Portents and Signs

There is no shortage of radio callers and message board maniacs that would take a 7-6 football season and berth in the NCAA Men’s Tournament as an invitation to launch an entire wing of prop planes with increasingly unhinged demands to fire a Gary Oldmanish everyone at their school. This is the Golden Age of Northwestern sports.

Northwestern returns with all the pomp one would expect from the Pin Striped-Bowl Champions, with a life-size replica of Justin Jackson erected in Monument Park and Pat Fitzgerald appearing at Pittsburgh, as bowl tradition dictates, to dress like an umpire and scream YER OUTTA HERE (IN REFERENCE TO THE PINSTRIPE BOWL) at the Panthers while doing burnouts on their practice field in a custom-built Pinstripe Champion bullpen car.

Pat Fitzgerald engages in the traditional spoils of the Pinstripe Bowl 
Championship

Northwestern’s triumphant sports mediocrity has not happened in isolation but from an attempt to operate like a major athletic conference sports school instead of a program for wayward youth to build character through getting run over and dunked upon. Scaffolding has sprung up across the campus watered by a money hose. Northwestern is building a ludicrous quarter-billion-dollar luxury sports fortress along the lake. The basketball team has been forced to a suburban arena for monster trucks, wrestling, and people dressed as monster trucks who wrestle at each other in a production of Grave Digger: The Grave Musical to make room for renovations so they can renovate Welsh-Ryan with things like chairs while sacrificing the crucial home advantage that comes from forcing opposing teams to get onto the court by shouldering past the hot dog line.

Welsh-Ryan Arena, shown before renovations began just before a 

Big Ten contest

Northwestern football has been at least consistently decent for nearly a quarter century.  The basketball team appears to be moving in the same direction.  An entire generation of visiting fans may be growing up seeing Northwestern win bowl games and play in a basketball arena without cigarette machines and in a football stadium with gleaming, gilded tarps and actually believe that their team could lose.  At that moment, it is possible that Northwestern will have lost its way, that the entire mission of sports at the university could have faded from its highest ideal, which is treading on its shitty sports history of crappiness to make opposing fans really, really mad.

NORTHWESTERN SEASON PREVIEW

They are supposed to be good.  SBNation has them raked #23.  The AP Poll has them just outside the Top 25.  They return a promising quarterback, a stout secondary, and one of the greatest running backs in school history.  They miss Ohio State and Michigan and the Big Ten West remains the province of dreams where anything is possible.  Illinois has been cowed back to Memorial Stadium after their last attempt to play at Soldier Field, embarrassed by a legion of dozens of Chicago's Big Ten fans in mewling purple showed up to take up several rows.  This is dangerous territory.

If you are like me and prefer to take something as frivolously enjoyable as sports fandom and inject it with doom and dread, then it is not hard to see problems on the horizon.  Northwestern has more often than not sputtered after putting together big seasons. Last year, the Wildcats followed up a ten-win season with an inexplicable 9-7 loss to an Illinois State team clawing at the coffin lid of the Missouri Valley Conference.  The last ten-win season spawned a preseason ranking and ESPN College Gameday matchup with Ohio State  that turned into a horrifying death spiral; the Wildcats lost that game and literally every other game until they managed to walk off with a consolation Hat.

A person with a sign saying that "the Exaltation of Mercury shows that 
Northwestern won't even go to the Meineke Car Care Bowl" was 
escorted from the Gameday set, the warning unheeded

College football remains unpredictable game by game.  Northwestern's disastrous five-win 2013 season involved a three game stretch where they lost in overtime, in triple overtime, and on a hail mary pass by a quarterback named Ron Kellogg III who earned that suffix as Nebraska's third-choice signal caller.  The 2015 ten-win campaign involved close wins from a failed two-point conversion, James Franklin's avant-garde time management style, and referees simply refusing to award points to Wisconsin that incited the Badger crowd into attacking them with a barrage of snowballs.  There's an entire school of analytical thought dedicating to pooh-poohing the results of individual games that are determined by small sample freak events like fumble recoveries, missed field goals, and players falling down and clutching at their hamstrings over the hushed, lilting tones of Fox's injured player version of the Football Robot Murder March before playing a bunch of commercials for truck boner dorito pills.  The entirety of college football is an epistemological project proving that human beings cannot actually determine whether football teams are better than each other.

