The Iowa Speedbump

If you were to draw up a diagram for how Northwestern would lose to Iowa, you’d pretty much get the game we got Saturday night. The Hawkeyes acted as always like a boa constructor, wrapping around the offense until no one wants to play football anymore. The ‘Cats couldn’t run the ball at all, stalled out on the pass game, and were forced into a cascade of punts. Right when it seemed like Northwestern might have been able to find the tiniest fissure with a field goal, they immediately gave up an instantly touchdown on the ensuing kick return and any hope of a competitive game vanished.

There is a blueprint to stop Iowa and that is to undergo a Face/Off-style procedure where you become Iowa, become the thing you hate the most and turn into the very embodiment of your own enemy to your friends and loved ones by playing turgid defense and forcing them to punt until the game becomes a barrage of punts darkening the sky above Ryan field with the brown tint of a thousand punts, and you might also hope they fumble. Northwestern has done that before and managed to win some of the most disgusting football games ever legally sanctioned in the United States. 

When you must become a Ferentz 

But in order to do that, you have to match Iowa tackle for tackle and and exchange gnarly linebacking with them, and the ‘Cats could not do that. They let “Hollywood” Hank Brown (I have given him this nickname for his showy and fancy play, which in Iowa terms means completing more than one forward pass) march the Hawkeyes down the field with no resistance on the first drive and let human battering ram L.J. Phillips blast through the line. By the time Northwestern was able to figure out how to slow down the Iowa attack, the Hawkeyes already had all of the points they needed.

Northwestern’s offense was without its indispensable star Aidan Chiles, sitting with an undisclosed “upper body injury.” Backup Nicco Marchiol played admirably in his stead. He’s a mulleted crafty lefty who has seen a lot of college football. Chip Kelly trusted him to run all of the insane maniac plays that he’s installed in the offense this season. And when Iowa had bottled up the running game and locked down the receivers, Marchiol scrambled again and again, willing to get absolutely blown up by tacklers in a desperate attempt to gain any sort of yards in the sort of performance you see when you are playing Tecmo Super Bowl and the half-assed quarterback run is the only play available because the computer-controlled opponents now move twice as fast as your guys. 

Marchiol played, I think, well enough to beat a lot of the teams on Northwestern’s early schedule, the ones that would allow Northwestern to have any sort of running game. Based on last game Marchiol would be one of the better quarterbacks Northwestern has had since Clayton Thorson. But he was not Chiles. Northwestern with Marchiol seems like the type of team that can the ‘Cats to a bowl game; Chiles was the quarterback who seemed like it might be possible to dream a bit bigger in a year when the most annoying teams in the Big Ten are in the throes of meltdowns and there may have been room for a star quarterback and an offensive coordinator who appears to be spending his time studying gaelic football in order to feel alive could squeeze into the mix. Instead, the party crashing at the top of the conference will be left to UCLA while Northwestern fends for a win and a Hat.

OHIO STATE

Things are bad in Columbus. The football team has collapsed, the coach is on the hot seat, the fans have lost all hope in the program, and the season is completely lost. Ohio State is 6-3, will probably win at least nine games, and may even somehow still get into the playoffs based on how stupid and chaotic the top of the college football rankings have been.

As he becomes embattled, Ryan Day is retreating further into the Steven Seagal styling universe. We are two losses from Day wearing elaborate necklaces and orange sunglasses while claiming he is actually in a secret law enforcement organization that even the president doesn't know about

The way Ohio State fans root for their team seems completely joyless and insane to me. The team starts every season with future NFL stars at every position, with a rank of backups that are good enough to fill another top 25 roster, a full complement of expensive Famous Guy coaches, and an expectation to win a title every year. The second something goes off by a little– they do not beat a team by enough points, or another team scores a single touchdown on them, or they lose to Michigan but still win a national title, the fans go nuts and demand to fire the coach. Winning a national title seems more like a vindication for all of that psychosis and spite than a celebration; it’s a mentality to me that seems less like rooting for a sports team than being hunted for sport.

Ohio State lost its starting quarterback and has been in a funk, barely eking out a win over reigning national champion Indiana before doing the unthinkable and losing two games in a row to USC and Oregon. This is the first time Ohio State has lost back-to-back games in fifteen years, and both losses were to unranked teams. This team might be as bad as the 2004 team that won an unthinkably paltry eight games, one of which was the last time they were defeated by Northwestern and is now somehow 22 years ago.

