One of the defining features of the early 2000s that went hand in hand with the increasing spread of the internet was a clear dichotomy between old-fashioned "dumb" and new-fangled, stats-inflected "smart" sports opinions. This manifested itself most clearly in baseball, where an emerging vanguard of stats-focused fans and analysts got a stronger foothold into the mainstream with game-changing revelations like “it is bad to make outs for no reason.” It helped that the opponents were a true rogue’s gallery of oafs and dunderheads: baseball lifers marinated in a cocoon of tobacco juice, mummified local announcers telling decades-old Mickey Mantle anecdotes, and newspaper columnists (there were still locally well-known newspaper columnists) who were photographed grimacing over typewriters and churning out sentence-paragraphs about how there’s only one stat that matters and it’s Heart.
Their argument was based on That's How It's Always Been Done, This Smacks of Math That Belongs in a Mother's Basement, and That's Not How The Mick Would Have Done It even though I have conclusively proven in this blog over the years that the existence of a ballplayer named "Mickey Mantle" was invented by Ken Burns and Billy Crystal as a CIA psy-op on Baby Boomers in 1988. Despite the fact that these people controlled 90% of the narrative in the game and had most of the airtime, they were, to anyone remotely capable of listening to reason, buffoons.
Eventually the rational argument won out. Stats guys replaced grizzled former players in front offices. Managers are now jacked 45 year-olds in hoodies, replacing the pot-bellied, hooch-nosed older breed who all regardless of their actual age appeared to be 77 years old after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, liquor, and the fact that 43% of all plate appearances before 1993 involved a guy getting a baseball thrown at his face because he may have smiled at some point. Baseball broadcasts now feature statistics that come from sophisticated cameras measuring every movement that happens on a diamond. All of the Hat Guy sports columnists took buyouts or retired and have been replaced by a bot dispensing gambling advice.
But what did the baseball fan gain from this? Front offices are obsessed with efficiency meaning they have a justification to avoid signing pricey free agents. The three true outcomes-style of optimized baseball is more boring than the objectively stupider method of having little slap hitters out there running around. Every team is run by a hair gel guy wearing one of those investment vests instead of a crusty baseball creature who makes dumb trades in order to feel alive. Starting pitching is disappearing from the game as dozens of identical guys who throw 98 with nasty movement are beltfed from the bullpen and are constantly bouncing between the majors and minors and subsequently batters just get up there and strike out. It’s enough to make you want to turn on the moneyball movie and hope John Connor has traveled back in time to take out Jonah Hill before he can start replacing production in the aggregate.
Another classic early 2000s "smart guy" sports opinion was to demand a college football playoff. The concept of a college football championship had been, for most of its history, a process where the most boorish second-generation ski-doo salesmen in each state yell at each other and hire airplane billboards in order to essentially demand their team win a national championship. Every once in awhile, teams just go back in history and decide they won a championship like they are forging documents to claim a minor principality in the Holy Roman Empire. The entire sport was based on hollerin’. To a rational person, this was incredibly stupid. Why not just have the best teams play each other?
Finally, college football acted and arranged for the two best teams to meet in a national championship game. Unfortunately there was rarely a consensus about who the two best teams were, and more often than not the answer was more hollerin’ and also bellyaching by the team or teams left out as expressed by rude airplane banners. It seemed to make sense to simply do what every other level of football does and simply have a playoff. So they unleashed a playoff that is constantly growing and threatening to swallow the entire sport.
An institution as corrupt and rickety as college football could not elegantly implement a playoff. They decided to ignore all of the rankings that had traditionally been used and consecrate a conclave of recently retired coaches and athletic directors and the occasional war criminal to disappear themselves into bland executive hotel conference rooms and emerge with their own rankings based on mysterious and whimsical criteria. Every week the square tie knot ESPN guys have to go on TV and guess at what the Committee was thinking by portentously intoning that "By its new rankings, the Committee has shown that it really values ranked road wins" like they are trying to divine the whims of ancient gods by the arrangements of fish bones on a beach.
And once ESPN and the conferences got a whiff of playoff money, the question would not be if the playoff expanded but to how many teams. Last year, the playoffs expanded to twelve teams, including higher seeds getting to play home playoff games. The atmosphere for those games was incredible, but the conferences are too committed to the big bowl games to move the next rounds off of neutral bowl sites. But that is not enough. The Big Ten has now proposed a playoff that consists of 28 teams.
Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti announces plan for 28 team playoff
The problem is not with the playoff itself, but with the way the playoff has devoured the rest of the college football landscape. The bigger the playoff gets, the more its shadow covers the rest of the college football landscape. Unfortunately for ESPN, which along with the Big Ten and SEC is driving the push towards a more NFL-style setup in college football, there are not 32 teams in FBS football but 136. It is impossible for ESPN and the other TV networks to both focus increasingly on the playoff picture that affects a handful of teams while simultaneously trying to build up their inventory of other games, which they market as narratively meaningless.