After a long and fruitful discussion, two college football fans agree on 
the importance of Conference Championships in the Playoff Picture

In this uncertain sports environment, it is silly to try to make predictions.  Northwestern's star linebacker Anthony Walker has gone to the NFL, picked by the Colts through the inscrutable whim of an orangutan.  Clayton Thorson will face a challenge in the passing game without Austin Carr, a receiver who was always open, caught everything, and drew the attention of defenses who by the end of the season were covering him the way Illinois law enforcement covered the Blues Brothers.  These are not cause for panic-- the Wildcats have stalwarts returning like all-everything safety Godwin Igwebuike and exciting up and comers like Montre Hartage and Joe Gaziano, the Scourge of East Lansing.  They still have Justin Jackson The Ball Carrier who has spent the summer attempting to track down wayward Pittsburgh players who have been wandering Eastern Seaboard after becoming too confused by his juking maneuvers to find their way out of Yankee Stadium.

I haven't run the numbers.  I haven't analyzed the schedule.  I have not pored over depth charts, watched filmed, attended practice sessions, disguised myself as Skip Myslanski and attempted to gain intelligence on the team by pretending I am writing an iambic pentameter poem about field goal holding techniques. There is no insight here beyond an irrational sports pessimism.  That is counterproductive.  There's no point attempting to shield oneself from disappointment when it comes to college football, where the worst outcome is have an Iowa fan sneer at you triumphantly in the parking lot.  It is time to be equally irrationally positive.  So here's the season preview.  Wisconsin? Divided in two and run blocked into Lakes Mendota and Menona.  Penn State? Remember when Vanderbilt sort of abruptly canceled a game with Northwestern when the SEC schedule changed and everyone was upset about that for some reason?  Well, the mighty Wildcat will not forget, as Northwestern players burst from the tunnel crying for vengeance, specifically in reference to football scheduling procedures for the 201 and 2014 seasons.  Nebraska?  We will see how the Cornhuskers play under the pressure of playing in front of their fans as opposed to at Ryan field where they also play in front of slightly fewer of their fans.  

The Wildcats will, according to my proprietary HOKUM model, run roughshod all over the Big Ten, leave the Hat safely ensconced in its guarded, climate-controlled Hat Chamber, and be good enough to force irritated college football pundits to have to get yelled at about them when they start inexplicably releasing meaningless Playoff Rankings because the college football media is entirely dependent on yelling about meaningless rankings for weeks at a time and so will I, traveling through American cities with a bullhorn demanding that the Playoff Committee take note of Opponent Schedule, Second-Half Hot Dog Shortages, and Body Clocks.

DRY RUSSIA

Prohibition lives on in the popular imagination as a time of rum-running, bootlegging, speakeasies, and gangsters who all talk like Edward G. Robinson all the time, just a mass of hardened criminals in pinstripe suits all staring at each other through sliding peepholes with hot jazz inaudible under the din of guys saying myaah.  This is a romanticized version of it, but people do get the general sense of the problem of trying to ban alcohol through the rule of law, of trying to enforce it through officials who may like to drink themselves, of creating an entire class of casual criminals who have probably already been punished by drinking corn mash fermented in an old sock.  

The Soviet Union tried to curtail drinking in the 1980s.  Stephen White's 1996 monograph Russia Goes Dry examines the Soviet anti-alcohol campaign with an academic flourish of figures and numbers.  White remains concerned with studying the anti-alcohol campaign as a critique of Soviet campaigns against social ills.  He susses out patterns, examines difficulties of enforcing campaigns over sprawling localities, and looks at societies, journals, and posters.  

