Northwestern Shuts Out Purdue With Oozeball

After Northwestern went into Penn State, beat them at their own homecoming, and decapitated their coach, it would be understandable if they struggled against Purdue. It was a big week, the last game at The Lake, and Purdue Pete was lurking in a house of mirrors with dozens of Petes leering at every angle waiting to spring his trap. But it turns out it wasn’t anything to worry about because Purdue was terrible in this game, Northwestern completely suffocated them and came away with a demoralizing shutout.

It’s clear at this point that Northwestern’s game plan is to slowly drip onto the other team like a slow basement leak that causes foundation damage. They come at teams like one of those lumbering slasher movie villains who you think you can outrun simply by managing to walk at a brisk pace. They ooze. In the first half, Northwestern held the ball for more than 22 minutes in the first half and allowed 57 yards and scored every single one of their 19 points. It was excessive. They only needed to score one point to win this game.

A foundational text for Zach Lujan's offense

Nothing Northwestern is doing is complicated. They are going to send Caleb Komolafe to smash into linebackers. They are going to send Joe Himon and Dashun Reeder to also smash into linebackers. They are going to throw the ball almost exclusively to one guy who is pretty much always open. And they’re going to try to take away big plays on defense and let other teams methodically try to work down the field until they screw up and have to kick the ball or give it to a Wildcat defender; last Saturday we saw three Purdue turnovers, highlighted by 291 pound defensive tackle Brendan Flakes leaping up and snagging a pass. This is the same way Northwestern has been pretty decent since the spread lost its novelty and Northwestern looked exactly like it was being run by a bruising suburban linebacker whose solution to every problem was bruising suburban linebacking. They even ran a classic doomed special teams trick play that the Wildcats pull off about as successfully as a teenager trying a skateboard trick at a strip mall with a single stair.

Pat Fitzgerald was there, by the way. Northwestern honored its 1995 Rose Bowl team and it was a mystery whether he would show up, what with the university firing his ass and saying he was responsible for the awful stories that were coming out almost daily about the football team and him suing the university in a shockingly bitter end to the coaching tenure of the school’s most important sports figurehead and Doing Things The Right Way mascot. But money heals all wounds, apparently. Whatever bitterness existed between Northwestern and Pat Fitzgerald seems to have been put aside at least for one day after he and the school settled their lawsuit for what I assume is a lot of money and Northwestern having to issue an official “actually Pat Fitzgerald was shocked SHOCKED to see hazing going on in this football facility” statement. So there he was, looking older and more weathered than the last time he was in public, smiling and waving, the face of Northwestern football in everything that it has come to represent.

Fitzgerald in happier times, before he had ever heard of cell phones and the RPO

The game was the swan song for The Lake. In the end, despite nasty forecasts, it did not rain. The game was played in unseasonably warm and humid conditions in very seasonable October gloom. It staved off  the sudden descent of autumn by one day. They’ll pack away the extra bleachers and video boards and yowling sound effects and return the field to its primary purpose which is to unleash the power of Northwestern’s lacrosse team on hapless opponents. They'll host next year's lacrosse final four at The Lake, and hopefully the 'Cats will be there. The Chicago Stars (an inexplicable naming downgrade from the Red Stars that is the type of thing that happens when a Ricketts is in charge) will be playing there next summer. 

The Lake was a wonderful novelty, a beautiful setting, and a very silly college football stadium. On a clear day, it was easier to see the skyline of downtown Chicago from the north endzone seats than plays happening on the field if they happened to be one of the many massive poles in the way.  There was nothing like it in college football, which was fitting for Northwestern, which has never felt like its games are happening in the Big Ten. When you think of a major college fcootball game, you think of maximalism, of massive crowds and screaming fans, and pageantry. Northwestern has never been like that. There are just not enough fans. The point of Ryan Field is that it never made a Northwestern game feel like an event– tickets were affordable, it was easy to get there, and they occasionally would run out of things like hot dog buns and end up selling loose hot dogs in a paper cup. The whole feeling was that none of this was a big deal.

The new stadium will not have that cozy, neighborhood feeling. It will be fancy and expensive. It will not be rusting like a disused WWII freighter or (presumably) rely so heavily on decorate tarps. And yet, no matter how much money Pat Ryan spends, it will never feel like a Big Ten home game because there are just not enough Northwestern fans to outnumber opposing fans. Maybe instead of spending close to a billion dollars on a stadium, they should have just paid people to show up in purple like nineteenth century ward bosses rigging elections. They could hand them laminated cards with important Northwestern Guys to reference, with fans comparing notes and saying things like "who'd you get? I got Chi Chi Ariguzo." 

It's time to start using the revolutionary ideas of early 20th century Chicago aldermen "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna in Northwestern revenue sports 

Under my ambitious Bribing Fans plan, you could eventually turn on a Northwestern game on the radio and actually be able to tell whether it's a home game. It’s worth a shot– certainly it’s better than building a fancy stadium and making people rob a bank for the privilege of getting screamed at by Iowans.

ELECTRIC NEBRASKA

Here’s the set of circumstances behind last week’s Minnesota-Nebraska game on Friday night. Minnesota’s last three games involved squeaking by a lousy Rutgers team, getting run over by the Ohio State steamroller, and narrowly beating the same Purdue team that we saw last Saturday look like it was having the rules of football explained to them during extensive TV timeouts. Nebraska had beaten a Maryland team fading from its September mirage, beat Michigan State, and lost narrowly to Michigan, but managed to keep a toehold on the #25 AP ranking. So of course, Minnesota absolutely crushed the Huskers, holding them to 36 rushing yards, no touchdowns, and an anemic 3.9 yards per play. There’s a simple explanation for this: the Big Ten West is alive.

