ROSS ADE STADIUM, WEST LAFEYETTE, INDIANA
Saturday, November 2, 2024
The Quarterback of Monte Cristo
ROSS ADE STADIUM, WEST LAFEYETTE, INDIANA
Saturday, October 26, 2024
What A Bad Idea!
You can look at Northwestern's loss to Wisconsin in two ways: either the great Daemonic Powers of Ryan Field fueled by the sacrifice of millions of soggy hot dogs and plus size midwestern asses to the unforgiving bleachers and the palpable waves of anxiety from the student section about consulting internship applications that allowed the Wildcats to more frequently than anyone would guess be able to defeat heavily favored Wisconsin teams did not travel to the Lake last Saturday or Northwestern played a crappy game against a better team.
I would like to see the Wisconsin Badgers beat Northwestern here
The game initially dwelled in the comfortable sludge of a Big Ten West matchup as the teams traded listless punts and missed field goals. Northwestern was stalling on offense and hanging in there on defense preparing to go into halftime down only 7-3. Then David Braun and his staff did something that we were not used to seeing at Northwestern. Their eyes got big. They wanted to try to score before the half. This is not something we are used to seeing. If it was possible, Pat Fitzgerald would have tried to kneel out the last ten minutes of the second quarter or had the quarterback cover himself with a giant cape. With less than 30 seconds left, the 'Cats dialed up a pass and before you could scream "NOOOOOO" in slow motion there was the sack, the fumble, and the touchdown. It was 14-3, Wisconsin was getting the ball on the second half kickoff, and it was over from there.
🗣️ "OH NOOO DISASTER. WHAT A BAD IDEA."
Eric Collins' reaction to this fumble is something every fan screams at least once on a CFB Saturday 💀🤣pic.twitter.com/fEfsoDnbbi— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) October 19, 2024
The most elegant summary of Northwestern's late half playcalling
Last week, Northwestern had success throwing reckless bombs all over the field. That did not work against Wisconsin's stouter defense. It did not help that, in one disastrous stretch, the Wildcats saw its top two receivers and defensive captain limp off the field and the injuries happened in such close succession they nearly caused a line to form at the medical tent. It also did not help that the offensive line succumbed to an endless series of penalties to the point where Northwestern was forced to play an after school special about linemen peer pressured into false starts by bad influence linebackers called "So You Think Procedural Penalties Are Cool" on the jumbotron.
It was a sour ending to a season on The Lake. Northwestern has finished its season on its temporary picturesque home. The stadium was a triumph of novelty football venues with the university turning a disaster of poor planning into a legitimate destination. Now they will play their remaining home games at Wrigley Field, a place that has been an absurd place to play football for the past two seasons marred by a ridiculous playing surface and lengthy delays while desperate ground crews try to come in and fruitlessly stomp on giant holes in order to prevent players from vanishing into the bowels of the stadium where Bryan LaHair reigns as the Phantom of Wrigley Field, playing his mournful version of the da da da da duh dah charge song.
IOWA WEEK
They may have upended the Big Ten, destroyed the Big Ten West, and thrown the entirety of the sport into upheaval but one thing the powers that be in college football have decided not to do is prevent a Northwestern-Iowa game in 2024. Games between these schools are less scheduled than inflicted and remain one of the most disgusting football games on offer every year. Consider last year when these two teams met in Wrigley to combine for 17 points as the field disintegrated under them while both offenses operated as if they were being coordinated by Bartleby the Scrivener. There are two things that occurred around the margins of this game that I feel compelled to point out a year later and that is that Cubs rookie sensation Shōta Imanaga was apparently in attendance to witness this and still decided to sign with the Cubs and that Brandon Sullivan who started for Northwestern on that day is now Iowa’s backup quarterback, meaning that the Hawkeyes are now in control of 100% of the quarterbacks that played that day.
Imanaga, who has said that he is not yet familiar with football, presumably enjoyed the blissful ignorance of not knowing that what he was watching was absolute horseshit, but he will soon learn as a person who has decided to watch the Chicago Bears
Last year’s Iowa team was a phenomenon, the apotheosis of Iowa football as the offense reached unheard of levels of ineptitude under the coach’s oafish son who, by the time of the Northwestern game, had already been pre-fired and told he would not be welcome back for another year but was still allowed to go out there and dial up the running around like a cartoon mummy play. The defense was good enough to stop most teams, and the special teams were fueled by a generational punter; Iowa's success despite its unwatchable garbage offense became celebrated on the internet until they had to play Michigan in the Big Ten Championship game and got absolutely destroyed. This year, Iowa is not that team. For one, they have a legitimate offensive weapon in running back Kaleb Johnson. And they also gave up 32 points to a more or less functional Michigan State team, which is more points than they gave up in calendar months of last year.