Posters from London's Pushkin House exhibition on 
anti-alcohol campaign posters

White and the Russian sources he cites struggle to identify consumption statistics.  Soviet statisticians included alcohol in broad categories such as "other foodstuffs" during the 1960s; White cites scholars that surveyed emigres or extrapolating from earlier categories of expenditures.  The Soviet government found that alcohol had a twin problem-- White estimates that in the 1960s and 1970s, alcohol taxes provided about a third of all government revenues but meted out a staggering cost in lost productivity, health, and even security. For example, White describes a Soviet crew in Czechoslovakia that bartered its tank for several cases of vodka, pickles, and herring; the bar owner then sold the tank to a recycling plant.

The Politburo announced an anti-alcohol campaign in 1985.  White stresses that the Politburo remained divided.  Mikahil Gorbachev came on board.  The most zealous anti-alcohol crusader was Yegor Ligachev, a teetotaler who had long desired to curb drunkenness.  The campaign was met with internal opposition from other officials who felt that the campaign was misguided or ill-planned-- one minister resigned, and Boris Yeltsin later wrote that the campaign was "amazingly ill-conceived and ridiculous" and that he "could not reconcile [himself] to [Ligachev's] obstinacy and dilettantism."

The campaign limited the supply of alcohol in stores, cracked down on homebrewing, and released a large number of posters involving bottles being crushed by hammers.  White claims that initially, the campaign did discourage drinking and manage to change some public attitudes.  But, within a few years, the campaign began to wane.  Homebrewing increased and led to vast quantities of sugar bought or even stolen.  Local Party officials varied wildly in enforcement.  In one Ukranian Village, local officials housed their own elaborate brewing apparatus described by Pravda as "45-degree first-grade hooch." The sober lifestyle had not caught on in Novosibirsk, where White notes that fewer than three percent of of Party members abstained; "A Communist is also a human being" was the local slogan.

The campaign faltered after several years.  Like in the United States, the attempt to reduce availability of alcohol sparked an enormous trade in illicit brewing.  The campaign also hurt revenue.  White notes that the government had planned to offset decreased spending on alcohol with increased spending on other goods, but the supply of these goods never materialized, and profits from alcohol sales ended up in the hands of private, illegal brewing concerns.  By 1988, one official critical of the policy had, according to White, referred to it as "a blunder unequaled since the time of the Sumerians."

FOOTBALL SEASON BEGINS
Nevada comes off an uninspiring 5-7 season with new coach Jay Norvell and a new Air Raid-style scheme led by Matt Mumme, son of legendary Air Raid innovator Hal Mumme.  Northwestern is somehow favored by 24.5 points, although I should note that betting lines are meant to encourage betting on all sides and in this particular case to entrap people with gambling problems who would actually wager on a Northwestern vs. Nevada game.  The sun should be out.  The tarps will be gleaming.  Northwestern will be dressed head to toe in purple in a sponsorship arrangement with Dimetapp.  The videoboard is set to show us hundreds of images of Pat Fitzgerald's jaw jutting against an American flag.  It is football season again with all of the joy and disappointment and yelling and complete absurdity that entails.  

UNDEFEATED IN ALL HAT-RELATED CONTESTS

Kudos to whatever maniac dreamed up the Pinstripe Bowl, a football game played in a baseball stadium in a city that on a late December afternoon could be overrun by snow, ice, polar winds, and complex societies of hibernating bleacher creatures who spend the winter deep in the bowels of the stadium while composing new clap clap clapclapclap cheers for the springtime and occasionally clashing over whether or not A-Rod is a true Yankee and marching to battle in their souvenir sundae batting helmets.  The game drew a healthy contingent of blanket-swaddled fans and surely a massive television audience of people at gyms, muted bar televisions, and people stuck at work forced to stream the game into their cubicle joined by their ergonomic back pillows and a staple remover with googly eyes named "Bite Golic."