The Big Ten may have gotten rid of its roiling crab bucket division, but as long as these middling, corn-fed programs get to smash into each other a few times a year, it is impossible to predict the results. The last thing you want to do as a ranked team is go into Minneapolis on a Friday night to play a team that just had to throw down a smoke bomb to escape from Purdue. For a long time, Big Ten West teams would have to bus down to Evanston, play in front of an overwhelming crowd of their own fans on a cold, gray morning, and lose 13-10 after a flurry of overtime scoring. Every team had to lose a game to Iowa with one combined touchdown. Northwestern and Nebraska, for a solid decade or so, committed to playing the stupidest football game you have ever seen at each other. Nothing the Big Ten and its pots of money and ludicrous westward expansion has done has been able to stop the Big Ten West from Big Ten Westing when the schedule allows.

Once again, Northwestern has to play a team that is frustrated after losing a game in which they were favored with some coach drama. Matt Rhule, who looks like the thought experiment “what if Phillip Seymore Hoffman played a college football coach,” is a rumored top candidate for the Penn State job that opened up after the Nittany Lions made the mistake of scheduling Northwestern for homecoming. Rhule played at Penn State and coached at Temple. I have no idea if Rhule is interested in the Penn State job when he is ensconced at a Nebraska program where the expectations are currently to clean up Scott Frost’s vomit, but if he is, it was probably not a good idea to immediately go out and get wiped out by P.J. Fleck’s Acronym Squad*. I can't predict what Penn State's gas station barons and anti-woke hoagie magnates are thinking about their coach search, but I would have to imagine a loss to Northwestern would affect Rhule’s job prospects after that was what did in James Franklin; regardless of the effect on Rhule's future employment, I think we all can admit that it would be very funny.

Phillip Seymore Hoffman as Matt Rhule reenacting the shut the fuck up scene from Punch Drunk Love on the headset with his offensive coordinator 

*Technically it's the A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Squad, the first A stands for Acronym and P.J. Fleck is hard at work consulting his Acronymicon for the rest

Nebraska remains heavily favored in this game despite sporting identical records 5-2 records with Northwestern ahead in the conference standings. It does not seem like anyone takes the Wildcats and their Just Sit On Them offense particularly seriously even after vastly outperforming preseason expectations. Nebraska still has highly-ranked quarterback Dylan Raiola, whom I know mainly from his close emulation of Patrick Mahomes that, at least last season, involved styling and dressing himself like the Kansas City superstar. I appreciate that, and I encourage more quarterbacks to do this; I think every Purdue quarterback should be encouraged, if not required, to wear his hair exactly like Kyle Orton.

 Welcome to Purdue, please take this copy 1678 copy of Haire Styles, Beardes and Moustachios for the Vigorous Manne to your barber

Northwestern needs one more win to get to a bowl game. Nebraska needs to get the taste of Minnesota field turf out of their mouth. Once again, Northwestern is a “get right” game for a Big Ten opponent. We’ll see if Nebraska, Northwestern’s second Big Ten opponent that isn’t currently either spiraling into organizational chaos or Purdue can manage to figure out how to stop the ‘Cats from running at them for seven minutes at a time. They haven’t been able to get right against them yet.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

Big Ten Commissioner Tony Pettiti told Marco Polo that he would tell him about Big Ten cities and Marco Polo would tell him if they existed. "Here is an enormous, teeming city," Pettiti said. "Buildings pile up next to buildings. All manner of people that have ever existed bounce off each other on unimaginable business.  And yet, despite their differences, there is one thing that unites them: wanting to watch small, regional football teams from suburbs or even small towns nowhere near them on television. Every single week, they huddle together around television sets fervently hoping to see their team or other teams from cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away play, and in their excitement they are willing to buy the products they see on screen: extra large men's pants, various braces for sore limbs, farm implements. Every person in these gigantic cities where they are crammed next to each other in small apartments will order a backhoe or one  one of those string spinners used for weeds."

"Great Commissioner, I have not seen such a city," Marco Polo says.  I have seen a city where no one sleeps, where dreams become corporeal and mingle with the half-awake people. Where the distinction between dream and reality becomes blurred and so it has been for generations, no one quite able to determine whether they are in the city or in its familiar but convoluted double, where connections between the dreamers are ephemeral and yet somehow more lasting than in cities where people can differentiate between them. They float on gossamer streets that might not be there and nothing is where it is supposed to be. Those are the cities I have seen."

"You're always seeing cities like that," the Commissioner said.

Cities and Memory: Linka

Linka, the great city of the past.  Everyone in Linka knows that the city had once had been astonishingly prosperous, covered in riches, everyone happy and learned.  The love of the city's past is palpable.  They say that anyone born in Linka or who lives there long enough, no longer even sees the city as it exists, but in their mind's eye they travel the great thoroughfares and boulevards in their own parades celebrating the city's former glories.

Conversation in Linka only consists of the recitation of these former triumphs.  The residents' devotion to ancient scholars and poets and architects who built the great libraries and gardens and palaces is so clear that these great figures seem alive and well in Linka.  Their teachings and personalities have been passed down so thoroughly it is as though they can still speak. But they are not alive. Years of interpretation and scholarship and popular bastardization have created competing versions of the same figures. People in Linka sometimes argue over the merits of these great ancestors, arguments that lead to shoving matches and the inevitable interjection of passesby, who proclaim that the celebrated old figures would never shove, except for Balon The Shover who had perfected the art beyond the comprehension of any contemporary Linkan. "To shove like that is barbarity unworthy of Balon The Shover," is a refrain that is sadly more common than ever in contemporary Linka.

You would think that Linka is covered in monuments and statues and museums to honor the glories of the the city's storied past. But the city is barren. No one can agree when the golden age of the city was. Every person seems to have a different idea of when Linka was a guiding light to the world and when it has shrunk to its present decrepitude. Any meeting where someone proposes erecting a monument descends into denunciations and recriminations and the inevitable bout of shoving. Even after a particularly vigorous bout of shoving when someone suggested building a statue to honor Balon The Shover, a small but insistent faction denounced Balon and claimed that it was actually his successor Pleton The Pusher that had perfected the art, and that whatever shoving Balon The Shover was doing was low, brutish calisthenics. It took three days for the people of Linka to stop shoving each other. A similar episode happened after a suggestion to dedicate a street to Uliot The Chest Poker.

