EVANSTON The people who came to the new Ryan Field got what they paid for and that was to see the new stadium while Northwestern casually crushed a struggling MAC team in the background. While the rest of the college football world simmered over with upsets and strange statlines and yet another fanbase filming themselves making obscene gestures at a defeated Lane Kiffin as he slinks off their field, the Wildcats easily handled Ball State on the way to a 4-1 record and their first AP top 25 ranking since 2020.
I do not have anything interesting to say about this game. It was not particularly competitive at any given time. Ball State could do little to stop Northwestern and Chip Kelly’s avant-garde 1940s offense, Aidan Chiles shredded them with passes to Griffin Wilde, and the Cardinals did little other than amass an enormous number of penalties. In the past, good Northwestern teams may have started slow or played a very anxious and close game against a team like Ball State, but this year’s version is ruthless. The one time Ball State started to get close towards the end of the first half, Robert Fitzgerald immediately picked off a pass and scored. Most fans were there for the stadium.
I have been very critical about New Ryan Field in the past, and I want to make it clear that I do not think the stadium itself is bad. As a building, it is impressive. It is expensive and fancy. The views, even from the upper deck, are excellent. Every wall has a large photograph of a Northwestern sports triumph and there are retro logos and old programs and tickets everywhere. The partial canopy has a weird effect of feeling like you are sort of inside while also clearly being outside and it casts strange noir shadows all over the field. Everything is state of the art with a jumbotron at each end, horizontal video boards lining the stands, and a massive sound system. This stadium even has its own lights and does not need to truck them in for night games. The name "Ryan Field" is stamped everywhere there is room to put it.
Here is panel from the large mural of old tickets and programs that could also appear as a graphic on College GameDay after Nick Saban says "well this is what is happening to college football, today"
The stadium experience is very modern, which means it is a constant assault on the senses. This is part of a trend at pretty much all modern sports games, where production teams will fill all of the endless commercial downtime with blaring music and videos. For this game, Northwestern brought back beloved former defensive tackle Joe Spivak who now apparently wrestles professionally under the confounding name “Tank Ledger”-- I assume he is supposed to be some sort of vicious accountant who wears a green visor and pummels his opponents with a giant old-fashioned account book and says things like “next week at the Rosemont Horizon, you’ll be in the red”-- as a host who is there to goad the crowd, get people excited, and encourage the students to kick the absolute shit out of the kicking bleachers.
The Wildcat Wall makes an absolutely unholy amount of noise. It’s a metallic cacophony. Imagine someone in the neighborhood pounding on a sheet of aluminum and then imagine every single person on your block and the next block and the next block also pounding on a sheet of aluminum while also screaming and blaring Welcome to the Jungle. This is an inspired choice because while Northwestern fans will likely continue to be overwhelmed by visitors in their own stadium, only Northwestern students have access to the ear-melting Wall Kick Technology. It is the fan noise equivalent of the 2001 A Space Odyssey apes seeing the monolith and then using it to try to draw false start penalties in the north endzone.
It is impossible to have attended games for years at the old Ryan Field which was left in complete disrepair and swaddled in tarps and not be impressed by the fact that the new stadium seems less likely to collapse upon you. My main issue with the new stadium is that I thought that the old rustbucket was charming and fit the program perfectly. The whole setup was very unassuming, easy, and relatively cheap. You no longer can roll up and simply park in the neighborhood; the homeowners around the stadium have used the clash with the university over the stadium to form a medieval fortress of permitting around their streets. The stadium is disturbingly fancy, as if you’ve been invited to some swanky bachelor pad that is inexplicably decorated with pictures of the 1995 Rose Bowl team.
This is Real Ball
The old stadium and even the charmingly janky lake setup felt well calibrated to Northwestern football’s feeling of not being a big deal. It did not have the pomp and grandeur of college football; instead it felt perfectly suited to the smallest school in the Big Ten that almost nobody cares about. Now, the new stadium is trying to make it a destination. That is a curious decision.
After the ecstatic Friday night debut, there were a ton of empty seats for Northwestern’s first homecoming in the new stadium. Ball State is not the most compelling opponent, and it was an uncharacteristically warm and beautiful Saturday afternoon– possibly the last the Chicago area will see until well into 2027. But if the new stadium is supposed to be a galvanizing jolt to the Northwestern fanbase, to activate alumni and bring in curious local onlookers, it did not look like that on Saturday. What it looked like was a typical Northwestern non-conference game. What it looked like was proof that even the best, most exciting Northwestern team in years, one that is not only good but playing with real offensive verve in a way that has not been seen since the spread offense was still novel, one that has attracted national attention in a way I can’t remember a Northwestern team doing because of the new stadium and a large number of prime time national TV games; this team still has no chance of selling out the stadium without having to accommodate an overwhelming amount of visiting fans. I'm sure they will appreciate it.
THE WEIRDEST NORTHWESTERN GAME EVER PLAYED
Pat Fitzgerald wants revenge. It has been three years since Northwestern fired its most famous football personality because he was responsible for the team during decades of horrifying abuse and hazing in the program and then Northwestern botched the firing process so badly that he won his unlawful termination lawsuit and they had to give him a bunch of money and release a statement officially stating that Pat Fitzgerald had no idea anything untoward was going on, he had never seen anything, in fact every day is a new blank slate for Pat Fitzgerald who is reborn daily in an innocent state of nature and therefore did nothing wrong. He will never forgive them.