ESPN went all out and scrambled all available Golics

Northwestern came into the Pinstripe Bowl as underdogs against a confident Pitt team disappointed to be slumming it with Northwestern in a low-status bowl within the incomprehensible Great Hierarchy of Bowls. Pitt's turbocharged offense managed to march down the field repeatedly but had trouble crossing the goalline.  Anthony Walker ripped star running back James Conner from a one-yard score and Godwin Iguibuike came up with an endzone interception.  On the other side, Justin Jackson slithered, danced, juked, and stiff-armed his way to 224 yards, three touchdowns, and a slew of prone Pittsburgh defenders laid to rest in an armtackle graveyard.

Justin Jackson temporary stops the rotation of the Earth on its axis for his second touchdown

Pat Fitzgerald coached like he had nothing to lose.  An earlier post discussed Fitzgerald's more aggressive playcalling this season on fourth down.  The ESPN commentators made it seem like this was part of the Fitzgerald package, as he recklessly calls for fourth down conversions like a child emperor demanding that courtiers get kicked by exotic animals for his amusement because they haven't seen the thousands of times that the Wildcats have tried to kneel down for entire quarters, or sent out the punt unit in situations that even Kirk Ferentz would find excessive, and asked Northwestern's kickers to kick into howling squalls where the only way to get a ball through the uprights would be to speak some sort of ancient phrase in a dead language.  Fitzgerald trusted his offense and they converted all four times on fourth down after watching similar attempts falter this season by cruel inches.

Pat Fitzgerald goes all in on fourth downs

Northwestern drew inspiration from some ESPN personality who picked Northwestern to lose the Pinstripe Bowl on television to the point that Fitzgerald called him out twice: immediately after the game and at the postgame press conference.  Fitzgerald made sure the clip of an ESPN blowhard was the last thing that Northwestern players saw before taking the baseball field and this is easily the second funniest aspect of the Pinstripe Bowl except for the existence of the Pinstripe Bowl.  One can only imagine how far the Wildcats could go if someone informed Stephen A. Smith of their existence.

If it were me, I would not have kicked it to Jeremy Maclin. I would 
have said I'm gonna drill a hole in the dome and I want you to punt 
into the real Alamo which is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE but a 
MOTIVATIONAL EFFECT. I would have put everyone on the endzone 
against RON KELLOGG the THIRD and the FIRST and SECOND for 
GOOD MEASURE. I would have called a PLAY against MICHIGAN 
where it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for Siemian to fall on his butt. 
I would have REMOVED HIS BUTT. I would not have lost 34 consecutive 
football games. I would not become embroiled in a basketball 
point-shaving scandal instead I would say y'all aren't shaving a TENTH
of a POINT until we at least make the NCAA TOURNAMENT

The Pinstripe Bowl provided a solid bowl experience.  It featured wild lead changes, huge plays, a swashbuckling coach who kept going for it on fourth down, controversial unflagged hits that knocked out Pitts' quarterback and inspirational superstar running back, Joe Girardi, a low number of hamfisted baseball references which is good but also slightly disappointing like Al Pacino's performance in Insomnia which was excellent but I spent the entire time waiting for a sleep-deprived Pacino to bug out his eyes and scream at someone like an unhinged maniac which is like the first thing you'd expect to see in a movie about a Pacino character who hasn't slept in days but he's barely even irate, and an upset for an incredibly rare Northwestern bowl victory.

THE REPORTS ARE IN AND THE BIG TEN IS BAD AGAIN

One of the most enjoyable things about bowl season is that the college football discourse, already a roiling pot of text-spittle, becomes given over to its favorite topic: whether a conference is bad.  Any rational person knows that a small series of one-off games often decided by a few plays tells us relatively nothing about the entire conference; it is hard to imagine a rational person sitting through more than 35 seconds of discussion about college football which consists of either a person screaming at Paul Finebaum while wearing a single-strap unitard or a person who sprays um actuallys around the internet like a sprinkler hooked up to a sewage line.