The city of Linka as it presently exists can never compare to the glories of the city in the past, and that makes the people who live there disgusted with their own city. They cannot build anything new because they fear it would compare unfavorably to what was there before, but they cannot admit that the desolate ruins of old, rotting buildings can ever be destroyed because of what they meant. The people of the city lead double lives, traipsing around the imagined city of past glory in their own heads while they grow ever more upset with the state of their own city as it exists, the one they traverse every day.  Linka is a city trapped within a million other cities that perhaps never existed, smothering the present. 

Northwestern Consultants Announce Restructuring of Penn State Football Operations

You would think that losing to Northwestern would get more coaches fired. But much to the chagrin of deranged message board posters who not only demand that every coordinator, coach, and official not only get fired but repeatedly run over by a truck with decorative testicles after their team suffers the indignity of a loss to Northwestern, it hasn’t really happened. Georgia Southern had to deliver the knockout blow to the infamous vomit-braggart Scott Frost after he traveled all the way to Ireland to lose to the worst Northwestern team in decades. Lovie Smith lost his job after getting trucked by a legitimately good Northwestern team in the brain-fog hallucination season in 2020, but that was more for his body of work than any specific Northwestern loss.* But last weekend, the Purple Reaper reached out and grabbed James Franklin, who will have to suffer the indignity of getting paid more money to not coach Penn State than anyone reading this will ever see in their life.

It is not a good sign when your coach is making the Brad Pitt Burn After Reading face on the sidelines, in my opinion 

*If anything, Lovie should have probably gotten canned after his six-win Illini got clobbered at home by a cratering, two-win Northwestern team that refused to even try passing the ball, one of the funniest and most satisfying Northwestern wins in recent memory. I can't think of a better way to describe the 2019 Illini than the sentence "They lost 35-20 to Cal in the Red Box Bowl."

This is likely the one time this season Northwestern football will be In The News for anything they do on the field, but almost nothing I saw about this game had anything to say about the ‘Cats getting what for now is a big win. The football media, as far as I can tell, viewed this game as solely about Penn State’s fall and how mad their fans are and whether James Franklin would get fired and how much money would it take to fire him and where would Penn State get the money to fire him and how funny it is that major college football programs have to meet a certain threshold of money to fire coaches they are mad at like it is a powerup in a video game where you have to amass a certain number of points to unlock the Fire His Ass menu and then once he got fired who would replace James Franklin. If Northwestern’s football team was mentioned at all, it was like they were an anonymous swarm of locusts who just came in and ate the opposing coach.

Beaver Stadium after the game 

Well, Northwestern was not just a malevolent force summoned to destroy James Franklin. They won that game. They beat up on Penn State. That was not easy! I don’t care how many central Pennsylvania psychopaths have spent the last week fighting each other for air rights to send the rudest airplane banner over Beaver Stadium or how logy Penn State has looked all season or the fact that their own stadium on homecoming was filled with angry bodypainted maniacs hopped up on vodka-infused hoagies who spitefully wanted the team to lose and that the Penn State team was flashing red like a boss with few hit points remaining. The ‘Cats still had to win a game over a team that has highly-rated recruits and NFL guys on the roster no matter how much they were reeling.

Northwestern won narrowly but they did not look overmatched. Their offensive line opened up holes for Caleb Komolafe to batter whatever linebacker or safety was unlucky enough to run into him. Their defense flew around and tackled Penn State's star running backs. They survived a blocked punt and a muffed punt return next to their own end zone. And no one on Penn State could cover Griffin Wilde, who galloped freely through their secondary on seemingly every big third down. The score could have been more lopsided had Joseph Himon not wisely decided to pass up a sure touchdown to wind down the clock. It is true that Penn State contributed with a virtuosic series of boneheaded, back-breaking penalties to extend Northwestern drives; it is also true that James Franklin, the Maestro of Clock Management, returned for one final valedictory masterpiece where he just sort of sat there watching the clock tick down for no apparent reason. Those are things that happen in football games, and the ‘Cats took advantage.

Penn State fans got what they wanted. Now they have to watch as their school goes through the skullduggery and subterfuge and rounds of fat new contracts handed out to every other name coach on the market and updates from people who use airplane tracking software that happens when a slot opens up at a big time program like Penn State. Franklin offered Nittany Lions fans a very good, relevant program that was never quite able to be one of the handful of teams capable of winning a national championship, a set of circumstances that is almost precisely calculated to drive fans of very good football programs into the ecstatic throes of madness. The program is now in its Booster Season when the most prominent people involved in Penn State are not coaches or football players but various ATV dealers and fracking magnates and the oily money-demons who are all in private Fire His Ass group chats. All I can hope is that the outcome for everyone involved is very funny.

James Franklin was an enjoyable foil for Northwestern. Northwestern first encountered him at Vanderbilt during one of the series Northwestern regularly schedules with the other private school power conference dregs. The ‘Cats beat Franklin’s Commodores in Evanston in 2012 and, weeks later, Vanderbilt canceled two future games with Northwestern presumably because the SEC added a conference game but as far as I am concerned they canceled the games from a fortified Nashville-area bunker because they were terrified of the power and prowess of Northwestern Wildcat Football.

But Franklin could not escape the ‘Cats for too long. He took over Penn State in 2014, where the Wildcats crushed Penn State as their homecoming opponent (Franklin suffers what I assume is the unique indignity of suffering losses to Northwestern in his first and last homecoming games). The ‘Cats also took Penn State down in 2015 in Evanston, an all time great Franklin Clock Management Game where he failed to take any timeouts and allowed Northwestern to wind the clock down all the way down before Jack Mitchell booted a game-winning field goal, which pointlessly took away any chance his team would get to come back. This man loves to squint at a clock, paralyzed into inaction as events spiral out of his control. He is the Hamlet of college football.