Now Fitzgerald is back, his head more enormous and his haircut more square than ever. He’s got a helicopter landing pad up there. He looks like the cartoon mascot for a 1950s roadside hamburger stand. Fitzgerald is back in the midwestern heart of the Big Ten where he was born to be buffeted by winds, beet red, screaming at officials while sending out the punting unit. He is coaching for the first time against the program he helped turn from a national laughingstock into a Big Ten power as one its greatest players, one that he took over at an impossibly young age after the shocking death of Randy Walker, and one that he molded into his image of putrid neckroll football that allowed Northwestern to master playing the most grotesque unwatchable games anyone has ever seen on the way to making Northwestern a satisfyingly mediocre Big Ten West team.
Pat Fitzgerald has reemerged as a miniboss in a sega genesis beat 'em up game
Fitzgerald looms awkwardly in the current program. Northwestern fired Fitzgerald for what the school argued was a gross dereliction of his responsibilities towards his players, but after the settlement Fitzgerald appeared at the Lake last year and was celebrated as part of the 30th anniversary of the Rose Bowl team. He hired David Braun, who talks about him as a mentor and friend though he was smart enough to avoid wearing the forbidden Cats Against The World t-shirt that led to a reprimand to and lawsuit from former offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian. There is a giant likeness of a faceless Fitzgerald on the wall of the new stadium along with Darnell Autrey. You still see 51 jerseys at Northwestern games, and there is a rump pro-Fitzgerald faction of fans, although Fitzgerald’s indifference and ineptitude in the new landscape of college football while leading his team to some of the worst records since the fallow 1980s has dimmed their enthusiasm. The fact that Fitzgerald was seemingly in no danger of losing his job after a 1-11 season until student journalists began investigating the hazing allegations was a testament to his stature at the school.
Pat Fitzgerald’s Michigan State team looks eerily familiar. It reminds me of when Bill Carmody took over Holy Cross and somehow made the NCAA tournament and had his team playing the exact same Princeton offense with the same sort of janky rec spec aesthetic except it’s now a team in green playing the exact kind of late-stage Pat Fitzgerald toiletball that went winless in the continent of North America. The Spartans have not been particularly impressive and have lost star running back Cam Edwards for the season, although they did manage an impressive comeback against a reeling Illinois team that sent the game to overtime and featured a blown call on an onside kick and Fitzgerald losing his mind and blasting middle fingers at the Illinois sideline.
The Michigan State game will also be a homecoming for Aidan Chiles. Chiles was recruited by former Spartan coach Jonathan Smith at Oregon State then followed him to East Lansing where he played for two years. Chiles was benched towards the end of last season following an up and down career where his improvisations led to disaster as much as they showcased his brilliance. Michigan State is facing multiple former quarterbacks this season with Chiles, Illinois’s Katan Houser, and Eastern Michigan’s Noah Kim all returning to Spartan Stadium. Though it was possible for players to transfer and face former teams in the past, the new freedom of movement in college has created a new phenomenon where the best word to describe programs encountering former players is “haunted.”
Northwestern is ranked and should be favored on the road. But I think this game will take place in a sort of Madness Vortex that makes it impossible to predict. Both Fitzgerald and Braun downplayed the emotional valence of this game, saying it was about the players. That is bullshit. Fitzgerald is I am sure foaming at the mouth to win this game. Northwestern fans, at least those who wanted him fired, desperately want this game as a cathartic refutation of his hold on the program. Aidan Chiles wants to beat his old team and the quarterback that was elevated over him. Too many people want revenge on other people. This game is an emotional maelstrom.
If this game involved any other program, a situation where a coach was fired in disgrace then successfully sued his own school and immediately took a job at a sort-of rival program while the original team snared that team’s quarterback– this sort of melodrama would be a major story in college football. Instead, it has been shunted off to Peacock and buried under a series of major games between college football powers happening at the same time. This is partly because nobody cares about Northwestern, and there has already been more Northwestern on national TV this season than I can remember. I also imagine that nobody on TV wants to talk about what was going on at Northwestern that led to Fitzgerald getting fired– the announcers of the game would rather impale themselves on Sparty’s sword than have to do anything other than make oblique references to “allegations of hazing” once before showing a montage of Pat Fitzgerald in purple puffing out his neck and pumping his fists after Northwestern wins a game 9-5.75.
Ever since Fitzgerald was hired, this game loomed on the schedule unpleasantly like a colonoscopy. I just want to get it over with. As fun and cathartic as it would be for Chip Kelly to razzle dazzle Pat Fitzgerald’s lumbering oafball back into the Big Ten West, beating Michigan State isn’t going to reverse the sad and horrifying revelations about what this program had been. I don't think Pat Fitzgerald will prove some sort of point by beating his old team. It will mostly be seeing Pat Fitzgerald lose a football game involving Northwestern, something we all have witnessed too many times to count.
No comments:
Post a Comment