The Big Ten lost a bunch of bowl games and now it is bad.  Ohio State, which grabbed a controversial playoff spot despite not playing in the Big Ten Championship, got annihilated by Clemson.  Penn State lost a ludicrous quarterback duel by a last-second field goal.  Michigan lost because of a delightfully insane series of invents involving an effectively flummoxed kick returner and an interception that featured a potential missed offsides call that has led to the endowment of the Barrett Chair in Drawing Arrows on Pictures of Football.  Only Big Ten West powers Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Unstoppable Wildcat of Northwestern managed to win their relatively lowly bowl games.

Michigan scientists analyze the interception in the brand-new Offside and Spot Center

The Big Ten's bowl season flop remains completely meaningless.  For one, it is incredibly satisfying to watch the bullies of the Big Ten beaten in bowl games.  Conference pride is incomprehensible; why should I root for the very teams that sweep into the stadium every year with their legions of fans and more often than not bludgeon Northwestern?  There are few things in college football more satisfying than watching Ohio State get towed out of the Glendale stadium like one of its detachable grass fields with the possible exception of watching Jim Harbaugh explode into a million Harbaugh particles, each of them spitefully calling a meaningless timeout in the dying seconds of the Orange Bowl.

Second, the Conference Argument Industry takes place in a bizarre, lofty space that has nothing to do with the experience of college football fans.  While the big teams and the arbitrary playoff committee or BCS or whatever rudimentary scapulimancies used to divine the national champion before then take up all the air in the room, the vast majority of college football teams are either scraping for a bowl in whatever pizza city may take them or having fans argue about firing their coaches on the internet, or doing both at the same time. There are approximately three teams in each conference that  determine whether the whole thing is good or bad, and Northwestern has absolutely nothing to do with any of it.  The only thing that matters are Hats and bowl games, and the bloviations of various windbags obsessed with which team will lose to Alabama remains as ancillary to most teams' experience of college football as the seeding in the strongman competition where the giant Scandinavians are forced to scuttle around while strapped into economy cars.

Mr. Bay, I'm here to audition for the transformer. Yes, I'm ready, here it 
goes: Reet rot roat. Shit let me try that again

BOWL CHAMPIONS

The last time Northwestern won a bowl game, the players participated in a horrifying ritual disembowelment of a plush monkey toy representing the Wildcats' bowl drought.  Now, they've won two.  Northwestern's bowl losing streak came down mainly to the relative paucity of bowl games and the team's historical football ineptitude.  Then, when the walls opened up and flooded these United States with a cornucopia of bowl spectacles, Northwestern ran into what appeared to be a universe determined to shut them out.  They played in all manner of bowls against big teams, against small teams, in Pasadena, in Detroit, and in every available venue in the state of Texas and they could not win their final game whether they were matched up against an SEC juggernaut or a cresting MAC team. They lost in overtime.  They lost on an overtime fake field goal.  They had NCAA officials stop games and invent novel overtimes and special teams scenarios for the Wildcats to falter.  

Brandon Breazell has spent the last 11 years returning Northwestern's 

onside kicks for touchdowns

The Pinstripe Victory was not as satisfying as that emotional, drought-wrecking Gator Bowl against Mississippi State.  That was a ranked Northwestern team in a New Year's Day bowl that had all the pomp you would exepct from a Mid Status Bowl Game: the sun-dappled Jacksonville coast, a guy in a knight suit threatening tax code with medieval weaponry, numerous cuts to an interview with a race car driver.  

No sports victory could possibly be more enjoyable than a long-awaited win after losing for decades and decades.  Those games, the ones that require the shredding of a stuffed animal monkey and brutal display of its plush carcass in post-game press conferences as a warning to FAO Schwartz, come once in a lifetime.  That does not diminish the Pinstripe Bowl, which featured a heavy underdog Northwestern team wearing officially licensed hats in triumph with their third winter victory in program history.  I hope there are many more crappy bowl game trophies to come. 

