Duck Off

Northwestern looked so lousy in the opening game of the season against Tulane that it seemed that the ‘Cats could struggle against FCS jobber Western Illinois in the home opener on The Lake. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that they could even lose, although you would like to think that even the lowest tier of Big Ten team could easily handle Western Illinois in front of a home crowd of several dozen Northwestern fans and the occasional windsurfer jauntily passing by the stadium. And they did. Northwestern bulldozed their less north and further western neighbors to a 42-7 drubbing and while I am skeptical that this tells us anything other than the difference in the type of athlete that even Northwestern can recruit over their FCS counterparts, I am also making the extremely brave and controversial assertion that it still fun to see them get a buttkicking win before getting fed into the Big Ten woodchipper.

Quarterback Preston Stone recovered from his tough first outing with a much better game with no turnovers and three touchdowns as he and receiver Griffin Wilde (pronounced more like Wildebeest than Wild) torched the Western secondary. Stone needed a little luck to avoid some turnovers– his first pass clipped through a defender’s hands like he was a character in a CD ROM football game before settling into Wilde’s mitts, and he also had a fumble bounce directly back into his hands with the practiced precision of an Australian football player– but he looked closer to the player that we saw in highlight reels from his first three years at SMU.

The highlight of the game for me was in the fourth quarter with the ‘Cats already up 35-0 when backup quarterback Ryan Boe ran the ball and stiff-armed a defender into orbit around Pluto en route to a glorious 58-yard touchdown run in garbage time. In a year that certainly looks like tough sledding for the Wildcats, I will take any play that results in a defensive player all but holding up a Wile E. Coyote sign before getting stiff-armed into oblivion.

Boe makes someone yell "B'oh!"

Unfortunately, the game had one disastrous outcome for Northwestern. Cam Porter, the steady sixth-year captain, injured his knee and will miss the rest of the season. Porter already recovered from a devastating knee injury once and has been a reliable presence in the backfield and on the sidelines since he first entered the program in 2020. With all of his accrued seasons, it is possible that Porter is the most Northwestern player, having played an unfathomable amount of Northwestern football. He’s also been a player that every teammate and coach has raved about, and it is crushing that the injury will likely end his tenure-track career in Evanston unless he is able to successfully apply for a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year by convincing the NCAA that it would be “a great bit.” 

I'm glad Northwestern got to wipe out an opponent in the home opener because the schedule makers have decided to make Northwestern go from blowing out an FCS team to having to face a rabid brontosaurus. Number four Oregon shows up as a profoundly unwanted guest this week.

DUCK SEASON 

Oregon comes to The Lake on Saturday after vaporizing both teams on its schedule. Last week they clobbered Oklahoma State and its coach, the physical manifestation of the Wilson volleyball from Castaway, 69-3. No one expects this to be a competitive game even after the Wildcats diced up the Western Illinois Leathernecks. Like every game Northwestern has to play against one of the terrifying title contenders in the conference, the goal here is not necessarily to win but to annoy and disgust the opponent with a display of what can best be described as Northwestern-style football. The 'Cats, for example, held national champion Ohio State to a 7-0 deficit for a decent part of the first half last season and though the game very quickly turned in the way that you would expect it to go, we at least got to luxuriate in 40,000 sour-faced Ohio State fans glowering and looking to comfort from the guy who puts on silver body paint as they furiously turned to their phones to see if it was legal for Northwestern to repeatedly throw complete passes for nearly an entire half hour.  David Braun, the Maestro of Embarrassing Field Goals, is likely itching to send out his kicking unit down 30 points in the fourth quarter.

The thing to me that is most interesting about this game is what the atmosphere will be like. This is the first time one of the new west coast teams will travel to Evanston and I believe that Oregon is one of the only Big Ten teams where there are fewer alumni and fans of a team living in the Chicago area than people affiliated with Northwestern. Because of the novelty of the setting, because Oregon is really good, and because I suspect some season ticket holders are more eager to turn a tidy profit than watch the team picked up and carried back and forth across the field for four hours, I suspect Oregon fans will still have an overwhelming presence at the game, but there will probably be more of them that had to get on an airplane to get here instead of a Metra train.

This is also Fox’s Big Noon Game that will be nationally televised for some reason and involve Fox and its studio crew of noxious, yelping morons posting up at the lakeside stadium.  Gus Johnson is on the call and I presume that he has covered himself in Memento-style tattoos that say “Northwestern is not Wisconsin” after his embarrassing gaffe in the 2018 Big Ten Championship Game that I constantly bring up because it is one of the rare times Northwestern football was nationally prominent for something other than Allegations, Lawsuits, or Uniform Disrespect.  As I am writing this, Urban Meyer is loose and unaccounted for in the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area, and it is possible he has deactivated his tracking device and Fox Sports personnel have been urgently dispatched to the area's most depressing suburban steak houses. 