Franklin preparing to recite his famous Two Minutes Left soliloquy

Franklin got his revenge in the next three meetings, none of which were close, but he ends his Penn State tenure with a 3-3 record against Northwestern at Penn State. He has an all-time losing record against the ‘Cats counting his Vanderbilt days. I haven't looked it up, but I'm confident that there's not any coach in the twenty-first century making the kind of money Franklin made that carries a lifetime losing record against Northwestern around. The Wildcats put his ass in the blender.

I have nothing else to say about the Penn State job search other than one of the rumored leading candidates is Matt Rhule. Northwestern plays at Nebraska in two weeks and has the opportunity to do something extraordinarily funny.

SLOP SEASON 

The Penn State win has changed Northwestern’s season. The ‘Cats are now 4-2 with six games remaining. In a year where I looked at the schedule like F. Murray Abraham in Inside Llewyn Davis and said to myself “I don’t see a lot of wins here,” it seems possible if not even likely that the ‘Cats can go bowling. But there’s a landmine in front of them with an obvious tripwire that says “Winless In The Big Ten Purdue.”  

It is not clear to me how good Northwestern is right now. Every single win comes under circumstances that are hard to diagnose: hammering an FCS team and Sun Belt team, sneaking by a discombobulated UCLA team with an interim coach that looked dreadful at the time but now looks decent, and beating a Penn State team that had already caught itself in a bear trap. I think the ‘Cats have looked pretty good since getting wiped away by Oregon and much better than they did in the opening debacle against Tulane. They have developed an identity and will try to run teams over. Once again, the true test for the ‘Cats will be how they look against a bad but feisty Purdue team.

The Big Ten or whatever shadowy cabal schedules football games has done a tremendous disservice to the American people by scheduling this game at the very weird time of 2:00. The weather forecast for Saturday as I am writing this is unpleasant; Northwestern deserves to permanently close its lakeside residency with the first bad weather game we’ve seen in the two seasons at The Lake, an eleven AM slopfest against Purdue in a downpour where fans are sliding around the bleachers in yellow slickers like they are on a capsizing great lakes freighter.  

As great as The Lake has looked on television on more or less 9 picture perfect football days, I am perversely curious as to what it looks like when it is playing in gray, nasty Northwestern Football Weather 

A win on Saturday would already put Northwestern in the hallowed grounds of Bullshit Emergency Bowl Participant territory with five more shots to get an upset. For Purdue, Northwestern probably represents one of their two shots to get a conference win this season along with their upcoming game against Rutgers. I certainly hope Northwestern is ready for Purdue’s best shot in crummy conditions in what may be the last game they are favored in this season and their last home game before having to decamp to an Opposing Fan Convention at Wrigley Field. It will, barring any disasters with the new stadium, be the last time they play on The Lake.

One thing that has come up over and over again as I write this blog is that Northwestern, no matter what they do on the field, is perceived as a bad team like it was still the 1980s and they were losing dozens of consecutive games and not the mediocre to decent team they were for most of the 2000s and 2010s.  The recent and rapid changes to college football have certainly threatened their niche.  Northwestern was slow to adapt to NIL (to be honest, I have no idea what is going on there and do not intend to ever care), the transfer portal is more likely to yank away good players who want to play for a bigger program than deliver stars to the 'Cats, and the expansion of the Big Ten has wrecked the comfy cocoon of the Big Ten West.  I remain skeptical that Northwestern football is something that the Big Ten wants to remain in business with.

And yet, Northwestern is sitting at 4-2.  They are the same team we've been watching overachieve in the Big Ten for the last two decades with a pain in the ass defense, a running game, and (in the best years) a guy who can get open enough, and that has been enough for Northwestern to keep going to the Separate Shaving Device Specifically For Your Privates Bowl until the bottom fell out at the end of Fitzgerald's time.  David Braun seems to keep wanting to do the same thing.  It does not yet seem impossible for the 'Cats to be able to win games in this conference against other low- to mid-tier teams. As much as a win against this year's flailing Penn State team might not look particularly impressive as they absorb the body blows from the rest of the conference, maybe Penn State's loss might not look as bad as everyone assumes just because there's a purple N on the helmet. Maybe David Braun will survive to usher in the silly stadium Northwestern is building for no reason.

Or maybe they'll get shithoused by Purdue and everything will vanish like a mirage and they'll be back in the toilet where every media person (including me) had them before the beginning of the season.  Let's hope this miniature win streak doesn't get washed away in the rain.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

Every night, the Great Commissioner Tony Pettiti and Marco Polo would sit at Big Ten headquarters smoking as the Venetian described the cities of his empire to him.  One night, Pettiti said to Marco Polo, "every night you tell me about the cities in my realm and yet we sit here smoking. You do not ever seem to leave this Rosemont Fogo de Chao." "Commissioner," Marco Polo said while flipping over his meat card, "consider that a city that is not a fixed place in space or in time, but a collection of memories. These memories build and perhaps are more important than bricks, and mortar, and roads. Cities are a collaboration between the living and the dead in simultaneous realms, for without the dead the city is an empty husk, a collection of asphalt and steel imbued without any meaning. Do you have to travel to a city or can you merely rearrange collections of memories until you can see every city?" The Commissioner chuckled, not completely believing what Marco Polo said but also realizing that the alternative to listening to him was to watch a Rutgers football game.

Cities and Transportation IV: Lafaye

There is no way to get to Lafaye from a road or by boat. The only way to enter the City of Rails is on a train. The entire city exists on rails.  Every road, pathway, and alley, and even the floors of large buildings have been torn up and replaced with tracks and elaborate switching systems. Different trains are constantly moving through the city: zippy cars carrying passengers, ponderous freight cars, trucks that have been mounted on rails to move them from the outskirts of the city, hand carts pumped by Pumpoliers in colorful costumes who belt out songs as they pant that are immediately drowned out by the ferocious roar of a passing train.

Some people in Lafeye wear elaborate rail boots with wheels on the bottom. They propel themselves up and down the tracks with large poles that the push from side to side like kayak oars. The traffic as the tracks narrow through tunnels and around rivers matches the pace of the slowest train. There is no way to pass, so Lafayens are patient and unhurried. But not perfectly so.  Every so often, there is a dispute or a scuffle where two people shove each other with their train-oars and try to roll the opponent off the rails entirely where they will be trapped and flailing until a train car with a joist can lift them back onto the rails to continue their journey.

