In the end, there is only the team’s record. Even in college football, the most subjective sport that involves a literal cabal of officials meeting in the ceremonial medieval chambers of the nearest Hyatt conference room performing their various suffixed -mancies to rank teams that specifically exists to process narratives because that is the only way for the committee to justify its own existence, a win is a win and a loss is a loss, and Northwestern lost to Indiana last Friday night.
But.
The ‘Cats gave the defending champs everything they could handle, with only an onside kick that brushed the fingertips of a Northwestern player before getting pounced on by a Hoosier ending the game. In the first half, the ‘Cats sprung a trap on Indiana by luring them into the stupidest football game they have ever imagined. The Hoosiers, after two consecutive penalties on the first snap that made the grim Curt Cignetti start making the type of faces and turning the types of colors that usually precede turning into a werewolf then mounted a grinding drive down to the one yardline where they were stopped by the ‘Cats. Then, on their first possession, Northwestern fumbled the snap in their own endzone and managed to fall on it for a safety. They had the ball for less than two seconds. It was 2-0 Indiana, and it stayed that way for the entire first quarter.
I believe that a crucial element of the relative success of Northwestern football involves a certain amount of psychological torment brought to bear on opponents by playing the most annoying and disgusting football available in the Power Four. I can’t imagine this is planned; I doubt that Northwestern’s coaching staff would meet and devise a strategy where they would be completely ineffective moving the ball and then letting the team give up 85 yard drives that all end in desultory field goal attempts, but this has been how things have operated here for decades. Add in the fact that these big ten teams would have to play games at the old Ryan Field, a rustbucket framing an oozing mud pit with a PA that only plays the wildcat noise or two AC/DC songs, and the fact that no team or opposing fanbase believes their team should ever lose to Northwestern because the team was really bad in the 1980s, and it feels like regardless of winning or losing, at some point enough players on the opposing team spend a lot of the time wishing they were doing anything else other than playing football on Big Ten Network Regional Action. That, I think, is what is going on when your team is whaling on Northwestern for fifteen grueling minutes and you’ve got two goddamn points.
If Northwestern insists on its All AC/DC music program, the least they could do is constantly play the part in the music video for the song they made for Last Action Hero that features Arnold dressing like Angus Young and awkwardly pretending to play guitar
We have seen Northwestern teams do this to very good, highly favored teams before. They stifle and frustrate a team that is supposed to steamroll them but is only winning 12-0 or 9-3 at halftime and everyone on the other team wants to sneak out of the locker room, fashion a bindle, and explore America on the rails except for the punter who is strutting around the sideline, and its fans who vastly outnumber Northwestern’s either in their own stadium or in Evanston spend the entire break wailing about uncalled holding penalties. Then because Northwestern’s defense spent 26 minutes on the field in the first half the other team then wins 45-6.
That did not happen on Friday, though, because of Aidan Chiles. Indiana, bolstered in a very 2026 way by having two fearsome defensive linemen added to the roster at the last minute through the intervention of a court, stymied the Wildcats’ running game, but in the second half they had no solution for Chiles. Chiles hung into deteriorating pockets, spun around defensive linemen like a matador, and dotted the ball to his receivers. The Hoosiers could not cover tight end Luke Dehnicke, the transfer from Division II Minnesota-Duluth, who looked like vintage Drake Dunsmore out there. To the horror of the crowd and grizzled lighthouse keeper John Mellancamp, Northwestern took a lead late in the fourth.
The ‘Cats have an offense now. The combination of Chiles and Chip Kelly through three games has been exciting. Chiles has been far beyond my expectations for a quarterback willing to transfer here; this might be the first time Northwestern’s best player is a quarterback since Northwestern tried to start a grassroots Heisman campaign for Dan Persa by purchasing billboards and sending tiny little barbells to Heisman voters.
Northwestern communicates exclusively through billboards along major Chicagoland highways that no bamboozle the local populace. Persastrong.com no longer exists, but a visit there says the domain may be available "at Dynadot auctions."
In the Indiana game, this effort came up just short. Northwestern couldn’t get one last stop or recover the onside kick and committed one ill-advised facemask penalty too many. Indiana, the number five team in the country, was able to fend them off. On the one hand, this was a hell of a showing for the ‘Cats on national TV after last week’s annihilation of Colorado. Faced with its strongest test of the season, Northwestern looked like it could compete with the conference heavyweights even without its best defensive backs. On the other hand, Indiana looks like it may be a diminished version of last year’s champion– the penalties, defensive lapses, and missed passes to wide open receivers from new quarterback Josh Hoover certainly didn’t look like last year’s death machine– but they are still an expensive, undefeated, talent-laden team. The question of how good Indiana is will probably not get answered this week as they face off against Rutgers.