I still can't get over the scandal that Urban Meyer allegedly kicked the Jaguars' kicker like he is doling out an evil ironic punishment like a direct-to-video horror movie villain.

Oregon apparently has an enormous floating duck that it occasionally deploys, and there have been calls for it to appear on the lake during this game. I think it is a reasonable response that Northwestern fans immediately form into a Waterworld-style jetski gang to take that thing down as a warning to other teams with inflatables and also to P.J. Fleck.

 

September 2025, Oregon is now master of the Big Ten. Only the Northwestern Armada fleet stands before them- Lakes are now battlefields.

College football is goofy and unpredictable, but defeating this Oregon team seems like a nearly impossible task-- a win against Oregon would be the largest upset in the modern history of the program or at least second to the Wildcats' win over Any Football Team in 1982. The Ducks will be competing for the national championship while Northwestern looks like their goal will be winning a Big Ten game. 

Oregon has not been in the Big Ten long enough to annoy me. In fact, Oregon has never beaten Northwestern as the 'Cats hold a 1-0 record over them from a 14-10 road victory in 1974.  While I am sure that I will eventually grow disgusted with the Ducks after being exposed to them long enough, I would rather have them win over any other traditional Big Ten power whose harrumphing, gloating fans have infected Ryan Field since I have been going to games.

If somehow Northwestern by some minor miracle manages to win this game, I will write and release a single called “Body Clocks” on the most appropriate label.

THE CHICAGO BULLS DROP THE GIDDEY BOMB

Tuesday was a rough day for Chicago sports fans who had waited all offseason to watch their supposed offensive genius head coach and highly-touted second year quarterback only to instantly be reminded that they root for the Chicago Bears and will have to endure what looks like another season of grim Bears-style football.  That was the day that, with the sports radio lines clogged with men choking on the wettest beefs legally available while furiously calling for Tyson Bagent, the Chicago Bulls announced to an already deflated and miserable fanbase that they will have to put up with Josh Giddey for four years.

Giddey, a 22 year-old Australian who is already entering his 4th year in the NBA, had been in a standoff with the Bulls all summer.  The Bulls traded for him by sending beloved superstar role player Alex Caruso, a brilliant defensive menace, to the Okalahoma City Thunder straight up without even getting a token draft pick.  Caruso instantly became a key part of the Thunder's championship team while the Bulls were once again 86'd from the play-in tournament the Miami Heat as is their custom, this time by a profoundly crappy and injured Heat team that had not beaten the Bulls all season.  

Giddey reportedly demanded starting point guard money but as a restricted free agent in a league where no one had cap space and also have access to numbers that say that he is not particularly good that apparently elude the Bulls' analytics department that I think is just one guy playing spider solitaire who occasionally sends the front office one of those fake spread sheets generated by the Boss Button on the NCAA tournament streaming website, so he had little leverage. The result was the exact deal that everyone expected the Bulls to give him for months but arrived at only after his team and the Bulls exchanged vaguely hostile emails for three months.

Giddey is a weird player.  He is very big for a point guard at 6'8" and he is an excellent rebounder and passer who routinely flirts with triple doubles and puts up combinations of stats that allow the Bulls broadcast to put up graphics that say things like "the only people who have ever scored 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 16 assists twice in a calendar month under the age of 22 are Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and  Josh Giddey" even if he put up those numbers in a depressing loss to the Charlotte Hornets. He largely steers a fun, uptempo style of play installed by Billy Donovan after the Bulls ran out of NBA-caliber defensive players last season and is responsible for one of the greatest Stacey King calls since Andres Nocioni dunked on a backup center and he started screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY FAMILY GUY" because of the center's oblong-shaped head reminded him of the baby character.

On the other hand, Giddey despite his size is an abominable defender, a lackluster shooter, and an oafish dribbler who is constantly giving the ball to the opponents. He is also not particularly athletic for an NBA player; he moves like he is a recently-enchanted broom from the movie Fantasia.  His game is pretty much the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art NBA star in 2025, and it's possible that what he can't do is much worse for a team than his box score stuffing contributions.  You can read from actual Basketball Knowers about Giddey rather than taking my word for it; I couldn't even watch Giddey's disastrous first half of the season because the Bulls played on a channel that I needed to buy an antenna to watch and now shows nothing but low-rent MMA events that look like montages in one of the several dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies where he enters an underground fighting tournament.