To move around Lafaye requires travel in a predetermined circuit. Everyone is always going the same way. No matter where you thought you wanted to go when you started out in your journey, the city of Lafaye will deliver you to where you are supposed to be. This does not seem to trouble the residents of the city, who exist with a good-humored fatalism.

The defining aesthetic of Lafaye is grotesque. The only art in the city consists of large, hideous statues of people with jutting chins and eyes dilated with madness wielding heavy bludgeoning instruments. These grotesques stand at every corner designed to surprise and terrify unsuspecting visitors. Some are spring-loaded to leap out unexpectedly at passing trains. The Lafayens know where all of them are at all times and they simply smile and smooth their blonde mustaches.

Take a Lafayen out of the city and this person will fall into the throes of confusion. Put them in a sunny plaza and tell them they can walk in whatever direction they want and they will stand still, unable to comprehend the idea. Tell them they can take a car or a boat and they will worry.  They will even regard a street car with some suspicion. Show them stairs and they will panic and fall down.

The Lafayens seem happy with their lot, boarding trains, taking them where they will go, and being deposited with the flow of the crowd or forced to continue riding around the city until the train stops. There is no concern with what to do next. They are content, even if every night they all end up in the same soot-covered train depot where the trains stop and rest for the next morning. The people of Lafaye do too.

Miniature Homecoming

On the first drive of the game, University of Louisiana at Monroe effortlessly ran through the Northwestern defense until a flea flicker left a Warhawk receiver streaking alone towards the endzone. ULM 7 Northwestern 0. The announcer who screams OH NO DISASTER was in my brain yelling “oh no disaster.” Northwestern was about to get torn apart in its most homecoming-ass homecoming game in recent memory in a Sun Belt paycheck game before having to throw itself into the gears of the Big Ten schedule. And then Northwestern rattled off 42 points and won the game easily.

The score is a little deceptive. ULM drove the ball effectively, but missed a field goal badly and got stopped on 4th down deep in Northwestern territory when they had an opportunity to make it an actual game in the first half. But it’s hard to find fault with a Wildcat team that was firing on all cylinders, dominating the lines of scrimmage, and, much like a civilization unlocking a new tech tree in a complicated strategy video game, discovered the new invention Receivers Other Than Griffin Wilde. Stone did not even complete a pass to Wilde until the third quarter, though his top target still piled up 64 yards and a touchdown. 

 

All of those people in the stands are rooting for Northwestern 

The fundamental issue for Northwestern or what I would refer to as the Northwestern Question if I was a muttonchopped nineteenth-century guy, is that it has far fewer fans than almost any FBS program and certainly any “Power Four” program in the country. Northwestern literally has tens of thousands of fans in Chicago and across the country; this is still closer to zero fans than any other team in the Big Ten. As anyone who has ever attended a Northwestern game and attempted to cheer for the home team in a Big Ten game can attest, the stadium is almost always overrun with visiting fans. This was true in Ryan Field (R.I.P. in its gnarly rusted glory), it is true in the tiny lakeside stadium, and it will be true in Patrick Ryan’s billion-dollar Xanadu where you will still have the experience of being tut-tutted by a Michigan fan who is upset that they are only up by eighteen except now you have to pay like two hundred dollars for the experience.

Pondering the Northwestern Question 

It is only during the non-conference schedule where smaller, far-flung teams are trucked into Evanston that you can experience a pure Northwestern home game. At the old Ryan Field, that meant the stadium was about a third full of parents, onlookers lured by cheap tickets, and high school marching bands all lolling in the blazing early September sun. Northwestern’s quirky quarter system meant that most students were not even on campus for the first several games. But in the diminished college football microdose ecosystem on The Lake, those same scattered fans are a dominant force, the vast majority of the capacity crowd. In some perverse way, this homecoming game against a Sun Belt team from northern Louisiana that has never played Northwestern in football before may have been the most overwhelmingly pro-Northwestern homecoming crowd they’ve ever had by percentage, and perhaps ever will have assuming that they revert to playing homecoming games against Big Ten opponents; in that case they are homecoming games because they are being played closest to their opponents’ homes in the greater Chicagoland area.

There is one game left at The Lake. The stadium is still a minor college football wonder. It feels like pretty much every game there has been in picture-perfect weather designed to look gorgeous on television; the game on Saturday was played on an uncharacteristic and frankly alarmingly warm day for October in Chicago. The end zone seats still have a vast and impenetrable network of poles in the way but this year they have oriented the speakers so you can actually understand the announcer when he bellows that it is time to move the chains instead of hearing him as a warbling Peanuts adult and then you have to turn to the person next to you and say “he said it’s time to move the chains.” I even heard the psychologically satisfying Wildcat Growl noise, which I only learned over the weekend is taken from the intro to a Janet Jackson song and not from an effects library entitled Royalty Free Sports Yowls.

The ‘Cats are now 3-2 with no more FCS teams, Sun Belt squads, or reeling Big Ten teams with recently-fired coaches to feast on before heading into the abattoir of the Big Ten. But a funny thing happened to that UCLA win, and it involves their next opponent.

PENN STATE REALLY BEEFED IT

Last week, while Northwestern’s backups were mopping up the remaining ULM players, a remarkable thing was happening in the Rose Bowl. UCLA, thought to be the worst team in the Big Ten coming off a string of embarrassing losses and a surprisingly feisty loss to Northwestern last week, was leading Penn State in the Rose Bowl. The Bruins jumped up to a major lead, led by their superstar quarterback Nico Iamaleava who finally looked like the guy who justified all of the transfer drama and by interim playcaller Jerry Neuheiser, a former UCLA quarterback and son of former UCLA coach Rick Neuheiser and California Hair Guy whose whimsical blonde coiff is as we speak being digitally scanned by a company that specializes in selling comical 1970s-style toupees for the insecure bald guys who refuse to get the Brian Urlacher Hair Treatment. Penn State rallied back and it came down to a fourth down near the UCLA goal line with the game on the line. Penn State farted around and blew it and produced one of the worst losses in the history of the sport. They showed this on the jumbotron at The Lake and I hope Penn State fans are aware that their team suffered the indignity of being guffawed at by a large group of Northwestern fans.