There is nothing I would like more than to see Northwestern get Iowa. There was a time when Northwestern had Ferentz’s number and no matter how highly the Hawkeyes were ranked, Northwestern would reliably beat them in a very stupid and annoying game where they would just do the same nasty Iowa shit right back at them and the the two teams would punt at each other until someone was forced to score a touchdown as a dare. It has been awhile since Northwestern has won. They came close last year with a late touchdown but somehow allowed a long pass and long field goal. Northwestern’s crummier teams tend to just get blown out. They don’t have a win against Iowa since 2020, and the Hawkeyes have taken four of the last five.
The bookmakers don’t think this will be close. Iowa is favored by more than 14 points, and I’m mentioning that not because I have any interest in gambling but because it was rare that Iowa could attain fourteen entire points in a single game last year. The ‘Cats just got beaten up by Wisconsin inside on both sides of the ball, and given that Wisconsin and Iowa are just different colors of Mike ‘N Ikes that taste exactly the same, it could very easily be a boring Iowa blowout as Northwestern can’t move the ball and eventually the defense starts allowing Johnson to gain momentum. On the other hand, Northwestern and Iowa games exude a palpable unpleasantness, a void where the entertainment value of watching football disappears as both teams grimly hold on until someone commits a stupid penalty, and if the game is like that Northwestern may actually win.
Northwestern desperately needs this win to have any chance of going to a bowl game, a path that would require beating Iowa, Purdue, and one of a diminished Michigan on the road, Ohio State, or a very good Illinois team at an orange Wrigley Field. There is of course a small possibility that they could only get two wins and go to a bowl game if college football runs out of eligible teams and is forced to throw Northwestern out there in a development that can be described as "very funny." But it is very difficult to tell what Northwestern will look like in any given game at all except that in a game between these two programs that try to play the worst football game you've ever seen as a part of their strategy the prediction is that this game will be bad.
KINNICK STADIUM, IOWA CITY, IOWA
This year is all about stadiums, so enjoy this excerpt from the novel "The Demon's Punt House" about the construction of Kinnick Stadium in 1929 as relayed by a stadium worker.
March 6, 1929.
We have finally begun construction by digging an enormous pit. Mr. Phipp [the head of the project] has told us to expect a grueling schedule. Me and the other most robust lads on the team are taking shifts with the mules to haul earth away.
March 9
Construction has been a difficult slog. Every time we believe we have gotten to the correct depth, a part of the pit fills in. Every day is a new setback. Today, that vigorous ass Inus grew frustrated with his mule and began to upbraid it with cruel words and a few sharp blows to the hindquarters. The beast waited for him to walk behind it and then kicked Inus in the solar plexus, a glancing blow, but one that sent him stumbling headfirst into a bucket which got stuck on his head and as he struggled, he managed to stumble into several mules, agitating all of them and they dropped their loads and began kicking out at all comers, a vicious can-can line of animal rage. It took a large supply of mule-grade laudanum to get them to calm down, but we lost a whole day and we are not sure that after managing to grease the bucket to pry it off of Inus’s head we did not permanently disfigure him with upturned nostrils that have given him an uncanny porcine expression.
March 20
The dig came to a halt as crews hit a large piece of metal with their shovels. After several hours of furious digging, they appear to have unearthed a large metal case. It took dozens of men and livestock to drag it out of the pit. I have taken some time to examine it and it appears to be a box with several moving parts and symbols that line up in some way. The men have been taking some time moving things around to try to open it before being sent back down to continue digging and transporting beams. Dabby Dubbert tried to bash it open with a mallet but the mallet bounced off it easily and hit him in the face and he spun around and fell into a bucket that some of us had been using as a spittoon and that night he vanished from the site without a word.
March 22
The box remains propped up on a table in the office. I have been spending all of my spare time (of which there is little as we had a large shipment of pink paints that I have been told will be used to paint the opposing locker room in order to psychologically diminish them according to top Brains Scientists) pondering the symbols. In my dreams I am arranging them on the case. I see it even when I am supposed to be taking inventory of individual nails or reporting the number of men who have fallen to cases of Stadium Bowels, a plague of which has run rampant through the site. Mr. Phipp personally reprimanded me after one of my reports on the latrine crisis consisted of nothing but doodles of the symbols, something that I do not even remember doing and must have written down as if in a trance. We have gotten little sleep, and Mr. Phipp recommended I take two hours for sleeping followed by a course of medical slapping across the face.
March 24
The large man. The small man. The hunchback. The cornstalk. The hawk. The cow. The eyeball. They spin around the box in some combination. They call to me in my dreams. The others don’t understand. I will arrange them.
