If for many, many years the only way your favorite football team can win a football game is to hopelessly muck things up, play a lot of soft coverage before stiffening in the red zone, and live exclusively by the linebacker and the punt, and the only other football you watch is the pre-Ben Johnson Chicago Bears, at some point you just have to accept the fact that you revel in unwatchable toilet football. That was how Pat Fitzgerald kept getting to bowl games in his 17 seasons at Northwestern and largely how the Wildcats continued to play under David Braun, and this was the operating environment of the Big Ten West; at some point under those conditions, a person who is a fan of a team that does that must accept that the only pleasure you can find as a football fan is appreciating how profoundly annoying your team is and enjoy the psychological distress that your team is causing to another fanbase that assumes that they will automatically win because Northwestern was very bad in the 1980s.
If you see this face you have already punted
So it was no surprise when a Northwestern team flaunting a great offense for the first time in recent memory, a Northwestern team that had only narrowly lost to the defending champs on the road and was coming in ranked and heavily favored would enter a Spartan Stadium that had been covered in mud and ancient tree traps and Pat Fitzgerald screaming “I’M HERE KILL ME NOW.”
Pat Fitzgerald when confronting an extraterrestrial hunting creature that has just blown up Jesse "The Body" Ventura's rib cage with a futuristic laser weapon
Michigan State, missing something like 45% of its defense (though not former Northwestern linebacker Kenny Soares, who I feel like has been lost in the shuffle in the various Revenge Game narratives– I apologize to Kenny Soares, you may also do Revengeif you would like to), managed to stymie Chip Kelly’s Rube Goldberg offense. They were not fooled by the Wing T and repeatedly sacked former Spartan quarterback Aidan Chiles, who was unable to do much in the first half. Northwestern’s defense, without tackling machine Rob Fitzgerald who is not related to Pat Fitzgerald by the way, let some receivers get behind them for big gains. Michigan State led 14-10 at the half, and it was clear this was going to devolve into a game where both teams Northwestern at each other.
The game turned dramatically on three special teams miscues. Michigan State blocked an early Northwestern field goal attempt. Then, after Chiles led a dramatic late touchdown drive and two-point conversion to tie the game at 21, Northwestern stopped the Spartans and got the ball back to attempt to go ahead. That did not happen. The ‘Cats were stopped deep in their own end and were about to punt the ball back to the Spartans with about three and half minutes left in the game. Instead, Braun, perhaps in a tribute to Fitzgerald, called for the fake punt. I am sure that in seventeen years at Northwestern, Fitzgerald must have called a fake punt or kick that actually worked, but off the top of my head, I can’t remember any. All I can remember are a series of fakes where the upman was given the ball in a futile Charge of the Punt Brigade before being tackled by approximately 85 scholarship players. This time, David Braun called for a variant of this where the upman instead attempted a doomed, wobbly pass to no one.
The stage was set for Pat Fitzgerald to kill the clock, kick a field goal, and (though he would not ever publicly admit it) feel like he has made some sort of point about getting fired by winning one Big Ten game. But that did not happen because of the third special teams mishap, the one I had warned you about in the last paragraph, the one where Brendan Flakes leaped up and battered down the go-ahead field goal and gave Chiles and the Northwestern offense a minute. That’s all they needed. The ‘Cats marched down the field, and Jackson Kleather drilled the 34 yarder to seal it up. Pat Fitzgerald had been out-Fitzgeralded in his new stadium.
The game was a sweet homecoming for Aidan Chiles who had been the starter at Michigan State and in a very 2020s college football twist was facing his former backup for whom he had been benched late in the season. Chiles seemed to get an unwelcome reception from Spartan fans, saying in the post-game press conference that they were chanting “fuck you, Aidan” at him; after Kleather’s kick went through the uprights, the cameras caught him emphatically waving goodbye at the Michigan State stands. This is a weird situation for a few reasons: one is a quarterback somehow finding himself in a better situation after transferring to Northwestern; another is fans getting really mad at a player they didn’t even want on the team anymore coming back and playing for a conference rival. It used to be that fans only got riled up about these kind of things if arcane message board rumors had him signing with a school only to get scooped up by a rival.
I remember seeing Wisconsin native Diamond Stone heckled at a Badgers home game for choosing to go to Maryland and probably also to determine whether it is more satisfying to say "Diamond Stone" in a Wisconsin or Maryland accent
While the ‘Cats and Spartans were busy melting down at each other in a fit of emotional pique, the top echelon of college football was destroying itself. The highest ranked teams in the nation were busy falling apart in a chaotic carnival of the unranked. Amidst all of the chaos, Northwestern went up one AP ranking to number 24; the voters saw a team needing a miracle to escape from one of the Big Ten’s worst teams, ignoring the game’s operatic register. After a crazy and draining game, the ‘Cats face a potentially devastating trap game against the absolute dregs of the conference.