Penn State fans have been in a state of absolute meltdown for the past week. The Lions, returning the core of a playoff team and fortified with expensive transfers, were lauded before the season and started play as the number two team in the country. They looked kind of mediocre against a very weak schedule building up to a major showdown with Oregon at home at night in a famed Penn State Whiteout game that they lost in overtime. The Oregon loss was another blemish against James Franklin in his dismal record against highly-ranked teams, and the letdown from that game plus what Franklin later described as exhaustion from travel in the first known case of an eastern time zone team claiming a Reverse Body Clocks situation climaxed in the historic collapse against a winless UCLA team. 

"They did Reverse Body Clocks," a despondent Franklin says at his press conference. "It was simply too late for our boys." 

So there you have it: a UCLA team that Northwestern dominated in the first half and sort of crapped around with and unnecessarily made the game come down to the closing seconds in the second was gashing through an expensive Penn State defense. The entire thing was extremely funny except for the fact that Northwestern now has to travel to Penn State (as the homecoming opponent, naturally) letting us enjoy a funny transitive victory for a week. 

Do you have any idea what is going to happen in this game? It could be that Penn State is so broken mentally and riven with conflict and hostility radiating from a maniacal crowd that Northwestern could take them out. The Nittany Lions could also be so mad that they take out all of the frustration out on the ‘Cats and annihilate them. After five games, I don’t really have a good handle on how good Northwestern is. They looked abysmal against Tulane, overmatched against Oregon, and took care of business against Western, ULM, and UCLA. Northwestern has looked better and better each week, but all we have learned is that they had a terrible game to open the season and don’t look good against one of the three best teams in the sport.

 

The Playoff Committee punished Penn State for its brutal loss. But they've waited a week, and now they're going to get revenge... on the Northwestern Wildcats

For many years, we watched Northwestern teams that were on paper much worse than their Big Ten peers manage to go into their stadiums and slop them around so badly that the ‘Cats manage to hold onto a win by their fingernails. It is not impossible for this to happen now, although the presumed gap between a Penn State team with its playoff pedigree and Northwestern is theoretically much greater than the usual scenario of Northwestern surprising a Nebraska team that is getting too big for its britches or a Minnesota team with a backup quarterback. Despite the turmoil and horrible vibes in Happy Valley, the ‘Cats are enormous underdogs.

My guess is that Northwestern will go into a Penn State stadium echoing with chants about firing the coach and the Nittany Lions will win comfortably while its fans grouse the entire time in a very annoying way and then get mad that they didn’t win by enough because everyone who roots for a college football team with expectations is functionally a toddler. The Penn State fans you see catastrophizing on the internet about this game have not watched a single second of Northwestern football since the last time they played Penn State and are just using the Wildcats as a vessel for their angst. But I would invite any of them who claim they actually want Northwestern to win because they are that mad at James Franklin and who have a ridiculous Philadelphia/Delaware County accent to immediately send me a recording of themself saying the words “let’s go Caleb Komolafe.”

Or maybe Penn State is in such disarray that James Franklin does some of his world famous James Franklin-Style Clock Management and they lose and then he instantly flees to a waiting blimp to whisk him off to Stillwater and immediately install him in Mike Gundy’s disused Antler Palace.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

At first Marco Polo and the great Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti could not communicate in the same language. Polo was mystified by what Petitti and his court meant when they kept demanding to see a “deck.” But Petitti soon came to understand Polo’s description of his conference’s far-flung cities that he would never see because there are so many of them through a series of gestures: Polo stomping around like an ungainly giant meant that there were fullbacks there, grabbing his head and pretending to angrily undo a chin strap meant that the city featured an inept Big Ten West-style quarterback, squinting into the middle distance meant an overmatched coach on the hot seat. Eventually, Polo mastered the Commissioner’s language and the Rosemont dialect spoken in his court, but after several conversations, he and Petitti soon decided that the gestures told him much more.

Cities and The Future I: Happylis

The city of Happylis is the great unfinished city of the conference. Every person you talk to in Happylis is excited to tell you about the great treasures that the city will have eventually. Every place you stand is the site of a future monument or edifice. And every person has a different idea what it will be. For example, you can stand in an alley and talk to one Happylisian and he will tell you that you are the foundations of what will be a great museum. Run into another person (the Happylisians are very busy) and she will tell you that you are standing where there will be a brilliant spire with decorations that will bathe the city below in different type of light depending on the position of the sun, turning the entire cityscape in its shadows into a psychdelic art project. It is a city that is becoming.

But while the optimism for the future radiates through every person in Happylis, all of them are despondent about the present. Here, any existing museum is a dump, any existing spire is a ruin, and any existing structure is only a placeholder meant to be demolished and paved way for something larger, bolder, and better. Everywhere there are signs on walls depicting what is going to eventually be there and contrasting signs with differing visions. 

On one building, largely considered the finest and most intricate in Happylis, the entire edifice has been covered in placards going up ten or eleven stories where residents have been feuding for decades about whether it is going to be a luxury hotel or an elaborate arena for laser tag; this argument for several stories until, as you reach the upper floors, the placards give way to personal insults about the person who had made the placard immediately below it. For two stories, the placards go back and forth in threats where the placard-writers threaten to fight each other, sending each other hypothetical combat moves. 

“Pig fucker!” one placard reads. “All you do is write on placards. When I see you in the arboretum (which will eventually be replaced with a helipad) I will do drum fills on your skull with my nunchucks.” “Swine-rutter! I have sketched a picture of my elbow on this placard to exact 1:1 scale so you can prepare for it to meet your solar plexus!” No one, as far as I can tell, has ever fought, and both placard-writers seem content that they had made their point.