It would be very cool to have a second Northwestern beats Ohio State picture 

Despite the fact that the Buckeyes are reeling into an unacceptable disaster that would rate as one of the best seasons in Northwestern’s recent history, they remain heavily favored at home. Chiles will miss another game; Ohio State’s losses have come against fellow Big Ten heavyweights with expensive rosters that are having down years. A Northwestern team that struggled to cover Iowa’s receivers has a tall task trying contain wideout Jeremiah Smith for a whole game unless there are the extremely funny weather conditions for the 2022 game where it was so windy and rainy it rendered passing impossible and gummed up Ohio State’s fine-tuned sports car passing attack and forced them to match Pat Fitzgerald’s Toyota Hilux style. They still won the game because they are Ohio State, but for more than an hour and half of real time, Ohio State fans suffering in late stage Ryan Field were enjoyably miserable. 

This time the action moves to Ohio State, where they can, as an ad circulating this week for an Ohio State bomber jacket emblazoned with the logo of what is apparently some sort of defense contractor says, "defend the 'shoe."

 

Northwestern will end up on national TV again, this time with the personal Ohio State broadcast crew on Big Noon Sunday. This means we will get Gus Johnson on the call, a man who I’m assuming has not watched a single second of Northwestern football in years and who I hope will come up with stupid nickname for Marchiol such as “Muskrat Marchiol.” “Here comes Muskrat Marchiol, slithering around the defense for a gain of a yard” is something Gus might yell or we might even get an echo of his most famous Northwestern call of all time “Touchdown Wisconsin!”

This is the second Northwestern game on Regular-Ass Fox in two weeks after three weeks in exile on Peacock. This has been the strangest broadcast schedule I can remember for the ‘Cats with five games on national, rabbit ears television, three on Peacock, and only one on Big Ten Network Regional Action. Fox’s night team of Connor Onion and Robert Griffin III has broadcast three Northwestern games this season, which is a lot of RGIII– in the last game, the first to have a little bit of autumn chill, he appeared in a hat that seemed to be modeled on one of Phil Spector’s insane wigs. He looked like he was coming across the steppe with his hoard to raid $25 gourmet sliders from the Great Chicago Food Experience.

 

RGIII to his haberdascher: Get me the Fur Nuclear Test  

If Ohio State does what I and everyone else expects them do to and wins this game easily, it is at least a small comfort that it will bring no joy or satisfaction to Ohio State fans, who at this point can only be appeased by firing Ryan Day and building an animatronic replica of him to be suspended in a cage over their stadium to be pelted with garbage as a warning to any future coach that might consider going more than one year without winning a national championship. If the ‘Cats somehow pull it off, if they somehow get their first win against them in decades and their first win in Columbus since fucking 1971, I probably have to go the hospital for laughing too hard.

FICTION SECTION

This season, everyone in college football is suing everyone all the time. This week, here is a scene from a tense courtroom drama.

THE PLAYERS 

R. Preston Hitch Manhitcher: Defense attorney for Moss Cross

Mack Branyant: NCAA Investigator

Judge: The judge

Phil Guarry: Attorney for the NCAA 

 

R. PRESTON “HITCH” MANHITCHER: State your name for the record, sir.

MACK BRANYANT: Mack Branyant. 

MANHITCHER: And what do you do for a living, sir?

BRANYANT: I’m a detective for the NCAA. Investigate impermissible benefits. 

MANHITCHER: Now, explain what you mean by impermissible benefits.

BRANYANT: The NCAA has rules for what athletes can and can’t accept. If they accept money from companies or individuals beyond the scope of the program they lose their amateur status. They can’t play ball.

MANHITCHER: And how do you investigate these types of claims?

BRANYANT: Standard techniques. Documents. Witnesses. I would expect an esteemed lawyer like you would know the basics of how an investigation works.

MANHITCHER: I would say I do. I would say I know an awful lot about investigations, things that a person like yourself would never even contemplate. However, I believe that the people in this courtroom need to understand the uh delicate mechanisms by which a fellow such as yourself would go about extracting information from parties that would wish to keep it hidden.

BRANYANT: I believe the people in this courtroom have seen TV shows.

MANHITCHER: Your honor?

JUDGE: Mr. Branyant, I’m going to ask you to make smart-aleck remarks in my courtroom.