The Bulls had a star for years with obvious shortcomings in his game that fans and the general NBA world fixated on in Zach LaVine, but LaVine was better at the much more important skill of scoring than Giddey is at anything, and the Bulls were barely able to give him away because of his crummy defense and mediocre playmaking.  I don't expect that the Bulls will do much better with Giddey as the focal point.

There are a couple of troublesome aspects of the Giddey contract in the broader strategic sense.  One of them comes from the annoying metagame involving the Bulls salary cap.  Giddey, whose four-year $100 million deal is fairly modest for a starting point guard, is still making a few million dollars more per year than the Bulls could have perhaps gotten away with if they had really pressured him.  I don't want to care about how much money players make nor root for front offices to squeeze them, but in a salary cap league where individual payments are apparently so important that there are very popular and influential podcasts where guys just list off how much money everyone makes for hours every day like a bizarre numbers station, it is true that any dollar Giddey makes theoretically takes away the Bulls' flexibility to bring in better players to put around him-- this is of course assuming that bringing in good players was the goal of the Bulls instead of Arturas Karnisovas doing a weird avant-garde art project with a basketball roster to prove a point that eludes me.

I am also very sorry to bring up Giddey's effect on the the profoundly depressing metagame of tanking.  Giddey and the style the Bulls play with him is probably good enough for them to win enough regular season games to take them out of the running for what analysts say is a draft laden with potential stars near the top.  That doesn't mean they will have no shot at drafting a Rowdy Boozer Son-- assuming the Bulls have another season hovering around the desolate environs of the Eastern Conference play-in tournament race, they could still jump up in the draft order.  The Bulls were apparently a coin flip with the Mavericks away from landing prized Duke freshman Cooper Flagg; the state of the Chicago Bulls is such that they are even getting their asses kicked by coin flips.  I personally hate tanking and find the idea of wasting everyone's time trying to intentionally lose a disgusting pursuit, but it pains me to admit that it is also the most viable way to land a superstar unless you are the fucking Los Angeles Lakers.

The fact that Giddey is merely a flawed basketball player who won't make the Bulls better than mediocre is not something that really bothers me since that is basically every basketball player the Bulls roster. Even as the Bulls have been a largely crummy and enervating to watch the last few years, the players on the team seemed to be good guys who liked each other and had fun playing uninspiring basketball. Giddey, who came to the Bulls under a cloud of gross allegations, is not someone I particularly want to root for, and it's a bummer to have my favorite team chained to him for four years.  Fortunately, the Bulls are going to vanish from my TV unless I pay an exorbitant amount of money to watch Jerry Reinsdorf's horrible sports teams, so perhaps the Josh Giddey Bulls will no longer be my problem.

Worst Dressed

There is not much to say about Northwestern’s opening game against Tulane other than they got their butts kicked very badly and it stunk. The Green Wave won 23-3 and it could have been worse than that. Maybe only General Edward Parkenham can claim to have had more unpleasant days in New Orleans.

The Northwestern offense, which even in good years merely exists to distastefully score points because it is not technically legal to win a college football game by a contest of sprinting into an opposing running back the most, did not impress in the debut of new transfer quarterback Preston Stone. Stone threw four interceptions and lost a ball after getting sacked– the Wildcats were only able to successfully run one of their first three plays without turning the ball over which sounds grim but if you look at the totality of the game the Wildcats managed to run a play without giving up the ball about 92% of the time.

The ‘Cats did manage one decent drive down inside the five yardline, but they elected to kick a field goal. Strategically I suppose there is nothing wrong with getting some points to narrow the score to 7-3 in the first quarter; on the other hand, based on how Northwestern’s offense has performed for the last decade, I would like to see them throw caution to the wind instead of assuming that they will just drive down the field again when most Wildcat possessions resemble a Labor of Hercules. David Braun is the Maestro of Cowardly Field Goal Attempts, and next time they get to a fourth down inside the five the crowd should clap politely as Braun enters the field of play in a tailed tuxedo, takes out a baton, and then cues the field goal unit with the wild élan of the great Leonard Bernstein to rapturous ovations.

Critics say Braun's interpretation of "Sending In the Punt Team" is "too American." 

The game would have been miserable to watch, but fortunately due to the Big Ten’s media deal that scatters games across networks and streaming services with the reckless abandon of an eighteenth century French Marquess tossing coins from his carriage while focusing entirely on how he plans to destroy his rival by making several subtle yet cutting remarks about inability to align his wig correctly, I was unable to get this game on TV. It was just me, WGN Radio's “Mr. Cat” Dave Eanet, and various household tasks punctuated by a regular drumbeat of interceptions.