March 25
I have been reprimanded for muttering. They said I am also negligent in my duties. My ledgers are filled with the symbols. I have also been banned from the tent where they are keeping the case and all managers on site have been authorized to bludgeon me if I come near it. I had been spending all of my time there, sleeping there, writing and writing trying to find the pattern. I am close, I am very close but they shut me out.
March 30
Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo.
April 3
I have the case. I do not know how. I can only recall it in flashes, me wielding a pistol, a desperate cart chase, escaping the clutches of the doctor and his hardest medicinal slaps, yelling “NO” when Mr. Phipp said “come back here you ass.” It is pouring and I am huddling with the case under a tarp in an abandoned barn. I know they’re looking for me but they can’t look too hard. They have a stadium to build and they don’t value the case, they don’t understand it. Not like I do. I consult my notebook and look at the combinations. I will look at the combinations.
April 7
The Combinations.
April 19
The fever has broken. This case was not meant to be opened. It is impossible to break the seal even with a series of powerful kicks, as I have learned and now believe I may have a broken bone in my kicking foot. It is, I believe, perhaps sealed to prevent the unleashing of a great evil. Maybe I should bring it to a university where it can be studied in great detail. Maybe I should bury it far away from the prying of human hands.
April 20
I believe I have had a revelation about the combinations. It is not about the figures themselves, it is about a narrative message within the symbols. The father and the son. The eye. I see it now.
April 23
I am sore and wounded. A group of geese also decided to make this barn their temporary home and we were happy sharing the space until they grew aggressive and I had to take out the largest goose, the leader, and in the tussle I sustained several serious pecks before I was able to subdue it with some scientific pugilism and some threatening honks summoned from the deepest recesses of my lungs. The horde flew away leaving behind only feathers and offal. But now I can at last return to the task of opening the case.
May 12
It is open. Forgive me if these writings are blurred with the celebratory tears. I could not believe the happiness I felt when I finally heard that click. I don’t know what I was expecting. Light, music, some sort of revelation. But what was in the case will require further study. They appear to be some sort of tablets and even some papers. This will require further study in the morning.
May 13
I have studied the objects. They are some clay tablets with more symbols similar to the ones outside the case. There are also newer engravings and some paper. It appears that this case has been opened repeatedly and added to. All of the symbols show a common element: a small figure, a larger figure and various other symbols but always those two in that configuration. I call them the Father, the Son (larger and somewhat oafish in appearance). There is also a canister containing a canvass with a large painting of the father at the head of a great host of helmeted men in a field gesturing as if making commands and the son lost in a bog making the same gestures. There is a carving of people looking at a man kicking what appears to be some sort of animal.
May 15
I have been going through a sheaf of papers. One appears to be a journal written in a language I cannot understand but illustrated with pictures of a man kicking. But, in the very back of this case, faded and crumbling but still legible, there is something in an older version of English. It appears to be a part of a log from a ship’s manifest and someone has circled Mr Foghens and Mr Foghens (son, oaf’s passage) bringing with them a Quantyty of Swynne’s Skinness.”
May 31
I have made my way back to the City. Though my beard has made me largely unrecognizable to anyone working on the stadium, I have taken great pains to avoid the site. I have used some money I had saved and bought myself nice clothing, bathed, and restored my appearance as I had grown my fingernails out into what I called “goose claws.” I have spent time at the library researching ancient languages and have sought out an expert at the university in Professor Clegborne, esteemed expert on Sinister Archaeology. I forged a letter of introduction from a colleague of his whom I took from the footnotes of one his publications “I Said Go Ahead and Smash the Laughing Demon Idol” from the pages of Traps and Blowdarts: A Compendium of Modern Graverobbing and presented myself as ancient objects dealer A. Vont Montgontage.
I showed him the objects telling them I have acquired them from the ancient artifacts underground and touched my nose, a gesture meant to show him I knew about where he got things from but one that seemed to leave him baffled. He was very interested in my objects though and said he had never seen anything like it. At first he seemed skeptical like I had made it up (archaeological hoaxes were in fashion on college campuses, as I had read in some publications, and many faculty had been taken in by embarrassing undergraduate mummy scams). He was able to decipher that one of the writings, one of the most detailed ones, seemed to be written in Old Church Slavonic and he wanted to keep it for further study since he had a book to translate it.
June 4
Midnight. Someone pounding on the door. I would like to say I had been sleeping but I had been troubled by nightmares of the man and his terrible son since I had opened the case and I was up doodling figures. It was Cleghorne. He was distressed. He told me he had translated the document or at least some of it and it was one of the most sinister objects he had ever seen in his long career. Something he saw that disturbed him were repeated references to “the field of maize,” and “the great maize palace” even though there was no reason for anyone writing at the time to know about the existence of corn. There was a reason why this was buried here, he told me. Something terrible was going to happen if they built that stadium.