PENN STATE HOPES TO IMPROVE FROM LAST YEAR'S GRIM PSYCHOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
Northwestern is getting thrown back into the fire against Penn State. This year’s Penn State team is coming in unranked and off a crushing last-second loss to Wisconsin in Matt Campbell’s first year. But a team with low expectations coming off a loss to a coach who successfully pulled off the George Costanza just keep showing up to work move is somehow in a much better place than they were before the Northwestern game last year when the entire program and fanbase was in the throes of ecstatic apoplexy with feral bodypainted fans rooting for their own team to lose, with James Franklin coaching the game sweating like a glazed ham, with the stadium PA playing nothing but the Mountain Goats's No Children.
Last year, Penn State debuted the fan favorite jumbotron participation feature, the Disdainful Jacksonville Jaguars Nose Wipe Guy Cam
The ‘Cats will likely be without top corner Josh Fussell and possibly without Dehnicke. Penn State, despite blowing a 17 point lead and allowing a gigantic tight end to score the winning touchdown by running through an open field with the power and speed of a tectonic plate, is still favored. A win for Northwestern would be legitimizing more than merely looking good against Indiana while a loss would reset expectations to the bleak preseason predictions.
The game will be Northwestern’s fourth consecutive night game, third consecutive game on regular-ass Fox and second in a row on a Friday night. This is why Northwestern has popped up in the national football conversation in September the way I have not seen since they beat an overrated Stanford team in 2018 and started a conversation on the concept of “body clocks;” a Wildcats team that clobbered "Neon" Deion's miserable Colorado squad and hung tough with Indiana would not be getting any attention if they had done this at eleven AM on the Big Ten Network. And while it is enjoyable to subject the American people to more Northwestern football than they've ever wanted from a baseline of no Northwestern football, it is strange to me in the same way it is to see a local indie band show up on Pitchfork with people writing about them who never even listened to their early EPs. For someone whose formative memories of early-season Northwestern games are sweltering early afternoon crucibles with half-empty stands in a rust bucket stadium, it is very weird that the Big Ten keeps throwing the ‘Cats in prominent time slots.
Oh you like Northwestern against Indiana? That's cool, I was more a fan of their earlier stuff liked Barely Escaping Dakota, Undefeated in Ireland and Body Clocks
The main reason why Northwestern is featured on Friday night is because they are unveiling the Ryan family’s gazillion-dollar new stadium. TV networks love to be there for new stadiums and send the sideline reporters to gush over every feature and say things like “wow, look at the size of these cupholders” and “they call this the Luxury Slap Annex which is staffed by Sven, a certified master of therapeutic slapping.” After years on The Lake, Northwestern will be in a strange new and inexplicably expensive home.
I have been consistently ambivalent, if not hostile, to the idea of Northwestern getting a fancy new stadium. It seems completely at odds with everything I enjoyed about Northwestern sports. It was fun to watch these storied Big Ten programs come into a rusting shitbucket stadium or the pre-renovation Welsh-Ryan arena where they had to rope fans in line for hot dogs off because there was no other way for the opposing teams filled with soon-to-be famous NBA players with their own shoe brands to get on the court other than sort of shimmying their way down the concourse. Because of this attitude, I have not been paying a lot of attention to the stadium construction and features because the whole thing bums me out. But in the last day or so, as what is going on in the stadium and what it represents have come more sharply into focus, it is clear that I, a person who has devoted through this blog more time than any reasonable person could devote to caring about Northwestern football, do not appear to be the type of person that this stadium is for.
On Thursday, the Daily Northwestern published a report that the marching band will not be allowed to play the pregame as it had been doing basically since a marching band existed at Northwestern. Instead, the band will be playing at something called the “Great Chicago Food Festival” which seems like a grim collection of expensive food trucks from a corporate executive-style person who remembers that food trucks were the in thing in 2009. My reading of the article is that Pat Ryan, Jr. now gets to decide where and when the marching band gets to play, and prefers some sort of soulless Pregame Entertainment Experience. “We didn’t build this to be like an NFL (stadium)” Ryan, Jr. told the Daily after replacing one of the quintessential things that makes college football identifiable and is done at virtually every college football game in the country so that they could play a video on the jumbotron showing the Ryan family triumphantly putting their name on buildings.
The new stadium will also have some sort of exclusive stadium club seating with elaborate rules banning clothes the color of the opponent and demanding “cheering should be respectful of the home team.” “The Loft Club is a Home Team Respectful Space,” a photograph of signage circulating on the internet says in a phrase that is now permanently embedded in my brain. You must acknowledge C.J. Bachér. This is a space where we can have a conversation about Chi Chi Ariguzo.
