens of thousands of Big Ten alumni from flooding every single structure Northwestern could play in but it is certainly less than the 12,000 of the lakeside stadium’s capacity– so the stadium should remain a fortress dedicated to the misery of opposing fans. I don’t want to see people rooting for Wisconsin sitting in sun-kissed bleachers watching a parade of sailboats blooming like flowers on a glittering lake. They should instead be pelted with sleet and spend the entire third quarter waiting in line for a hot dog only to be told they are out of buns and be handed a loose frank in a paper cup. Ideally, Northwestern should play in a stadium that is rigged to explode at the end of every conference game.

OK FINE HERE'S FOOTBALL

 

Last week’s post highlighted the stark changes in Northwestern’s football team, but one thing stayed the same: the Wildcats won yet another punt-driven 13-6 slog marked by dominating defense. The result is very good; Miami is coming off an eleven-win MAC championship season, the game was only as close as it was because of an ill-timed goalline fumble, and Northwestern’s untested secondary largely held up and kept the RedHawks out of the endzone. A team like Miami would have likely defeated many recent vintages of Northwestern Wildcats in the type of game where Pat Fitzgerald would have immediately been loaded onto a barge after the game and sent to Door County after being mistaken as a live mascot for a cherry orchard. At the same time, it would be nice to see a brand new offense headed by a dynamic quarterback who is electric running in the open field manage an offensive opener more exciting than The Mick McCall Gambit.

If Northwestern can't break 20 points Mike Bajakian will have to file another lawsuit against Northwestern, this time for plagiarism

This week, Northwestern will face off against Duke with an absurd eight pm kickoff on a Friday night. This game will be on national cable television for the benefit of the most degenerate college football fans possible and football maniacs who are too cheap to shell out for Peacock to watch the Packers and Eagles play in a venue even more ridiculous than the lakeside stadium. This game will undoubtedly be a blow for Chicago’s restaurants and nightclubs as late night revelers stay home to watch these two teams try to secure a vital win that will make it easier to qualify for the Spirit Halloween Novelty Dracula Fang Bowl.

Duke and Northwestern have been playing an awful lot lately, and Duke has been running away with the series. They’ve beaten the ‘Cats five consecutive times. Despite the fact that these two schools historically operate in the same sad dregs of the power conferences, I don’t think that playing them every year has congealed this series into a rivalry. But I also know that I am sick of watching Northwestern lose to Duke in football. I would like to see the Wildcats get a decisive win and then start a new tradition where they make the opposing mascot walk the plank into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan.

 

Northwestern lures the infamous Coach K Sheffsky into the stadium only to march him straight to the plank while he makes those hideous death mask faces that he used to make if the official dared to call a foul on his team

Between staff moves, the transfer portal, and the last of the Covid era players lingering for their ninth-year dissertation defenses, it is incredibly difficult to tell how good a team will be year by year.  Duke has a new staff headed by Florida journeyman Manny Diaz and a new transfer quarterback.  They beat an FCS team called "Elon" handily.  Northwestern is playing at home and will outnumber whatever Duke fans manage to float in.  It is at this point very difficult to figure out how confident I am in a Northwestern win and even whether we should Throw Out The Record Books for this quasi-rivalry that is now being played for The Basketball Legacy of Ryan Young.  Looking at the dragons that lurk on Northwestern's Big Ten schedule, they need this one badly.

CHICAGO BEARS FANS HAVE HOPE AND I'M TERRIFIED

Look, the Chicago Bears don't have quarterbacks.  My entire life they have sent out some new jabroni to throw for 167 yards while the Bears lineback the other team into submission.  For a long time, the Bears didn't seem to even care about the position; their approach to quarterbacks seemed to mirror a gang of street toughs menacing Jean Claude Van Damme in that each of them would do a couple of moves before falling down or getting thrown through a plate glass window.  The Bears now have the most hyped rookie quarterback since Trevor Lawrence, a full complement of competent wide receivers, and an offensive coordinator whose previous experience didn't watching Aaron Rodgers run around for 15 seconds and then heave a perfect pass across his body to a wide open guy and then saying "I told him to do that."  I genuinely don't know what to do.