June 5
We ran to the stadium site and demanded to see Mr. Phipp. The stadium had crude outlines for grandstands and the beginnings of dressing areas for the team. The site was no longer a tent city, and Mr. Phipp had lodging in town. Prof. Cleghorne told him about objects found under the stadium, but Phipp told us they had been hauled away by a madman who had worked here. I grabbed him by the lapels and told him I was that man and in fact I was not mad but the sanest person he had ever met, in fact the most sane person on the site. I told him that the objects in the case portended great calamity if the stadium had ever been built, something that would potentially destroy the sport of football itself. He laughed and asked Cleghorne why he was listening to me and that I had been administered mule-grade laudanum for my many muttering fits. The professor said “I agree, this man must be insane” and then he whispered apologies but he had his position here at the university to worry about and then the cudgeling crews swarmed and threw me out of the stadium site. By the time I got back to my lodgings, the case was gone.
Friday, October 18, 2024
College Parked
The Padres decided to go with Dylan Cease on three days rest. He had never pitched on short rest in his life, but it's the playoffs, the mustachioed righty was the best pitcher in the Padres' rotation, and they wanted to stick their boots on the necks of their bitter division-rival billion dollar superteam Dodgers up 2-1 at home with the backing of a braying mustard crowd. But Cease was not at his best. He lasted less than two innings, gave up three runs, and the Dodgers were on their way to a devastating 8-0 win. The result forced a winner-take-all Game 5 in Los Angeles but it had one more important consequence: the elimination game took up the slot on Fox television that was going to the Maryland-Northwestern game and moved it back to FS1. If only the Padres had managed to hold on, the premier sporting event airing on network television that night would have been Northwestern unexpectedly mangling the hapless Terrapins; baseball superstars Shohei Ohtani and Fernando Tatis, Jr. could only watch as Maryland held onto the ball to no discernible end for quarters at a time and Northwestern crushed them in one of the strangest blowout wins I've ever seen.
Maryland, down only ten, had the ball for a large chunk of the second half. During the third quarter, Northwestern's defense allowed Maryland a stately ten minute march down the field that yielded a Maryland field goal then the 'Cats got the ball back, punted, and immediately scored a touchdown on a fumble recovery before kicking the ball right back to the Maryland's offense to ineffectively gallumph around again. Watching this game reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Homer discovers he has a layer of fluid around his brain that allows him to get pummeled in the head to no effect and he defeats a series of hobo boxers by allowing them to relentlessly punch him until they get tired and fall over.
I am still not sure what to make of Northwestern’s offense. The 'Cats struggled running the ball, went three out of twelve on third down, and delegated the second half largely to the defense. Taken in isolation, all of that looks like the recipe for offensive malaise that had plagued Northwestern this season except there was one play that was working and it was letting Jack Lausch launch bombs to Bryce Kirtz. Lausch also chucked one to Kirtz in the Indiana game, and A.J. Henning came pretty close to another one in this game, and while I have no idea whether the Oops All Bombs playbook is going to be successful for the rest of the season, it is at least a different type of Northwestern offense than we are used to seeing which is usually a Chicago Bears-style offense that puts the scoring onus on linebackers.
Taking a look at Zach Lujan's playbookMaryland is a very funny opponent for Northwestern because, like many Big Ten teams, its fans assume they will always beat Northwestern because the Wildcats used to be very bad in the 1980s. But the Terps joined the Big Ten in 2014; in ten years of conference play, they are 1-4 against Northwestern. Maryland joined the Big Ten, played Northwestern roughly every other year, and 80% of the time not only lost to them but got clobbered. The cartoon villain Skeletor has a better success rate than that on his evil plans. And yet every single time they lose to Northwestern it seems like a lot of their fans continue reacting with the sort of open-mouthed confusion and incredulity that Clayton Kershaw would display after serving up yet another massive playoff home run despite doing it regularly for the better part of a decade.
This is not the typical Maryland team that gets beaten by Northwestern. For the past several years, Maryland has started strong and looked like they were actually going to compete in the Big Ten before suffering the fate of the Indiana Jones Sword Man against the powers of the Big Ten East. The inevitable loss to Northwestern usually served as the death blow to whatever hopes they had of competing in the conference. This year, Maryland just stinks. They are winless in conference play. Their remaining schedule is legitimately alarming. I don't know what this says about the trajectory of Maryland football, but then again I don't really know what Maryland's deal with football even is.