GREG SCHIANO AND RUTGERS ARE TRYING TO PAINT A TRAIN TUNNEL ON THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN THIS WEEK
Rutgers might be the only football program whose relationship to its head coach reminds me of Rasputin’s relationship to the Romanovs. Schiano has maintained a bizarre, mystical hold over the program by making the team bowl eligible in the early 2000s. Schiano’s success at Rutgers was so unexpected and celebrated that he left to give the Tampa Bay Buccaneers MRSA. The entire time, Rutgers was pining for him as the program plunged back into misery under Chris Ash while Schiano got fired from the Bucs, coached defense for Ohio State, and repeatedly threatened to take the New England Patriots defensive coordinator job before it became a sinecure for Belichick’s various upsetting sons. But in 2020, Schiano returned to Rutgers to lead them back from being the laughingstock of the Big Ten to the heights of mediocrity as promised in the Prophesies of Schiano.
Schiano in his triumphant first stint at Rutgers where he could be pictured with James Gandolfini looking exactly like a Desperate Gambling Guy in an early Sopranos episode where he has no idea that Paulie Walnuts is going to hit him with a wrench
But even the powers of Pisacataway’s favorite son seem to be waning in 2026. Rutgers got blown out by traditional FBS doormat UMASS, a team that was historically so bad that I started a blog post about the terrible 2019 Northwestern team somehow being favored by 40 points against them by typing "UMASS, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. U-MASS. The lips taking two steps to bleat out and hiss on the second syllable U MASS.” UMASS has actually been surprisingly good this season, racing out to a 4-0 record, but Rutgers was also bludgeoned by a Boston College team in the death throes of the Bill O’Brien tenure. This is one of the worst teams in the Big Ten.
On the other hand Rutgers has not been an automatic out in the conference. They took USC down to the wire in a cross country Body Clocks classic and are coming off their lone Big Ten win by beating a Maryland team that was flashing red like a video game boss low on hit points. The loss to Rutgers, a sort of rival in that they were both part of the third wave of pointless Big Ten expansion as the conference grabbed at lousy teams in a dispiriting desire for East Coast television markets, was the final straw for Mike Locksley. Locksley had gotten Maryland a few bowl wins, but the person who edits Lockley's wikipedia page and writes entire paragraphs about each of his seasons could only describe the 2025 season with the sentence “Locksley returned as head coach for Maryland in 2025 for his seventh season.”
Northwestern is heavily favored at home against Rutgers. This is a dangerous game. Northwestern’s offensive line was battered and beaten up against an injury-riddled Michigan State defense, and the Wing T is not going to take anyone by surprise anymore. Northwestern's wounded secondary has to face Rutgers's excellent receiver KJ Duff, and the Scarlet Knights have a veteran quarterback in journeyman Dylan Lonergan, an Alabama backup who came to Piscataway via Boston College– yes, I checked to see if Lonergan got a Michigan State "fuck you"-style reception from BC fans in his return to Chestnut Hill but he was apparently injured for that game and I can’t find a record of whether BC fans were giving him the business and yelling “I er ah do not care foah this Lonahgan fellow” at him in street clothes on the sidelines while his backup threw four interceptions.
A win here would already make the ‘Cats bowl eligible. Looking at the schedule before the season, I thought just getting to a bowl would be an incredible achievement because I did not realize that Penn State is now a hollowed out disaster that goes out there every week looking surprised that opponents are allowed to run the ball. But that was also because after this game things get serious– they face a Halloween game on the road at what looks like a diminished but still solid Oregon, home against traditional Big Ten West foe Iowa, and then on the road at Ohio State before finishing up against a confounding Minnesota team and an unpredictable Hat Donnybrook against Illinois so if Northwestern does not win this game they could be in last year’s excruciating position of desperately trying to get to Detroit for weeks at a time.
But with Northwestern playing well and major questions from the Big Ten contenders left on the schedule, some fans are dreaming much larger than a low-tier bowl berth. There's a lot of dragons left on the schedule before I will start thinking about anything more, but this also looks like it could be a special Northwestern team.
FICTION SECTION
In 2026, college football mostly a collection of lawsuits. Here is a short story about one of the greatest legal minds in college football.
The case had already pinballed through stays and injunctions and open letters to the media by the time that the partners decided it was time to see The Moose. The Moose was once the most feared litigator in any case touching college sports, a relentless force that could bend any courtroom to his will. But The Moose was retired. The man who had once charmed juries and thundered at judges had become a recluse, only occasionally deigning to offer advice from his office that no one ever saw him enter or leave.