The one thing everyone in Happylis can agree on is that the current leadership in the city cannot fulfill their future vision. Everyone spends all day with plans to depose the leader, to throw him in an oubilette. Every poster with his picture, warmly smiling on the site of hypothetical construction, immediately becomes a site for outdoor bowel relief for even the fanciest citizens. Those in their regalia, tails flapping in the wind, elegant evening gowns enmeshed in elaborate scarves that are cut to seem like they come directly from the neck, stop immediately and erect elaborate screens that they carry for this purpose to they can befoul pictures of city leadership. “He will not build the sky library,” one of them tells me as he laps up water to assault an etching of the city leader at a bus station. “That maniac wants to build a sky library” another one on tells me as he charges toward the same image.

For the traveler who is cursed to see Happylis as it is, the city is bustling and idyllic. But after spending any length of time there, the traveler begins to see the city becoming. The entire city becomes subsumed to becoming, the present becomes poisoned. The charming neighborhood becomes a slum, the parks a blemish. The streets curdle and disintegrate. Happylis drowns in its prosperous misery.

You Had Better Have a Coach If You Want to Beat Northwestern At The Lake

The titanic Showdown On The Lake between two Big Ten bottomfeeders scraping for a rare conference win turned out to be a tense, exciting game that came down to the final seconds where Northwestern triumphed as the Kings of the Rot Pile, and I was miserable and fuming.

UCLA came out looking every bit as lousy as advertised. The ‘Cats ran the ball on them at will with Caleb Komolafe steamrolling through their defensive line like it was made out of papier mache and Joseph Himon flying around the outside. They let Griffin Wilde run free in the secondary. Northwestern, a generous donor of the ball early this season, did not turn it over. The UCLA offense, led by heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava, moved the ball a little but continually stalled out. At halftime, the ‘Cats were up 17-3 and on their way to what looked like an easy romp against a profoundly crappy team and one of the most convincing wins against a Big Ten opponent in years.

But in the second half, the game took a turn against the ‘Cats. UCLA got another field goal. Northwestern went on a long, punishing, run-heavy drive that took up a large chunk of the third quarter and into the fourth that got them all the way down to a first and goal at the three, but the ‘Cats couldn’t punch it in, and the field goal was blocked. Somehow, Iamaleava took an offense that was doing little other than getting hit in the solar plexus by Robert Fitzgerald and led a quick drive down the field. All the Bruins needed was a field goal to send the game into overtime. The game went from a casual Wildcat romp to the ‘Cats desperately holding onto the lead with the tips of their fingernails.

Calmly watching the second half of the UCLA game 

The ‘Cats could not get the drive they needed to finally put away UCLA and the Bruins got the ball with 86 seconds left to get into field goal range. I was watching this at like 11:00 at night and had spent the entire afternoon in a hermetically sealed internet bubble to avoid knowing what happened and I was quietly losing my mind and pacing around, anxiously fast forwarding from snap to snap. But there was nothing to worry about. UCLA mounted no real threat to score and the clock ran out on them with the Wildcats triumphing and remaining in a strong position to not be the worst team in the Big Ten this season. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be their biggest win.

When you root for Northwestern, you can’t really get mad at a win. You can watch them flail around against a crummy team or win because of a very stupid mental error by another team or because of what a scientific analysis of other teams’ message boards after losing to Northwestern has determined to be an extremely unfair amount of uncalled holding penalties, very nasty holding penalties, it’s a disgrace with the holding penalties and we’re looking into it very strongly. So I am not going to go on the internet and complain that Northwestern did not win a Big Ten game enough in a period of time where they are averaging like one big ten win a year. We got ‘em. The Bruins came into The Lake with their interim coaches and their fucked up Body Clocks, they didn’t come back, and you can go ahead and chisel that W on the Wildcats’ schedule.

 

Welcoming the west coast teams to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone, uh file not found for the Oregon game

Maybe it will mean something. Maybe Northwestern can somehow manage to get another couple of wins from more combobulated Big Ten teams and get in prime position in case ESPN runs out of bowl teams. Maybe it will just mean that they won a Big Ten game on The Lake before they fold it up and put the stadium into storage like a crooked circus.

A HOME-STYLE HOMECOMING

As far as I can tell, schools try to schedule their homecoming games against a team they think they can beat, which is why Northwestern plays what seems like at least three road homecoming games every season. Last year, because Northwestern was desperately trying to assemble the lakeside stadium out of scrap metal and lincoln logs, they scheduled one of the funniest homecoming games possible: a late November Wrigley Field game against future national champion Ohio State in a venue that was at least 90% Ohio State fans. I wrote about this last year, but watching all of the stadium attractions programmed to Northwestern Mode in front of probably the most overwhelmingly away-team heavy crowd I have ever seen at an ostensible Northwestern home game was surreal. These people, I thought incredulously, don’t even know who Corey Wootton is.

You think that's Steve Schnur 

This year, Northwestern has taken the opposite tactic. They’re playing on campus at The Lake against a Sun Belt team from Northern Louisiana. I don’t know about the traveling predilections of ULM football fans, but it seems likely that Northwestern’s homecoming will actually feel like a home game, as much as it can feel like a home game in a stadium so small that the crowd noise on the television broadcast sounds like a golf tournament, and not even one of the rowdy golf tournaments like the Waste Management Open where Scottsdale hospitals spend the day full of cases like “fell into pool of own vomit, cactus” and “the warning from the Cialis commercial.”

I would never lie to the readers of this blog unless for some reason I thought it was funny, so I will admit that I know nothing about ULM football. I am not sure I have ever watched a ULM football game, not even the 2012 AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl. Northwestern has never played the Warhawks; even if a ULM team from the earliest days of its program in the 1930s wanted to get on a steamer and head up the Mississippi looking for midwestern football teams to tussle with, they would have to go through far too many squads and take far too many violent 1930s style tackles from Normal Schools and dental colleges especially tough air force reserve programs before they even got to the Quad Cities.