This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen. Anyone who has ever been to any iteration of Ryan Field knows that, with the exception of early non-conference games against far-flung opponents and bad Big Ten teams with less of a local presence, opposing fans have always outnumbered Wildcat fans. Chicago is a hub for Big Ten alums who vastly outnumber Northwestern grads, and there is essentially no local interest for Wildcat football. It is annoying, but also an essential part of the Northwestern fan experience; every attempt by Northwestern to attempt to goad Chicago fans who either already root for a rival team or don’t care about college football to come be fans of the local fancy private school that is known mostly for being historically bad has been incredibly funny. Frankly, I would have no idea what to do if I went to a Northwestern-Wisconsin game at Ryan Field and it wasn’t 80% red.
This attempt to simply ban opposing fans from a fancy section so that alums who have paid enough money won’t have to get hooted at by a belligerent guy in a faded Ricky Stanzi jersey or (this is something that literally happened to me) get shushed by a Michigan fan for “clapping too loudly” in a game where Michigan won by like 30 points is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. I’ve read that they will be enforcing this with some sort of soccer-style warning card system; I assume they will be recruiting decorum patrol from a pool of journalism students who have expressed a dream to write opinion columns for the New York Times.
Between the If I See A Single Goldy Gopher Logo On That Shirt Your Ass Is Grass luxury boxes and the banishing of the band to the type of “food experience” that only a guy wearing an investment vest thinks is fun, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that I am not the target audience for the new stadium. This is a Luxury Fan Experience for luxury fans; the cheapest ticket I saw for the Penn State game costs almost as much as I paid for a full season ticket in 2018. The people in charge of the stadium are building a premium event venue that seems to be completely divorced from anything to do with college sports. I’m sure the football stadium will be nice– the renovated Welsh-Ryan Arena is nice– but I also know that getting your ass annihilated by a frozen bleacher under the grayest sky you’ve ever seen watching Big Ten football in a historic and decaying hundred-year-old stadium surrounded by braying opposing fans who are complaining about it the entire time while watching a game with 26 combined points is also a Fan Experience and one that to me felt like the entire point of Northwestern football.
FICTION SECTION
In 2026, college football is about suing other people. This is an excerpt from the 2026 college football legal thriller “Tackled By The Law” by Trent Van Grackle that is being shipped directly to airports.
The smell hit instantly. The sweet, acrid odor of a locker room. It was like Proust’s madeline except for a childhood of jerseys sweat through the Georgia summer and jock straps that should have been buried in a pit. It was home, once. Now it couldn’t be further from the sumptuous office suites of Graves, Prate, and Muldoon, where Jeff McCragg now worked. It wasn’t home but sometimes he slept there.
A week ago, McCragg was sitting in one of those offices looking at M. Frake Graves himself, the legendary attorney who had unexpectedly summoned him. He had never spoken to the man before as a low-level associate grinding his way through documents in corporate espionage cases that were never as exciting as the name implied and mostly involved someone sending an email they shouldn’t. Sitting in a chair in front of Graves’s enormous desk that had required the demolition of three walls to get into his office whole, the strapping McCragg had never felt smaller.
“McCragg,” Graves said. Says here you were top of your class. Law review, internships out the wazoo, DI baseball. Pitcher, it says. How’s your fastball son?”
“A little too slow and a little too straight these days,” McCragg said.
“What the hell are you doing in espionage? Email law. Seems like a waste of your talents.”
“I’ve been winning cases, sir,” McCragg said.
“What you’re winning is piddly shit. A man could die there, in espionage. No what you need is an opportunity. A way to get past your ,uh, name. Nick Falcon told me you’re a sharp kid. I believe him. At least on this stuff. Not on his golf game. Loves the bunker, that Falcon. Son, what do you know about college football?”
Before McCragg could even answer, Graves cut him off. “You don’t know anything about college football. You think those guys are hitting on the field? You should see what happens in the boardrooms. Lots of concussions, legally speaking. Richest men in the state putting each other in the fencing position. You understand this isn’t just a bunch of academics in their little gowns. These are wealthy men. You got car dealer money in there. You got fourth-generation car dealer money. You got truck nutz money. You got the governor throwing people around over a backup TIGHT end. It’s a nasty bunch of pit vipers.” He pronounced it vi-ah-pers.
“Now one of these boys at State is all heated up, you understand. Not the type of guy you can say no to. Not exactly a man you can tell to cool off and relax. He’s worked his whole life so that no one can tell him to top hollering until he damn well pleases. And he’s all worked up. Seems he thinks Tech is up to something. Now normally, these guys get mad enough they just give a few million to a nose guard and they feel better. You can just pay the players now. You don’t have to go and buy a Grave Digger in their grandmother’s name anymore. They can buy all the Grave Diggers they want.”