What is Maryland football for? As a fan of the Big Ten West, I have an innate understanding of the purpose that mediocre Big Ten teams with no chance of winning a national championship serve in the greater college football ecosystem: fullbacks, punting, scoring as few points as possible, and in the case of the University of Iowa, Renaissance Italian city-state-style dynastic family politics. The goal of Northwestern is to host an opportunity to visit the Chicago area in the fall and probably be mildly annoyed by the Wildcat Sound as your team wins or loses 17-10. The purpose of Nebraska football is to wistfully cling to former glories. Michigan football exists as a pretext for the writing of strong Letters to the Editor. Even Rutgers has a clear destiny which is to function as a cult dedicated to Greg Schiano; when he dies, the entire university will be buried with him in his funereal pyramid as specified in his writings. But until Maryland finds a purpose in the Big Ten, they will be forced to wander the wastelands and ponder endure the hardship of having the worst record against Northwestern as a Big Ten team.
One important function for Maryland might be to pronounce the name of this baseball player in the Cubs minor league system
WISCONSIN WANTS TO TAKE THE LAKE
No group of people outside the Ryan family and their cohort of Northwestern money perverts enjoyed the destruction of Ryan Field more than Wisconsin fans. For some reason that I have never been able to discern, the Badgers could not consistently win in Evanston. It is more beguiling because there are few major conference football teams that consistently enjoy such an extraordinary advantage as Wisconsin fans who have routinely swarmed Ryan Field since time immemorial and can guarantee matching and in many cases overwhelming Northwestern fans in their own stadium.
But now Ryan Field is gone. Wisconsin will have to see what is like to play the final game of this season at The Lake. Here, I would expect Wisconsin fans to still manage to take over the stadium; there are so many of them in the Chicago area alone not to mention those willing to take the short drive down I-94 or arrive in a convoy of party boats. Badger fans will be looking to see whether it is the city of Evanston and the overwhelming pressure of performing in front of their own fans or whether it was a quirk of Ryan Field and its intimidating dilapidation that caused the Badgers to routinely falter there.
The Badgers are still smarting and looking for revenge. Last year, a Northwestern team left for dead went up to Madison and destroyed Wisconsin to the point where fans sarcastically cheered a pointless last-second touchdown that saved the Badgers from tying an ignominious record for scoring futility at Camp Randall. Wisconsin was in transition, in Luke Fickell's first year and in the process of installing a spread offense that is offensive to me and to be frank aesthetically disgusting when performed in a Wisconsin uniform. Northwestern also started Luke Fickell's former Cincinnati quarterback, who did not follow his coach to Wisconsin and was therefore I believe fueled by Psychology to defeat him. Whatever the reason, Badgers had no answer for Ben Bryant. The shocking Northwestern loss was part of an uncharacteristically poor season that was jarring for Wisconsin fans used to metronomic consistency.
I really appreciate the "ah, the hell with it" celebration from #6 up there after Wisconsin scores their last-second Touchdown of Futility
Wisconsin is coming off a rough early season where they had for some reason agreed to host Alabama and lost their starting quarterback to an injury in that game. Usually getting utterly annihilated by Alabama is not anything that would discourage a team with a Big Ten West pedigree, but we have since learned that Alabama is capable of losing to Vanderbilt and wobbling against South Carolina ,and the entire nation of Alabama football fans is somehow calling into sports radio and making professional wrestling-style threats at new coach Kalen DeBoer, so the result is perhaps slightly more alarming to Badger fans.
Bama fans rationally explaining that they were betrayed by DeBoer and his flashy west-coast style football coaching and demand to challenge him and all of the DeBoer Boerniacs from coast to coast at the Rosemont Horizon
The Badgers also lost badly to USC but managed to right the ship last week and use the entire Rutgers football team as a squeegee to clean the field. Wisconsin fans certainly see Northwestern as another opportunity to get back into the Big Ten mix. The Badgers are, as is custom, heavily favored. But there is something strange that happens to the Wisconsin team when they cross the threshold of the Skokie Lagoons. Perhaps they will manage to win easily, as everyone predicts. Or perhaps whatever force that causes Wisconsin to do the absolute stupidest things possible and throw away games to the Wildcats will rise again at the Lake, the 'Cats will get a bunch of turnovers, and Lausch will drop a 60 yard nuke to Bryce Kirtz that is so majestic that the demoralized Wisconsin team will leave the field and begin despondently rowing to Milwaukee. There is one thing I know for certain about Wisconsin's consistent headaches trying to win at a stadium which their fans turn into virtual home games every time they play and it is that Northwestern's home record against Wisconsin is one of the funniest things that has ever happened in college football and no one knows about this but us.
CAMP RANDALL STADIUM, MADISON WISCONSINThis season has been all about stadiums, so this year's fiction section is investigating the history of opponent stadiums. This week, everyone knows that the University of Wisconsin has never considered naming rights for Camp Randall Stadium, but what these two letters that I have completely made up presupposes: what if they did?