Bears fans have been through the ringer with their last two great quarterback hopes.  Mitch Trubisky was such a pud that he was booed by fans on draft night and spent the entirety of his career here being reminded that he was drafted over Patrick Mahomes.  Justin Fields, handed a nonexistent offensive line and a cadre of wide receivers that were made up of kick returners and XFL players, produced some of the most incredible highlights I've ever seen from a Bears quarterback, but never found rhythm in the passing game.  I put a lot of hope into Fields, who was an absolute monster in college and a person who seemed to bear the inept management of his career that looked almost like sabotage with an admirable grace.  I still am very defensive about Fields and instinctively lash out at anyone who dares to call him a glorified running back.

The 2024 Bears hype has been fueled by their first appearance on Hard Knocks, the HBO and NFL Films documentary series that follows a team in training camp.  I have no idea if this is how Hard Knocks is or because Bears ownership mandated that they remove all of the swearing, but this TV show was unbearably boring.  The NFL Films crew does a great job filming game and practice action-- a sequence from the final episode that seamlessly stitched together a bunch of Caleb Williams practice throws was delightful-- but there is little the gravelly voiced NFL announcer can do to get you hyped up to watching a bunch of guys in athleisure talking in meetings.  It doesn't help that the Bears management and coaching staff have zero personality.  Matt Eberflus, one of the most baffling and oafish coaches I've seen whose blundering through the first half of last season made me astonished that he had not yet been fired, made a dramatic offseason change by growing a beard and getting a new haircut and apparently in NFL logic this makes him good now.

Eberflus had a dramatic beauty transformation from a "find me the girl" henchman to a "get me the launch codes" henchman

Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of pressure.  Bears fans are not just expecting the first good quarterback they've had in most fan's lifetimes, they are expecting a superstar and fast.  It is unlikely that a rookie, even one as talented and magical as Williams and with his supporting cast of star receivers, will be that good that quickly.  Williams, for his part, seems to welcome the hype.  Fields, cast in a similar role, seemed to bear the psychosis of generations of quarterback-scarred Bears fans belching giardeniera into sports radio call lines with a stoic determination.  Now he's trying to win the grimmest quarterback battle in the league against a chalk outline in the shape of Russell Wilson.  As Fields knows, Williams may never be as popular in the city as he is right now.  A lifetime of experience has hardened me against hope that the Bears will ever have a functioning passing attack. 

 

Chicago is already a rabid Bears town above all other professional sports, but the Bears optimism has reached a deranged pitch because the rest of the city's professional sports scene is dreadful.  The Cubs have been floundering all summer making their last desperate lunge for an unlikely wild card spot.  The Bulls have traded their two best veterans for underwhelming returns including a deeply flawed and unpopular young player and seen their two all-stars turn into untradeable albatrosses that have no interest from the league; they need to desperately lose as many games as they can so they don't lose their 2025 draft pick.  The Chicago Sky are still several players away from building anything around their two exciting rookies.  I have been told we have a hockey team here and it is also bad.

But it is impossible to frame how bad professional sports teams are in Chicago without talking about the White Sox.  The White Sox have already lost 109 games.  They seem to win a game once every two weeks.  They are inept in ways that defy belief-- in a recent game their entire outfield and left side of the infield collided in the shallow left field, allowing two runs to score on a routine popup hit by a guy who started the season playing for them as the DH because he was somehow worse at fielding than that.  The 2024 White Sox will finish the season the worst major league team in modern history.  They are run by a cadre of fools led by Jerry Reinsdorf and somehow immortal croaking corpse Tony La Russa, both of whom seem like they would rather have this team become a national laughingstock than find someone who has a functioning understanding of baseball in 2024.  I understand that Reinsdorf is very old and rich enough that he never has to interact with anyone who isn't going to flatter him, but I do not understand why a person would want to continue owning sports teams in a city where the possibility that you might have some weird emergency that requires you to leave your house without a retinue would instantly result in a mob of sports fans trying to capture you and parade you around the city in the type of restraints made famous by the late, great Hannibal Lecter.  To me, that sounds like a bummer.

This city needs a winner badly and they are counting on a rookie quarterback on the team that destroys quarterbacks for as a reflex.  It is natural to go into this Bears season in a defensive crouch, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But life is hard enough as it is.  If Caleb busts, he busts.  If the Bears stink, they stink.  Why not at least have hope, for both football teams that play on the lake.