“This certain personage,” Graves continued, has asked me and this firm as a personal favor to look into certain chicaneries that he believes are being perpetuated down at Tech. Now I can’t send one of our partners on this horseshit. You understand. The vipers. But I can send some email peckerwood down there and tell him we’re looking into it very strongly. You understand?”
“Yes, sir, but I’m very close to a verdict…”
“A verdict? Must be the important case of I accidentally attached this PDF. Yes, I know what PDFs are. Look, son you can go town to Tech and look into this for me or you can go do exotic pet law. You know what that looks like.”
McCragg winced. Graves must have known his father, the most brilliant law student in his class who seemed ticketed for the Supreme Court until one day he quit his track in legal academia and became the foremost exotic pet lawyer in the state. He was the first person to get a client to legally own a puma. McCragg was sneered at by students and faculty alike all through law school. His first year, one of the professors referred to him only as “Pet Law” and made him write it at the top of his papers. He hated how his father was treated as a joke, but he also wanted the McCragg name no longer associated with home alligator lawsuits.
“OK, I’ll go. What am I looking for?”
“Go down there and look at that football team. Find every person on that roster and how they got there from the transfer quarterback to the goddamn walk-on punter. If they’re up to anything, I need to know. You have no idea how much I need to know,” Graves said.
McCragg was on the plane the next day.
It was easy to find information on most of the players. A lot of it had been reported directly. Others were rumors that he could source from message boards. Some of the players told him themselves, happy to tell anyone how much money they were making when he sidled up to them in various campus hotspots. But there were four players that eluded him. They were not in any recruiting databases or highlight reels. They seemed to come from nowhere.
He called Graves. No emails, no texts, Graves had told him. “I’ve got four guys I can’t trace anywhere,” he said.
“Well, do you see them? Know what they look like? What kind of car do they drive? Why not just follow them around?” Graves said.
“I’m a lawyer, not some sort of NCAA detective,” McCragg says. “Why don’t we send in a freedom of information request? Sue them. This is a public institution.”
“What’s that? I’m having trouble hearing you,” Graves said. “Sounds like you’re saying something about suing the state to let a lady have a pet monkey if it wears a diaper?”
McCragg got the point. He disguised himself as a reporter, putting on some fake sideburns and a wig bad enough that it looked like a sincere but unconvincing toupee, and jostled into the post-practice scrum. He even asked coach Lance Bouleis a question, identifying himself as Barry Mojave from Footballguy.com about the defense. “They’re hungry, they want to get the quarterback,” Bouleis said into McCragg’s phone, that he stretched out, imitating the reporters around him. “Thanks, Coach,” McCragg said before slipping away to tape a service door.
Now it was three in the morning. McCragg slipped through the service door and crept through the corridor. He was out of place. This is the first time in his legal career he had to creep. He had noted earlier where the four players had lockers, all clustered in an out of the way corner. He chose one for Pete Mant, a tackle who had no high school or college record and had simply appeared fully formed as a 350 pound behemoth. The lockers could not be opened, but had some vents to air them out from the lingering pad stench. He slid a thin camera with a light on it into the vent and connected it to his phone. This was the type of thing he had learned about in one of his cases, how a defendant was alleged to have stolen the recipe for a dunkaroo prototype that was threatening to upend the lunch room snack market.
He could barely make out anything in the locker but something caught his eye. It was a flash of gold and teal. A snarling logo on a duffel bag. McGragg clocked the logo instantly. This was not some miraculous freak from nowhere. Pete Mant was at some point Jacksonville Jaguar. Lance Bouleis was bringing in professionals.
He peered through the grates of the other lockers. He could not see anything in Johnny Nimbus’s locker, and nothing was out of the ordinary in Chris Pibb’s but there it was in Malachi Harmonious’s– barely perceptible on the grainy camera, but his shower shoes had the undeniable mark of the New York Jets.
The scam was obvious. Simply have these players change their names, their identities, maybe grow some crazy facial hair, have them wear heavy visors on the sidelines, and you’ve got hardened pros who have just been cut from NFL camps on your team. Graves’s friend was right. He had them dead to rights.
McCragg was so involved in his thoughts as the scheme came together in his mind that he barely noticed the sliver of light from the door fanning open. But then it was too late. It was Lance Bouleis and two scary-looking beefy guys behind him, who McCragg had recognized as strength coaches.
“Mr. McCragg, as a lawyer I hope you realize that trespassing is a very serious crime here,” Bouleis said.
McCragg looked at what was dangling menacing from his hands. “Nunchucks are illegal here as well for non-display purposes,” he said.
“Well looks like we’re both in trouble,” Bouleis said. That was the last thing he heard before the lights went out.