In 1895, the Wisconsin Badgers began play at Camp Randall, a Civil War-era Union training camp located on the grounds of the University of Wisconsin. In early 1894, the university sifted through competing offers to change the name of the stadium. Neither was adopted. Here, reproduced for the first time through university archives, are these letters reproduced below:
Dr. L.P.X. Manoxko, Surgeon, Esq.
Friday, October 11, 2024
Big, Bad, Indiana
Nov. 9, 1947
The University of Maryland will soon begin construction on a new football stadium approximately twelve miles from the District of Columbia code named Site Acropolis. The Department of Special Projects has formed a COMMITTEE chaired by General L. Moth Pathock to explore the use of this site for a defensive project aimed at potential foreign military action against the District.
MINUTES
November, 14 1946.
Gen. Pathock, Chair
Asst. Dep. Und. Sec. Bython
Lt. Meusse
Lt. Feest
Gen. Van Mant
The CHAIRMAN introduced Site Acropolis and proposed construction for a football stadium. The stadium construction presents an opportunity for clandestine construction of a major defense project to cover the District of Columbia. The CHAIRMAN emphasized that the Committee must act quickly within the time provided before construction begins to use the stadium as cover to build a project facility.
The ASST. DEP. UND. SEC. noted that preliminary discussions with the University personnel indicated they will cooperate with installation of government equipment at site Acropolis. The university personnel have no understanding of what the military will put at site, but the liaison on the university board (codename CUYAHOGA) told the ASST. DEP. UND. SEC. that “if you’re putting missiles down there, leave one for slowing down Bama.”
GEN. VAN MANT stated that preliminary surveillance reveals Soviet plans to use soccer stadiums to hide advanced military technological projects. He said that his CIA sources have informed him that these projects could threaten key positions in the Near East. The CIA also described the nature of these projects as “extremely communist.”
The CHAIRMAN asked GEN. VAN MANT to elaborate on these Soviet projects. GEN. VAN MANT showed the COMMITTEE plans for what the CIA believes to be a “Man-Boulder” program which would allow soldiers to be hidden in a large and powerful artificial boulder and rolled at enemies “to devastating effect.” The CHAIRMAN described these plans as “troubling.”
Jan. 7, 1947
Met with University contact CUYAHOGA. The University has concerns about United States military activity at Site Acropolis. University is concerned with potential exposure to radioactive materials. University is also concerned with any activity that would make Site Acropolis and the University itself targets for enemy attack or intrigue. University is also worried about clandestine work at Site Acropolis that would affect SoCon play as the Terrapins had a strong team returning with eyes on the Gator Bowl.
MINUTES
Gen. Pathock, Chair
Asst. Dep. Und. Sec. Bython
Lt. Meusse
Lt. Feest
Gen. Van Mant
The CHAIRMAN asked the COMMITTEE to address concerns brought to the COMMITTEE from the University.
ACROPOLIS SITE COMMITTEE
PROJECT BAKER’S DOZEN
LT. FEEST
Feb. 22, 1947
SITE ACROPOLIS COMMITTEE MEETING
March 19, 1947
Gen. Pathock, Chair
Asst. Dpt. Und. Sec. Bython
Lt. Meusse
Lt. Feest
Gen. Van Mant
SITE ACROPOLIS COMMITTEE
ASST. DEP. UND. SEC. Bython
June 13, 1947
October 3, 1972
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Northwestern Drops A Five-Burger
The beginning of the first quarter in Seattle looked like a quintessential welcome to the Big Ten moment for Washington. The Huskies were at home playing a Northwestern team they expected to beat easily and instead had gotten sucked into an unwatchable vortex of punts, the fate of too many Big Ten teams that had signed up to play Northwestern with the intention of playing a football game. Then Washington was able to get their offense going and Northwestern was not and the whole thing fell apart for the Wildcats.
It happened late in the third quarter. Northwestern was down 17-2 after the Wildcat defense scored a safety on a Washington intentional grounding penalty. The 'Cats had recovered a fumble at Washington's 33 and managed to drive all the way down to the one yardline. They had barely been able to move the ball into Washington territory all game, so this was a rare scoring opportunity. After three tries to get into the endzone, David Braun called for one of the most pointless and cowardly field goals I've ever seen to put Northwestern down 17-5, which brought them from down two touchdowns to down two touchdowns.