Tulane is an excellent team with ambitions to claim a playoff spot out of the American Conference and Northwestern is at best the second-worst team in the Big Ten. But the game dealt a dispiriting blow to anyone hoping to see the Wildcats pushing for a bowl berth or even being able to stay on the field against lesser Big Ten opponents. The only heartening thing left to believe is that Northwestern came out similarly flat against Rutgers in the 2023 opener that was scheduled as part of a “You’ll Even Watch This Slop” Opening Weekend. The ‘Cats were towed around the field in that game too, and their performance along with the looming stench of scandal made it seem like the football program would simply be packed up in a truck and left in a warehouse and if anyone showed up to the stadium to watch a game there’d just be a guy there shouting back to some people in the back “Football? Hey anyone remember at football team here? Oh? Those guys? Oh, yeah. He said they left.” Instead, they managed to win seven games, crush the Badgers in Madison, and win a bowl game. 

The game could have been a normal low-key Northwestern butt-stomping, but all of the attention after the game had nothing to do with anything that happened on the field but with the jerseys the teams were wearing. After his Green Wave had finished mopping up the Wildcats, Tulane coach Jon Sumrall said that Northwestern had denied their request to wear white jerseys, which were the jerseys Tulane had worn in their first game after Hurricane Katrina had displaced them from their home stadium 20 years earlier. Northwestern claims they only received the request on August 17th and did not have time to change their uniforms without saying whether or not they were willing to. “When you show disrespect to the city of New Orleans, that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Sumrall said of the sartorial dustup. 

It seems reasonable to ask why Northwestern would not simply do what they could to accommodate this request and why it would even be a question but the I believe that the answer runs into extremely stupid Football Logic about the questionable strategic benefit of wearing white in hot, humid weather. Northwestern likely wanted to aid its plodding, snow-conditioned players any way they can to cope with the Louisiana heat; I have been told it is illegal for linebackers on the field to fan themselves like it is an early twentieth century courtroom drama. Perhaps Northwestern’s coaches felt like Sumrall was himself cynically chasing this advantage with his request; more likely, they underestimated or did not care about the importance of Tulane’s white uniforms as a symbol of New Orleans’s resilience in the aftermath of the hurricane.

What seemed to happen by my own reading of events as some guy who has no inside information or insight into how the team operates is that whoever made the uniform decisions really valued the infinitesimal perceived cooling power of white uniforms over the risk of looking like giant assholes. While I understand why Sumrall was upset about the uniforms, I do think it was unfair of him to not mention that the Wildcats made up for it by charitably handing the ball to Tulane players repeatedly.

Northwestern has upgraded its uniform debacles to Insensitive from Depicting What Appears To Be The Aftermath of a Massacre Perpetrated by a Public Domain Captain America 

After dealing with dozens of lawsuits from players and firing a coach and then getting sued by him and also the offensive coordinator (I am unaware of the results of the Mike Bajakian lawsuit, but if it ends anything like the Fitzgerald suit, the university will be forced to put out a press release with then-athletic director Derrick Gragg officially apologizing for disparaging his "Cats Against The World" t-shirt), it seems like the Northwestern football program is only in the news when doing something dumb or embarrassing. As a fan, I would very much like to support a team that has normal college football scandals and am willing to throw myself at the mercy of the NCAA by illegally buying a football player a burrito. That's the kind of thing Northwestern should be about instead of seeing headlines like "Wildcats Coach: No Disrespect Meant To Tulane."

The Wildcats get a chance to get back on track with their home opener at The Lake against Western Illinois. The Leathernecks are an FCS squad and the hope is that Northwestern will easily defeat them, Stone can gain some confidence, and the team will not get into a feud with them over the jersey selection. I would have thought these teams would have played a bunch of times dating back to the early years of the twentieth century, but they've only played once, a 24-7 Northwestern victory that happened in 2014. That's not the sepia toned history I was hoping for-- in fact I was at that game and have just now remembered that it was the game where Pat Fitzgerald called three successive timeouts at the end of the first half to successfully ice the Western kicker, which I remember that because I know that I badly photoshopped a picture of Fitzgerald's face onto Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Mr. Freeze. I wrote all of that without even looking at the post even though a few weeks ago I went for a bike ride for several hours and left all of my keys just hanging out in the lock on the front door.