No one at the firm wanted to see The Moose. He had become irascible and unpredictable, and while The Moose still had what I was told was invaluable insight and advice, he was also liable to berate anyone who saw him and throw them out of his office if they brought a problem he thought was beneath his concern. It was nearly impossible to determine what he thought would merit his attention, and he did not defer to rank or position. One time a high-ranking partner, a man whose name was on the building and whose interactions with anyone who was not desperately trying to please him had dwindled to other motorists who gave him the finger after he cut them off in his car with its signature JURIS license plate had to retreat from a hail of staplers thrown by The Moose who dismissed him as a “certified Brain Idiot.” No one ever figured out how The Moose had obtained so many staplers.
The way it worked is that we all wrote our names on pieces of paper and threw them into a modified t-shirt cannon that we had purchased for this purpose and fired them into a wall covered in sticky paper, and whoever’s name got stuck had to go see The Moose. It will come as no surprise that we had to come up with elaborate rules because of immediate and rampant cheating– now the paper had to come from a single source to stop participants from using heavier letterhead and all of the paper had to meet a four step crumpling process after an intern was found with an aerodynamic origami book that was concealed within a hollowed out collection of case law. I had never bothered to cheat because I subscribed to a fatalism that the universe would decide when to make me face The Moose, and so I didn't yell or fall to my knees or vomit like so many others whose paper had stuck.
Recently, I was told, The Moose had developed very strong opinions on fabrics. He allowed no polyesters, rejected certain cotton blends, and had a very stapler-heavy reaction to certain kinds of wools. “There’s more than one kind of wool?” I asked. “You have no idea,” I was told.
The Moose eventually reached a compromise with the rest of the firm after one person came to see him stark naked. From then on, all visitors had to wear a sort of heavy vinyl smock over their clothes that would prevent his exposure to offending linens or gabardines.
I was led to the two enormous doors in front of The Moose’s office. H. K. R. Theodore Jentamucz, Esq. on the nameplate. He used to have a secretary, but the increasingly complex rules for entry had gotten too unwieldy for anyone but a dedicated employee. At one point, I was told that The Moose would not see anyone who had consumed mustard within the last month, and he demanded that all persons with business before him must undergo a three-week “mustard cleanse.” An associate who had come to see him about a difficult burrito payment case before the NCAA that had reached a snag– cash payments, the burrito completely consumed, a hostile player refusing to yield a stool sample for burrito residue testing– had cheated by a day was met by The Moose bellowing that the firm had sent him a “mustard creature.” “The stuff is oozing from his pores,” The Moose yelled while blasting him with a fire extinguisher.
I knocked in the pattern I was told to and said the phrase “the smog is fog upon the bog.” The doors opened slowly. I was told once that it took three attempts at installing an automatic door opener to match the dramatic pace The Moose demanded without taking forever, but that is a contentious story around the office. The Moose sat behind an enormous wooden desk with papers piled up in the corners. Behind him was a massive portrait of him sitting behind the desk with the same papers and the same portrait that continued recursively, each portrait showing a younger version of him as his muttonchops turned from a pure white into a deepening red as it receded into tinier dimensions. The office was warm and I began to sweat under the vinyl smock. I had heard that he had relaxed the mustard prohibition after undergoing a series of exercises, but I ate my turkey sandwich dry as a precaution.
“Another one,” he said in what was once a powerful baritone but had thinned out and now had a slight wheeze. “I managed to have a long glittering career before the NCAA without having to constantly go barging into someone’s office and begging for help. Used to think through problems myself. Take, for example, Wayne Arizona. Power forward. Mr. Basketball. We had him dead to rights on the car, we thought. Brand new Alpha Romeo sports roadster in Carolina blue. But the paperwork was perfectly in order. They had it in the grandma’s name, you see. Not only that, but they got the old bat race car certified. There were checkered flags all over the house, driving goggles, the whole thing. Someone taught her how to do donuts in a parking lot. Had me up for weeks, pacing. The NCAA was done, you understand. They were totally out of their depth. A bunch of pants merchants over there. They were sending their people down to the DMV, to the title office.
I said to them, bring me the car. I had some friends down at the local pep boys, game them a few bucks, you know how it goes, or maybe you don’t, you’re probably just pecking away at that computer all day, but I had those pep boys break the whole thing down piece by piece, carburetor to glove box. And that’s when we found it. A receipt from Randy’s Lunch Munch for meatball sandwiches with the name Bunch on it, that had to be Smack Lancaster, an assistant coach. He couldn't resist giving them Steve, he's the only Smack around, and with a certain predilection for the pressed and balled up meats, you see. Grandma admitted she had heartburn in a deposition, she couldn’t handle even half of a Randy’s. Well, when I was done with him, Mr. Arizona never played a minute. Last I heard he was selling high-end custom shoe inserts, doing very well for himself, I understand. That’s what we do here at this firm. That’s the expectation.”