ULM comes into the game 3-1, with wins against FCS Saint Francis, a UTEP team team winless against the FBS, and conference foe Arkansas State. Their only loss was to Alabama, who wiped them out 73-0 in what was probably an expression of the complete derangement of everyone around that program who have reacted the program merely being “pretty good” by a descent into total madness. Northwestern is heavily favored, but the ‘Cats are also a big target. Any team that comes to Northwestern for a paycheck game sees the Wildcats as a rare opportunity to pin a Power Four pelt on their wall.

It’s hard to measure these things, but ULM is possibly a tougher matchup than UCLA. Sure, they don’t have a million-dollar five star transfer quarterback, but their run defense does not appear to graciously usher tailbacks to the first down marker with linemen spreading garlands of flowers before they ineffectually fall down. It’s clear that this year’s Northwestern team wants to just run the ball at ball people as much as possible with their large offensive line, sit on the clock, and happily punt. For six quarters against Western Illinois and in the first half against UCLA, Northwestern looked dominant doing that. If they have to start trying to move the ball beyond just letting Komolafe run over guys and Himon run around them, things may get precarious.

If Northwestern manages a win, they will be 3-2 heading into a gauntlet of a schedule that includes three ranked teams and a Friday night game in Los Angeles against a dangerous USC team. Northwestern does have some games against fellow Big Ten West Slop Alumni, but I have absolutely no idea how competitive the ‘Cats can be against the likes of Nebraska, Minnesota and Even Purdue this year. Whoever took a reeling, Fickell-addled Wisconsin team off the Northwestern schedule this year must be found and held accountable. I don’t have high expectations for this season, but any shred of hope would die with a loss on Saturday. But I do believe that this year’s homecoming has to be better, if only because I assume ULM doesn’t have some weird self-proclaimed mascot guy running around the stadium in body paint.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES I

Tony Petitti does not necessarily believe Marco Polo when he describes the various cities of the Big Ten. In the life of any Conference Commissioner, there is a pride in conquering vast swathes of new territory and a melancholy and relief of knowing he should give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes in the evening, with the smells of unlimited Brazilian meats waft into his Rosemont headquarters and the traffic from the Jane Addams intensifies into a steady roar of passing cars rather than the grind of stalled traffic, and the din from the Chicago Dogs baseball stadium has died down. Only through the tales from the Venetian explorer could Commissioner Petitti grasp the subtle patterns.

Cities and transportation infrastructure 1: Angelina

Angelina is a great city of roads. The roads form a great circuit around the city and the residents travel through them all day every day to unknowable ends. The city is divided into those who can still remember the purpose for which they set off on the road and those who have forgotten and only travel upon the roads for lack of understanding of what else to do. 

Travelers are constantly broadcasting their complicated routes to other travelers and describing the parts of the city they have heard about– the beaches, the gardens, the tar pits, the elevated street taco place that’s still authentic– they are all constantly explaining these plans and meticulously broadcasting them to other travelers who are making and explaining their own plans. The travelers all take to the airwaves to talk about their routes and then appear on other travelers’ broadcasts to have the same conversation.

Somewhere nestled in the mountains through ribbons of road there is a large, flat, bowl. The sun sparkles on it before setting into a picturesque scene, like a softboiled egg nestled in a purple broth. And yet, the bowl is empty. Travelers discuss games that take place there, they relay explanations of complex plays and detailed descriptions of violent tackles, but no one can verify them since they are not there. They have played an infinite number of games, each one altered by a traveler who has not seen it but has heard of it, the games warp in the retelling and become another game. In some accounts these games turn into perverse spectacle and others turn into farcical comedy, impossible comebacks, the endless, recursive return of onside kicks into touchdowns.

No one has seen the games because no one is there. The travelers of Angelina are circling the stadium in loops simultaneously arriving and departing until it is impossible to determine which is which. It all blurs into the same road.

Cities and waterfowl 1: Eugenia

The citizens of Eugenia complain of neck pain because they are always looking up. Their necks stick that way. Older residents are no longer able to see their own shoes and need to have them placed on by children with more pliant, flexible necks. Toddlers crawl and call out obstacles on the ground to older relatives, an imperfect system since they do not have a keen eye to discern obstacles, but they have been deputized for this important job by being lowest to the ground.

The residents of Eugenia must keep their heads up at all times because the city has a duck. Every day, the man-sized duck flies across the city on a nest of zip lines. The tallest buildings have been repurposed into zip line towers, and this duck zooms around, low to the ground, its webbed feet constantly clattering into unaware heads as distracted citizens are knocked into creeks and merchant stalls filled with fresh fish. Before the Eugenians adopted their signature pose, the duck was knocking scores of people to the ground every day as it zips around toward a purpose that no one has discovered.

Every day, the Eugenia go about their business to the din of the zipline and enter their low-ceilinged buildings where they read and write on their own ceilings and hang their belongings so they do not trip on them. Doctors say it takes five years for outsiders to be able to look up vigilantly enough to avoid the duck and unaware visitors expect to get kicked or belly bumped by a ziplining duck at least three times each day, depending on the duck’s activities.

The people of Eugenia like their duck and are horrified at any suggestion that the duck should be harmed or stopped from maniacally ziplining into the populace. You should get out of its way, they say to anyone who protests. This is simply what the duck does in this city. You should not carry large bundles of eggs or panes of glass. 

The duck is whimsical. Every small joy of looking forward or bending over to smell flowers or even to avoid stepping into a pothole or pile of animal waste is subsumed to the enjoyable spectacle of a duck flying around, hopping from line to line, expertly lining up in front of a baker carrying an enormous layer cake unaware of the duck’s whereabouts. 

No one needs to bicker or spread gossip. The only acceptable topic of conversation in Eugenia is what the duck is up to or speculation about where the duck might be going next or even talking to each other as if they were the duck him or herself even though the duck’s own thoughts are entirely inscrutable. People come to Eugenia with hopes and dreams and fears but they happily subsume them to hopes and dreams and fears about the duck in an annihilating relief.

The duck also has a motorcycle.