Until then, the only thing to do is sit and wait for the next great impossible victory: become one the 68 best basketball teams in the country.  

HEY I'M PLAYIN' FOOTBALL HERE

The Northwestern Wildcat Football Team shrugged off a hideous loss to an FCS bottom-feeder and managed to defeat Iowa and the fetid rump of the Big Ten West to qualify for this, a mid-afternoon weekday bowl game played in a frigid baseball stadium against a Power Five opponent that is so angry about playing Northwestern that its fans have been complaining about Bowl Tie Conspiracies. I could not possibly be happier.

A long and costly investigation by the hard-bitten journalists of the Pinstripe Bowl website 
who spent days sleeping in cars and meeting with informants in empty warehouses overlooking 
waterfronts and surviving threats that show that they were getting too close to the truth finally 
reveals that both teams are excited to play in this bowl game

The internet hosts a smattering of maniacs who somehow oppose the rabbit-like proliferation of bowl games over the past few decades because I guess it taints the august legacy of for-profit amateur exhibition football.  This is insane.  There should be more bowl games.  There should be a bowl game for every American, each sponsored by a preposterous company or branch of the United States military, played in a weird frozen stadium in front of 85 people at 10:00am on a weekday and if you go to them there should be Official Bowl Events for each fanbase that include all of the pretentious pomp of major sporting events even though it's for the Amalgamated Belt Buckle Corn Dog Bowl located in a disused rust belt buckle factory complete with some obscure 90s band trotted out for an elongated halftime and a national television crew and the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle swaggering in for the Presentation of the Belt Buckle Trophy punctuated by streamers falling on the empty floor at what had once been the room where they custom embossed "BOSS HOSS" right onto the buckle except for the time they got an erroneous plate and had to recall all those BOSS HOSE belt buckles, but that was not the responsibility of this man, the President of Amalgamated Belt Buckle, under whose stewardship the company has recovered and is now prosperous enough to host a Bowl Game.

College football is too large and too unwieldy for a single championship to cover, and to write off shitty bowls because they don't count also means writing off the vast majority of college football games.  Northwestern football games face the same criticisms as those leveled at shitty bowl games: low attendance, prominence of tarps, the involvement of the Northwestern Wildcats, and none of that has any impact on my own enjoyment of it.  When you strip all of the glittering grandeur and television talking heads discussing the playoff picture with the same breathless tones as the terms of the Yalta Conference, the end result remains the same: an entertainment product that holds precisely as much meaning as we allow it. And much like Northwestern football, the primary focus of shitty bowl games is to give us a few hours to pass the time, yell at people in a socially acceptable way, and make Big Ten fans angry on the internet.

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

Once, Northwestern owned a devastating bowl loss streak that stretched decades because the United States suffered through a horrifying paucity of bowl games and robbed us of things like the Dapper Dan Looking Good, Sport Pomade Bowl and also the Wildcats lost the vast majority of football games they participated in.  That all changed with the 2013 Gator Bowl, Northwestern's sole postseason victory in the NATO era.  Now, the Wildcats enter their bowl game as substantial underdogs, desperate to prove the college football experts wrong and come home with the Pinstripe Bowl Trophy, a statue of former Northwestern coach and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner ordering people to trim their beards like a baseball Peter the Great.

Historical woodcut of George Steinbrenner demanding that 
Goose Gossage cut off his beard before being allowed to throw 
baseballs at people

Pitt boasts an 8-4 record, victories over Clemson and Big Ten Champion Penn State, and a supercharged offense that last scored 76 points against Syracuse.  That game saw a record 137 points scored as both teams attempted to defend using only rhetoric.  The Panthers' offensive juggernaut comes as a bit a surprise since they are coached by former Michigan State defensive mastermind Pat Narduzzi.  Narduzzi gives the game some emotional heft, as he doubtless seeks to avenge his mentor Mark Dantonio who watched these very same Wildcats rampage for an unprecedented 54 points in East Lansing against a Narduzziless Spartans team that went from Big Ten East contenders to a 3-8 squadron of Purdue impersonators.