Sing us the Song, O Coach, of the Pointless Field Goal
At some point when a team is getting its ass kicked in a football game, the coaches have to make a decision whether they are going to keep doing risky things to at least make a token effort to get back in it and potentially lose by more points or try to minimize embarrassment. There is nothing wrong with this; the concept of trying to find a way to lose with some semblance of dignity was the fundamental question occupying Northwestern football for large swathes of its existence. But when Northwestern kicked a field goal in that exact situation it raised a concern that I was not ready to contemplate: whether the score 24-2 or 24-5 is funnier.
Northwestern's beginning to conference play did not look particularly promising, but they hope a return to The Lake can galvanize the team into a win over holy smokes it's an undefeated, ranked Indiana team.
WHAT THE HECK INDIANA IS A JUGGERNAUT
Well who saw this coming. Indiana fired Tom Allen after several years of listless Indiana-style football and brought in James Madison mastermind Curt Cignetti. Cignetti, who turned JMU into an FCS powerhouse then brought them into the Sun Belt where they went 11-1 and were ranked and overcame a very stupid NCAA rule that would not let them play in a bowl game because they were in their first year in FBS but fortunately there are no so many bowl games that they can't find enough teams to play in them anymore so the Dukes got to lose to Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl as is their right.
Under Cignetti, the Hoosiers are looking downright terrifying. The team, fortified with an army of hungry transfers, has been demolishing teams, putting up 77 points on Western Illinois and absolutely crushing UCLA and a Maryland team that at the time looked decent. Indiana is averaging more than two and half times as many points per game as Northwestern's sputtering offense has managed to scrape up.
Northwestern has had its ups and downs this century, but Indiana served as a rare Big Ten program that was consistently lousy and decent bet for a conference win. The Hoosiers have not won in Evanston since 1993; even though Indiana has an overwhelming fan and alumni presence in the Chicago area, they could not be counted on to consistently outnumber Northwestern fans because they didn't want to come watch their horrible team and sit on cold bleachers and listen to the Wildcat Yowling Sound for three and a half hours. Instead Indiana fans tended to swarm into Welsh-Ryan arena to watch their basketball team dunk on the 'Cats although now they mainly tend to roam the country like they are discredited doomsday preachers trying to convince people in every town they travel to that Boo Buie pushed off.
You hate to see an entire fanbase turning to Bryon Davis Thought
The last two games will be interesting tests for the temporary lakeside stadium. Northwestern has asked the important question of how small they can make the stadium and how expensive and annoying can they make the ticket purchasing process in order to actually get a Northwestern home crowd at a Big Ten game. I suspect that the current setup still will not work. A fired up group of Indiana fans and the always well-traveling Wisconsin fans will bring their crimson hordes to bear from land and water on the new stadium and taunt Northwestern fans by reminding them that the very small stadium is in fact small like they are a group of Patricks Beverly. The most important question will be if eight to nine thousand away fans are enough to make Northwestern have to go on a silent count at home again or whether any Indiana fans will try to gain access to the stadium by taking a boat from across the lake and then stealthily swim up to it while trying to assure stadium security guards that they are soaking wet because of a mishap involving the network of toiletmobiles.
Northwestern is coming off a bye week. Top running back Cam Porter will return after missing the Washington game, and Zach Lujan and his staff have hopefully had an additional week to try to duct tape together something that resembles a functioning passing offense. Northwestern's schedule already looked grim at the beginning of the season and the introduction of a rampaging Indiana team and what looks like a pretty good Illinois team that is already showing signs of Hat Madness certainly don't help things. But Northwestern can do something that few Wildcat teams have had the opportunity to do this century: get an absolutely enormous, field-rushing upset against the literal Indiana Hoosiers.
MEMORIAL STADIUM, BLOOMINGTON INDIANA
This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.
The following is a letter concerning the construction of Indiana's new Memorial Stadium from 1958, and it appears courtesy of the University of Indiana Made Up Archives.
To the Regents of the University of Indiana and The Government,
I am disappointed although admittedly not surprised that the university is preparing to erect a new, larger Memorial stadium without the consent or participation of my family, from whom the Stadium takes its name. And yet, instead of taking this opportunity to once again revive the thick packet of grievances, insults, rude telegrams, slaps in the face both metaphorical and literal, and times that my father and I have been physically thrown out of meetings by the Board of Regents and their vanguard of square-headed Hench Men, I would like to offer the construction of a new stadium as an opportunity to make things right. I am extending the proverbial Olive Branch. All I ask for is that in commemorating the war dead, whose sacrifices I and my family deeply respect and also wish to honor, you also consider the stadium, in a small way, a memorial to the victims of Indiana's various Horror Creatures and Monsters that have been ravaging the good people of this State and for whom my father Vincent Memorial had asked to be included in this name for decades dating back to its original construction. I have included my father's original letter for your the record:
Gentlemen,
I have seen in the papers that you are going to build a new football stadium called Memorial Stadium to honor the soldiers of the War. But if you are going to be commemorating people, you should also consider the many men and women and children who have been carried off and devoured by the Monsters and Ghouls haunting this particular State. You probably know some of them like the floating eyeball out in Crawfordsville but there are dozens of known Creatures that go around lurking and haunting in the forests and the lakes and every year more citizens than you think are attacking people and putting them under the control of their Dark Magicks. I humbly ask that these victims also be included in your your stadium as a Memorial to the brave War Dead and Victims of Indiana Monsters.
