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.