“Or take Rick Cabinet,” The Moose said, barely looking at me. “Quarterback. Sued the NCAA after getting caught with a custom racing airboat from Larry Matador, the airboat king of southwestern Louisiana and a major booster at Western. Said he was entrapped by overzealous NCAA investigators tipped off by Mississippi rivals. There were hours of tapes of him refusing to take the boat saying ‘Sir, that is not allowed by the by-laws of the National Collegiate Athletics Association.’ But he finally took the boat. What he said was that certain rivals had goaded his father into a ruinous air boat race for the stakes of the family bar and grill. Only he, Rick Cabinet, felt like he could guide a supercharged airboat through those swamps fast enough to save the place. The whole thing was a setup. It was a tough time for the NCAA, you see. A few investigators had just been caught planting hamburgers on the Peranta brothers.
It was a good case. The kid was like a stone in his deposition. But what he didn’t know is that I had one of my guys, young hotshot like you probably, working undercover in the high-stakes airboat racing underground. And what he was telling me was a completely different story. Rick Cabinet wasn’t some innocent kid. He was a degenerate airboat racer and not nearly as good as he thought he was. Owed money to all sorts of swamp syndicates. The whole racing to save his daddy’s bar and grill was a bunch of nonsense he and his sumbitch lawyer Bennett Manmancer came up with. You have no idea what we were up against back then. That Manmancer once invented an entire multistate group of vintage burlap sack enthusiasts including handwriting months worths of ‘zines– that’s a homemade magazine, you write it out and put it through a copier– in order to prove why his client had several burlap sacks with dollar signs on them in his garage after committing to A&M.
But what my guy came up with after months undercover was this.” The Moose began rooting around his desk through mountains of paper breathing heavily and cursing under his breath. Eventually, he pulled out a crumbling, yellowed paper in a plastic sleeve. He frisbee-tossed it over to me and I caught it in a sort of clapping motion after which he yelled at me “what on earth are you doing, haven’t you ever handled a sensitive document before? You’re grabbling at it like you’ve got scissor hands. That was a movie, you understand, there was a pale sensitive boy who had scissors for hands. It's impractical. Cumbersome, as you can imagine.” I looked at the paper while he was berating me and though it had faded and crumbled at the edges, it was clear what it was: a flier advertising an upcoming airboat race featuring the stars of the circuit Ed Tembley, Mead Pohoga, Wayne “Ayne” Cain, and finally in the smallest type on the flier, Rick Cabinet.
“There it is in black and white. You see, he was already entered in the race, daddy or no daddy,” The Moose said. “The flyer was put up weeks before any bet when he was already secretly negotiating with Matador through a series of hand signs while he was swearing he wouldn’t take the boat into the wire Matador was wearing.
You should have seen Rick Cabinet’s face when I produced that at his deposition. I’ve never seen a human being turn that shade of green before. Manmancer gave him the thumbs down like he was a Roman emperor making a decision on a gladiator. Cabinet broke instantly. We never heard from him again. I assume the swamp syndicates go their hands on him. Sad story, great arm, just loved the boats too much. Not uncommon, unfortunately.”
He finally stopped talking and glowered at me. I didn’t want to say anything to break into his monologue and didn’t dare interrupt him. But after a minute or two, it was clear he was finally ready for me to speak.
“Thank you, Mr. Jentamuscz for…” I started to say but he immediately interrupted.
“Out with it already,” The Moose yelled. “Here I am taking all afternoon to tell you about how we win cases at this firm and you’re standing there with your mouth hanging open like a muppet. That’s one of those puppets that Jim Henson made, they had a frog and a pig and all sorts of other creatures,” he said. I knew what a muppet was.
“Sorry, sir, what I meant to say is that we have a somewhat delicate case, one that has everyone here a little perplexed…”
“Let me guess: you’ve got a car someone paid for. Someone bought a couple of pinatas to a children’s birthday party, the good ones, not the new ones where you pull out the ribbons. Did you know they do that now, they pull out the ribbons instead of hitting it with a stick?”
“No, it’s none of those things…”
“Meat importation. Wing tipped shoes. Illegal pythons. I can do this whole case in 35 seconds. Come on, let’s get this over with, I’m a busy man.”
“Mr. Jentamuscz, we are representing a school who wants to play a quarterback that was caught gambling on his own team.”
The Moose, who was noisily shuffling papers while I was trying to talk, stopped and looked at me. “Well you’re screwed,” he said.