The playoff is not the entire problem. The constant realignments, the merciless pillaging of rival conferences, and even the desperately-needed implementation of player payment under a grungy and haphazard system governed by collectives of alumni determined by who has the stupidest goatees instead of making these players employees with unions and employee protections-- these are all vandalisms against the sport that the conferences and TV networks are trying to paper over with the spectacle of the playoff, the promise that we will eventually have a champion where 40 years from now a university president standing next to the smirking heir to the only plot of fresh water not yet claimed by an LLM data center can decide that they actually won the 2031 title. Unfortunately, while the so-called "smart" sports argument was to beg for a rational answer to the question of awarding a title in college football, it turns out that maybe having people yell at each other on the radio was the best way to do it.
Before the playoff, the best way to ensure your team was in the playoff was by creating BCS acronym themed signs and also hiring airplanes to fly them over your rivals' games; another way would be to hire a fleet of Napoleonic war ships to denounce your team's rival with a series of saucy semaphore codes.
The playoff is a fun and entertaining mechanism for crowning a college football champion. It also has nothing to do with how college football is experienced on about 100 of the 136 campuses where it is played. The networks and conferences now has to figure out what to do with all of the excess football that has nothing to do with the playoff that is left around like overstock inventory. Perhaps these games never mattered before either in the grand scheme of the mythical national title chase. But they had weight because the sport seemed at least to acknowledge that the title chase was only part of the picture; college football was a self-justifying enterprise because there were drunk college students willing to yell about it and regional rivalries and dumb trophies that meant as much as turning the World's First Monster Truck Lawnmower Boca Raton Bowl into a playoff game between the 34th and 36th seeded teams. As the sport gets rationalized into a more and more efficient way of distributing money to the biggest programs in the two big conferences, that seems to be getting lost.
Early 2000s sports arguers got the college football playoff, advanced stats in baseball, optimized shot distribution in the NBA, and even (and I remember this being sort of part of all of this conversation as well) legalized gambling. But when the optimized and rational idea gets combined with the obsession with chasing efficiency in money, we get obsession with salary cap arcana, bland homogenization of tactics, and idiotic gambling being forced into everything. I'm sure that people arguing for better baseball strategies or normal ways of crowning a football champion at the time were not aware that their cries for rationalization would get swept up with the ruthless and efficient financialization of everything in sports. The one silver lining is that I strongly believe that college football is too stupid to ever be fully contained.
NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL
Whatever they do with the playoff, it is not my problem because I root for Northwestern, a team that will almost certainly not qualify for the playoff no matter how many teams they let in. Every change in college football bodes terribly for the Wildcats, who feel to me like they are sort of floating in the Big Ten and just waiting for the axe to come down and send them into DIII the second the conference can justify it by adding a lawsuit in university form like Florida State or Miami. But here we are in 2025, the Big Ten is one of the two pinnacle quasi-major league conferences in college football, and some of these august teams are going to have to waste their time on the 'Cats and their makeshift stadium that holds 25 people or play in a baseball stadium that regularly devolves into a muddy pit.
Last week, the university finally settled its lawsuit against former coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired in the wake of a widespread hazing scandal where several former players described ugly incidents, many of which inexplicably mentioned the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek. Fitzgerald sued the university, claiming he was shocked, shocked! to see hazing going on in the Northwestern football program and demanded $130 million for costing him his career coaching at the only school in the country where a guy who goes 1-11 is not even on the hot seat.
The last game Pat Fitzgerald won involved him somehow squeezing a crystaline football helmet over his head so he could look like a warlord in a movie where the prop budget involved stealing a bowl from the director's mom.
Fitzgerald seems to have prevailed in his lawsuit. We have no idea how much money the school ultimately paid to Fitzgerald, but they were forced to put out a humiliating press release claiming that Fitzgerald knew nothing about the hazing, possibly because during the time he was the coach, he was one of those Guillermo Del Toro guys whose eyeballs are on his hands and he was always holding something. The ruling presumably clears the way for Fitz to get one of those bullshit "analyst" jobs for disgraced coaches and eventually reenter the coaching ranks for any program in the market for a guy who failed to win a single played game in the United States in his last active season and who will denounce NIL and player movement as some sort of new offshoot of communism.