Pat Narduzzi is on the prowl for the blood of the Wildcat in his operatic Bowl Game Revenge 
Narrative that I've just invented because we need something for this  bowl game rivalry these 
teams haven't played since 1973

Northwestern combines an unpredictable season with its tendency to turn its bowl games into a complete free fall into chaos where nearly every possible kind of football misfortune becomes possible.  Last year, the Outback Bowl descended into a miserable and boring blowout unbecoming of a Northwestern bowl loss.  The laws of Probability Science unambiguously declare that Northwestern is due for a bowl game that involves at least overtime, a game-deciding extra point return, a series of preposterous interceptions, and an incident where the entire crowd is distracted and then when they look down on the sidelines Pat Fitzgerald has been poisoned and a New York City detective must interrogate a stadium full of monocled professors all of whom hide a sinister secret.

BASEBALL STADIUM FOOTBALL

At last, the Northwestern Wildcats have returned to their natural home, a Stunt Baseball Stadium Experience.  The 'Cats played in a baseball stadium fairly recently, when they took on Illinois at Wrigley Field in 2010.  The game's most notable feature was its use of a single endzone after a meticulous Big Ten study of the field layout determined that it would be detrimental for football players to run face first into a brick wall.  The unidrectional play did not cause too many problems to the integrity of the game like it would have if they had taken away the hashmarks or the fifty yardline or the people dressed like anthropomorphic hot sauce bottles who are forced into brutal races for the twisted pleasure of braying fans.

Though the Illini only had one endzone, they were allowed to use all of their available Zooks

The game has shifted to Yankee Stadium in its second iteration.  Yankee Stadium remains haunted by the ghosts of great Yankees in the past like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, and a fictitious baseball player named "Mickey Mantle" invented by Bob Costas and Ken Burns as a massive prank on millions of American Baby Boomers who swear they saw him play when what they really saw were blurry photographs of dozens of actors in stirrups who could not even consistently remember to hit from the same side of the plate.  That stadium was demolished.  The Pinstripe Bowl will take place in the new Yankee Stadium which hosts legendary throngs of belligerent New Yorkers who are still screaming at Alex Rodriguez for some reason.

The Pinstripe Bowl's unique setting offers several amenities such as wind burn and the opportunity to see a sport played in a venue designed for another sport.  Imagine thinking to yourself, hey, that's where the mummified remains of Derek Jeter used to dive feebly at balls just out of his reach as you watch receivers dive feebly at balls just out of their reach.  I am sure the commentators have been working on their comparisons like these to inform the people trying to surreptitiously stream the game because it is on in the middle of a workday.  Imagine Jack Mitchell, unleashed in his natural baseball environment, winding up to split the uprights and hit the Scott Brosius statue in Monument Park as commentators Mike Golic and Mike Golic, Jr. (this is true, those maniacs) bellow that this one is for all the pinstripes.

Fans somehow figure out how to mock a guy for bobbling a ball in a football context and also 
repeatedly scream FUCK YOU at all and sundry

The Pinstripe Bowl, even by bowl standards that include a single bowl named after Beef O'Brady's and cryptocurrency, at least three bowls named for chicken restaurants as well as one named after a duck call so that you can shoot your own fowl to consume at your leisure, and unmitigated potato worship, is weird.  It's in an unconventional venue in a cold city where residents are spending the week bracing for an influx of people who are willing to stand outside for hours to be in the presence of Ryan Seacrest.  The setting is anomalous enough that it is ripe for the rarest of all bowl traditions: a Northwestern victory.