Several years ago, I had the misfortune of encountering one of these Creatures outside of Bruceville. I had taken the cart out to gather some firewood and hunt for rare mushrooms. It was me and the horses and the old hound Spark and I guess we had lost track of the time looking around the creek because it had started to get dark pretty quick. Well we were on our way back because I knew my wife Patunia (it is a nickname I gave her, her real name is Patricia, to be honest she did not care for it) would be mad at me for dawdling again but at this point it was pitch black in the forest and Spark started howling and pointing and his fur was spiking up around his neck. I told him to quiet down but soon I heard some rustling through the leaves. Now I'm not a person who scares easily and I've heard every type of rustling there is in the woods, a deer or a coyote or even a every noisy squirrel so I immediately knew that was a different type of rustling. We kept moving and the noise kept with us, like it was following us. Then I heard a chomping noise, it was a loud wet noise, like nothing I've ever heard, a chomping and a slurping noise which was not of the Natural World, so I lit up a torch and then a few hundred feet behind us I saw the Monster. It was big and sort of looked like a person but it had gangly legs and a gigantic head and the largest mouth I've ever seen, the mouth took up most of the head and it was stumbling towards us and chomping and gnashing and drooling as it shambled forward. We high-tailed it out of there real fast and I told everyone about the Monster, I called it the Bruceville Biter, I thought that was a good name for it on account of the mouth.
A few days later my wife Patunia said she was going to go into the woods to get some firewood because she was sick of watching me sit on my behind (she did not understand the various Projects I had undertaken, you might be aware of the letters I had been writing to rename Terry Haute to Pterry Haute in honor of the flying prehistoric beast Pteranodon) and I begged her not to go into the woods because the Biter was in there but she ignored me. Well I waited and waited but she didn't come back so I headed out into those woods with the biggest rifle I had and I went back over to the creek. I heard the rustling and now I was following it and I listened for the chomping and I whipped the lantern around and nothing. It was gone. I even yelled out, come on out Biter. Bring my wife back you tooth monster. I was scared to death but I wandered those woods until sun up and I saw nothing. I knew Biter had gotten my wife. The sheriff was help at all but I will not waste your time as I have written several letters about this already and it is not university business.
So as you can see there are hundreds of us suffering in silence on account of the government doesn't want to hear about monsters, but this is real. And even worse since these people vanish and the monsters do all sorts of Daemonic tricks for example I keep hearing from people that there's a woman who looks exactly like my Patunia named Patty Schulz married to a man named Frank Schulz up in Indianapolis and I urge you to explain that other than the machinations of a Beast operating with forces that we cannot understand.
Please consider the people lost to Indiana's monsters of the Forests and the Lakes when you are naming a memorial, for their loss hurts as much to us as the brave men who lost their lives in the War and weren't even dealing with mysterious Tooth Creatures who harm innocent people.
Sincerely,
Vincent Kubbnilk
As you know, the university regents have consistently ignored my father's requests. They never responded to his letters and repeatedly removed the plaques he made and installed at great effort and expense to remember the victims of Crypto-Zooligical Creatures within the Stadium. My father even received no response from the regents when he legally changed the family name to Memorial in order to claim that the stadium was now named after his late wife. But now, as you seek to build a new stadium bearing the Memorial name, you can undo the harm you have caused to not only my family but the hundreds of persons suffering from effects of attacks from Indiana's various Monsters.
I look forward to appearing at the ceremonial Ground-Breaking as a representative of the Memorial Family. As a gesture of good will I have purchased my own Golden Shovel in order to spare the taxpayers of Indiana any further expense. I also ask to be able to discreetly spread a portion of my father's ashes under the stadium, although I will of course carry most of them in a small pouch on my belt, as per his final request, so I can use them to blind any Monstrous Creatures that I may encounter and then make my escape or perform an opportunistic attack to the Monster's weak points including eye-balls, eye stalks, exposed brains or visible reproductive organs. All we ask for is a small gesture to make up for the decades of insult and ridicule to our family name and to come together with the University to collectively mourn and celebrate our people lost to the horrors of War and Supernatural Monsters that terrorize the countryside. The people of Indiana deserve that much.
Terrence Memorial