THE 2025 WILDCATS
There have been two recent vintages of Northwestern teams: those where there is a capable veteran transfer quarterback who can at least manage to keep the offense on the field long enough so the defense doesn't keel over from exhaustion in the third quarter that is good enough to get to a bowl game and teams where there is functionally no quarterback and they win one 0-1 Big Ten games. In David Braun's first year, they had Ben Bryant and a vicious defense, and that was enough to win eight games. Last year, they played offense like they were on the game show Slippery Stairs.
This year, the 'Cats will have heralded transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who was last seen grimly watching his replacement at SMU self-destruct in a playoff game against Penn State while Stone was functionally en route to Evanston. There are some questions about who will catch the ball-- Northwestern's receiving corps is most politely described as "untested"-- and some key losses and transfers on defense, most notably with stalwart captain Xavier Mueller's graduation.
And even is Stone is as good as advertised and the defense is as much of a pain in the ass as it has been in the past, it might not be enough. Northwestern's veteran-quarterback-and-defense program was optimized for the Big Ten West, where teams would simply bash their heads into the locker room walls for 60 minutes and the winner was the last guy to stagger onto the 50 yard line and vomit. The Enormous Ten has taken away these comfortable environs and traded them for an absolutely brutal schedule. Stone will not be hanging out on the sidelines against Penn State this time. They also have to face Oregon at home and Michigan at Wrigley in what has been described as the most annoying football game ever played. I would rather lick the L tracks at Addison than sit with 40,000 power-shushing Michigan fans and I am a person who willingly pays money to go to Cubs games and sit next to a group of 48 year old guys wearing backwards hats and loudly having "tell my lawyer she doesn't get the audi."phone calls.
It is possible that Northwestern is both a much better team this year and also has an equally bad or worse record simply because the schedule is marked "thar be dragons." Even Illinois is good now; the only Big Ten team that anyone has any expectations to beat is Purdue which will either be very bad or can be expected to have the entire roster at one point in the game ensnare itself in a giant net on the sidelines. Either way, I'm not sure how this bodes for David Braun, who unlike his predecessor cannot rely on a legacy of being one of the greatest players in the history of the program to shield him from criticism. Braun's success seemed like a minor miracle under the gross circumstances surrounding the team in 2023, but no one is particularly tied to him and they're opening a shiny new stadium next year. It doesn't help that I have watched a lot of Northwestern football and I could not tell you anything about Braun's personality other than "football coach." Maybe also "regularly photographed with mouth open." In the end, what may save him if he has another rough season is the classic Northwestern conundrum of who else would even be willing to coach here.
The 'Cats will have to open the season on the road against Tulane, a very good team in out of the American Conference. The Green Wave face some uncertainty at quarterback, where they are choosing between latecomer Jake Retzlaff from BYU and former Northwestern quarterback Brandon Sullivan who has been hovering around the Wildcats like a specter. Sullivan, who served as the backup for Bryant, ended up in Iowa last year and came off the bench to lead the Hawkeyes to a dispiriting romp against the 'Cats. It would be at the very least awkward, in my opinion, to see him getting the better of his former team again and hope he does not have three more years of covid-related eligibility so he can barnstorm around the country every year playing for at least one Northwestern opponent that he gets to by traveling via one of those pump railroad carts with a bindle sporting a Tim Beckman-inspired anti-Northwestern symbol.
The Tulane game is a good measuring stick for Northwestern. Tulane is favored to win by about as large of a margin as you'll see from a team outside the Power Four against a Big Ten opponent this time of year. A surprising Northwestern win would instill some hope that they could seriously scrap for a bowl this year. A crummy loss does not mean the season is instantly over, but Northwestern desperately needs every win that that it can manage before facing the Big Ten manglers.
Northwestern's first year in the brutal, unforgiving Enormous Ten was discouraging. And yet, there has been no reason why the Wildcats should have been able to field a competitive program for more or less the entire modern history of the school, and for about 20 years in the new century, they were able to be reliably annoying if not occasionally outright good. The fact that Northwestern will constantly have to face off against playoff powerhouses in whatever stadium they happen to be playing in that year is a blow to their hopes of making crappy bowl games should they still exist, but on the other hand, each of those games offers a rare but tantalizing opportunity to do something incredibly funny.
Unfortunately, the playoff means that, should the Wildcats manage to do the impossible and actually knock off a ranked team in front of an overwhelming number of opposing fans at what is supposed to be a Northwestern home game, it does not have the destructive power that a loss to crummy or mediocre Wildcat team could have in the past. Before the playoff, a loss to Northwestern usually meant an absolute annihilation of that big time opponent's dreams of winning anything. The playoff has meant that teams like Northwestern can't single-handedly derail a opponent's national championship season by punting them into hell but what the playoff can't take away is a bunch of those fans going on the internet demanding that they fire their coach and whining about uncalled holding penalties, which to me is the greatest prize of them all. Let's hope we get one of those this year.
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