MANHITCHER: I would like to establish, for the record, the various techniques that Mr. Branyant uses in his so-called investigations. Mr. Branyant, do you believe it is ethical to misrepresent yourself when gathering information that you can use against the subjects of your investigations?

BRANYANT: It is not illegal.

PHIL GUARRY: Objection, he’s asking hypotheticals.

JUDGE: Sustained.

MANHITCHER: So you’re OK with lying and disseminating as long as it is not legal. 

JUDGE: (bangs gavel) Mr. Manhitcher.

BRANYANT: The gavel banging means you’re not doing a great job.

JUDGE: That’s enough out of you, Mr. Branyant. I already warned you about smart-aleck remarks. In fact, I want you to think about this court room as an industrial clean room, you know the kind where you have to put on those special suits to prevent any sort of contamination, and the contamination in this case is smart-aleck remarks. This is a smart aleck free zone. And if you contaminate it, I will let you clean yourself up in a jail cell, do you understand me Mr. Branyant?

BRANYANT: Yes.

MANHITCHER: Of course your honor. I agree wholeheartedly with your policy about smart-alecks. Which is why I am being very thorough with this one here, which you can see is a grade-A certified prime smart…

JUDGE: Get on with it, Manhitcher.

MANHITCHER: Absolutely. I was merely establishing the type of character that Mr. Branyant is in order to illuminate it and set the scene for what it means for my client to have a person such as Mr. Branyant attempting to quote unquote investigate him. Mr. Branyant, we’ve established that you have no issue with misidentifying yourself. Perhaps it would be best if I cited a concrete example. Mr. Branyant do you recall your case against Chaveous Wilhelm? 

BRANYANT: Yes. Point guard. Had an entire wardrobe of couture leather. Not permissible from the NCAA. Not a good look for him either. 

MANHITCHER: Now would you say you represented yourself truthfully to Mr. Wilhelm?

BRANYANT: It was an undercover operation.

MANHITCHER: Yes. In fact we have a photo of you with Mr. Wilhelm at the Leather Hats Expo. Enter this as Exhibit A. A photo of Mr. Branyant passing himself off as Darren St. Mauve, a stylist and influencer who insinuated himself into the confidence of Mr. Wilhelm. Mr. Branyant, do you find it difficult to worm your way into someone’s life, lie to them, and betray them to the authorities in order to ruin their athletic career? Perhaps you enjoy it.

BRANYANT: In this case, I found it extremely uncomfortable.

MANHITCHER: Uncomfortable to turn on an ostensible friend, someone you came to like and respect all the while knowing that you could at a moment’s notice upend his life? Uncomfortable to live a lie, live in the fast lane with the fashion set? 

BRANYANT: It was mainly the pants. Have you ever worn leather pants, Mr. Manhitcher?

MANHITCHER: Only once and it was for a charity… that’s beside the point. What happened to Mr. Wilhelm? And what about violence? Do you have a problem with violence in resolving a case?

BRANYANT: I don’t like it. But I’ll defend myself.

MANHITCHER: I am going to read directly from your report. This is the Travis Wagstrel case. Do you remember that one?

BRANYANT: Exotic reptiles. Extremely impermissible.

MANHITCHER: Here’s a quote from the report. “The shop man said he didn’t like me asking so many questions. I saw he was looking for something in the corner of his eye and it looked like it wasn’t used in the reptile trades. More of a sporting good. ‘Actually I’ve got some rare slugs for you,’ I told him. ‘Is that so,’ he said. Hissed. I gave him two good ones right in the stomach. He slithered to the floor. Those weren’t so rare, in my line of work.” Is that accurate?

BRANYANT: Yes.

MANHITCHER: You punched a man in the stomach repeatedly?

BRANYANT: It’s what those in the reptile business call a quick strike.

MANHITCHER: Thank you. Do you remember the Chust Munck case?

BRANYANT: Punter. Someone gave him a truck.

MANHITCHER: According to your report “that’s when he kicked me. I’ve been kicked before but this man was an artist.” Is that correct? And how did you describe it?

BRANYANT: I wish he was into something more abstract. But what he hit me with was perfectly rendered.

JUDGE: Mr. Manhitcher can you get on with it?

MANHITCHER: And how did you obtain this photo of the defendant Moss Cross getting what you claim is a burrito paid for by Mr. Ballace “Hog” Hogge?

BRANYANT: I walked by them and took a picture with my phone.