These FCS games are never that fun. Even if they win fairly comfortably, there's usually a nagging feeling that they should be winning by more. Only a win so convincing that the Western Illinois coach takes the team and leaves at halftime only leaving a note that this isn't fun anymore is satisfying. There is also the risk that they could actually lose. Northwestern has two losses to FCS teams on its XBOX Achievement page and crazy stuff happens in football-- the 2016 team that went 5-4 in the Big Ten and beat Pittsburgh in a bowl game lost to Illinois State on a last-second field goal after being held to seven points. There is nothing worse than a team losing to a designated jobber opponent after paying them millions just to show up unless this happens to another Big Ten team in which case it is extremely funny.

AT LEAST WE ALL GOT TO SEE BILL BELICHICK EAT SHIT

College football is a huge business and commands tens of millions of eyeballs, but for ESPN and college football media that is not enough and there is nothing more exciting for them than when a famous NFL Guy deigns to return to the college ranks. For many years, that person was Deion Sanders, the brash, larger than life NFL superstar who loves the spotlight and used an entire college football program as a vehicle to launch his sons' NFL careers. Though Deion has somewhat unexpectedly stuck around at Colorado even after his son Shedeur went pro through a process that turned ESPN's draft guru Mel Kiper, Jr. into the Joker on national television, ESPN has been laser focused on a new coach, Patriots mastermind Bill Belichick.

Belichick has the opposite media profile from Sanders. He spent his decades in New England glowering on the sidelines, disdainfully giving curt, contemptuous answers to the press, and acted like he would prefer to call games from a cave where he could be alone with his special teams film from 1971. He has no charisma. And yet, because the Patriots won championships with a joyless factory-like efficiency throughout this 2000s, he has become extremely famous. Belichick could have retreated back to Nantucket to enjoy his riches away from the spotlight but unfortunately his legendary quarterback left, his post-Brady Patriots teams plummeted in the standings, he got essentially fired by the team owner who he was also feuding with, and he could not get another NFL job because the 2020s version of Bill Belichick who has locked himself in a football bubble and will only hire the sycophants and flunkies whose football knowledge is sealed in amber around the year 2008 or his own very upsetting sons is not really up for coaching anymore, and this clearly has made him go insane and desperately try to chase the high of being thought of as a mastermind and genius again. Belichick, out of ideas, went back to school.

Belichick arrived to enormous fanfare at the University of North Carolina over the summer but with an uncharacteristic media circus. That is because Belichick also has new developments in his personal life as he is dating a much younger lady who is also taking a prominent position promoting his personal brand. That relationship came to prominence while Belichik was simultaneously installing himself at the head of UNC Football and promoting one of those bullshit "Winning Winners Who Win The Winning Ways in Football... And In Business" books that old coaches publish and then talk about in depressing mandatory corporate conferences where they are paid more money for a 90 minute talk comparing business-to-business sales to scoring touchdowns than you and I will make for a decade.  His appearances with Jordon Hudson that involved her yelling at a reporter doing a fluff piece for CBS News, a multipart investigation by Pablo Torre about Hudson and her role at UNC that raised questions of whether she was technically banned from the facilities and also for some reason revealed the location of the rental house where Belichick was caught shambling shirtlessly from by a doorbell camera, made this a major sports story over the summer. 

Torre tried to emphasize the less tawdry parts of the story, emphasizing that Belichick is now an employee of the state of North Carolina, but I think most people can admit that Belichick was in the news because of the prurient tabloid interest in the gruffest, most joyless man in the NFL swanning around with a lady young enough to be his granddaughter who is trying to launch a media branding career centering on a miserable sweatshirt-ogre who is only willing to talk publicly about obscure punting rules. I've personally made fun of this whole thing obliquely and directly in a post that contains the two grossest sentences I've ever shared publicly and therefore haven't really posted about much because I am afraid people will yell at me.

But the other dimension of the story that came to a head Monday night was that Belichick, after all of the stories and the attention, would have to coach a football game. Belichick, the great NFL Mastermind was coming to show college teams how the football is played along with his most unemployable henchmen and an unknown number of his grim, post-apocalyptic sons, and when ESPN put UNC on national television on Monday night of a holiday weekend the Tarheels got absolutely smoked by TCU. It was not only very funny but also one of the best online sports events we've had in awhile as the entire internet together to celebrate watching some nasty geriatric dickhead completely annihilated in one of the few endeavors we have left where nasty geriatric dickheads can't simply lie and say "actually we won the game and in fact won it very strongly."  

LOOKING WESTWARD 

The 'Cats will need to get their act together against Western Illinois because #6 Oregon comes to The Lake the next week, and things do not get much easier after that.  While Northwestern has already started off the season on the worst possible footing, the only shred of hope is that there is a whole season still ahead of them with opportunities to improve, to possibly shock an opponent, and to also hastily apologize to someone else.