The New Ryan Field Is Decadent and Engraved With "Ryan" Everywhere

 

EVANSTON The people who came to the new Ryan Field got what they paid for and that was to see the new stadium while Northwestern casually crushed a struggling MAC team in the background. While the rest of the college football world simmered over with upsets and strange statlines and yet another fanbase filming themselves making obscene gestures at a defeated Lane Kiffin as he slinks off their field, the Wildcats easily handled Ball State on the way to a 4-1 record and their first AP top 25 ranking since 2020.

I do not have anything interesting to say about this game. It was not particularly competitive at any given time. Ball State could do little to stop Northwestern and Chip Kelly’s avant-garde 1940s offense, Aidan Chiles shredded them with passes to Griffin Wilde, and the Cardinals did little other than amass an enormous number of penalties. In the past, good Northwestern teams may have started slow or played a very anxious and close game against a team like Ball State, but this year’s version is ruthless. The one time Ball State started to get close towards the end of the first half, Robert Fitzgerald immediately picked off a pass and scored. Most fans were there for the stadium.

 

I have been very critical about New Ryan Field in the past, and I want to make it clear that I do not think the stadium itself is bad. As a building, it is impressive. It is expensive and fancy. The views, even from the upper deck, are excellent. Every wall has a large photograph of a Northwestern sports triumph and there are retro logos and old programs and tickets everywhere. The partial canopy has a weird effect of feeling like you are sort of inside while also clearly being outside and it casts strange noir shadows all over the field. Everything is state of the art with a jumbotron at each end, horizontal video boards lining the stands, and a massive sound system. This stadium even has its own lights and does not need to truck them in for night games. The name "Ryan Field" is stamped everywhere there is room to put it.

 Here is panel from the large mural of old tickets and programs that could also appear as a graphic on College GameDay after Nick Saban says "well this is what is happening to college football, today"

The stadium experience is very modern, which means it is a constant assault on the senses. This is part of a trend at pretty much all modern sports games, where production teams will fill all of the endless commercial downtime with blaring music and videos. For this game, Northwestern brought back beloved former defensive tackle Joe Spivak who now apparently wrestles professionally under the confounding name “Tank Ledger”-- I assume he is supposed to be some sort of vicious accountant who wears a green visor and pummels his opponents with a giant old-fashioned account book and says things like “next week at the Rosemont Horizon, you’ll be in the red”-- as a host who is there to goad the crowd, get people excited, and encourage the students to kick the absolute shit out of the kicking bleachers.

The Wildcat Wall makes an absolutely unholy amount of noise. It’s a metallic cacophony. Imagine someone in the neighborhood pounding on a sheet of aluminum and then imagine every single person on your block and the next block and the next block also pounding on a sheet of aluminum while also screaming and blaring Welcome to the Jungle. This is an inspired choice because while Northwestern fans will likely continue to be overwhelmed by visitors in their own stadium, only Northwestern students have access to the ear-melting Wall Kick Technology. It is the fan noise equivalent of the 2001 A Space Odyssey apes seeing the monolith and then using it to try to draw false start penalties in the north endzone.

It is impossible to have attended games for years at the old Ryan Field which was left in complete disrepair and swaddled in tarps and not be impressed by the fact that the new stadium seems less likely to collapse upon you. My main issue with the new stadium is that I thought that the old rustbucket was charming and fit the program perfectly. The whole setup was very unassuming, easy, and relatively cheap. You no longer can roll up and simply park in the neighborhood; the homeowners around the stadium have used the clash with the university over the stadium to form a medieval fortress of permitting around their streets. The stadium is disturbingly fancy, as if you’ve been invited to some swanky bachelor pad that is inexplicably decorated with pictures of the 1995 Rose Bowl team. 

This is Real Ball 

The old stadium and even the charmingly janky lake setup felt well calibrated to Northwestern football’s feeling of not being a big deal. It did not have the pomp and grandeur of college football; instead it felt perfectly suited to the smallest school in the Big Ten that almost nobody cares about. Now, the new stadium is trying to make it a destination. That is a curious decision.

After the ecstatic Friday night debut, there were a ton of empty seats for Northwestern’s first homecoming in the new stadium. Ball State is not the most compelling opponent, and it was an uncharacteristically warm and beautiful Saturday afternoon– possibly the last the Chicago area will see until well into 2027. But if the new stadium is supposed to be a galvanizing jolt to the Northwestern fanbase, to activate alumni and bring in curious local onlookers, it did not look like that on Saturday. What it looked like was a typical Northwestern non-conference game. What it looked like was proof that even the best, most exciting Northwestern team in years, one that is not only good but playing with real offensive verve in a way that has not been seen since the spread offense was still novel, one that has attracted national attention in a way I can’t remember a Northwestern team doing because of the new stadium and a large number of prime time national TV games; this team still has no chance of selling out the stadium without having to accommodate an overwhelming amount of visiting fans. I'm sure they will appreciate it.

THE WEIRDEST NORTHWESTERN GAME EVER PLAYED

Pat Fitzgerald wants revenge. It has been three years since Northwestern fired its most famous football personality because he was responsible for the team during decades of horrifying abuse and hazing in the program and then Northwestern botched the firing process so badly that he won his unlawful termination lawsuit and they had to give him a bunch of money and release a statement officially stating that Pat Fitzgerald had no idea anything untoward was going on, he had never seen anything, in fact every day is a new blank slate for Pat Fitzgerald who is reborn daily in an innocent state of nature and therefore did nothing wrong. He will never forgive them.

Now Fitzgerald is back, his head more enormous and his haircut more square than ever. He’s got a helicopter landing pad up there. He looks like the cartoon mascot for a 1950s roadside hamburger stand. Fitzgerald is back in the midwestern heart of the Big Ten where he was born to be buffeted by winds, beet red, screaming at officials while sending out the punting unit. He is coaching for the first time against the program he helped turn from a national laughingstock into a Big Ten power as one its greatest players, one that he took over at an impossibly young age after the shocking death of Randy Walker, and one that he molded into his image of putrid neckroll football that allowed Northwestern to master playing the most grotesque unwatchable games anyone has ever seen on the way to making Northwestern a satisfyingly mediocre Big Ten West team.

Pat Fitzgerald has reemerged as a miniboss in a sega genesis beat 'em up game 

Fitzgerald looms awkwardly in the current program. Northwestern fired Fitzgerald for what the school argued was a gross dereliction of his responsibilities towards his players, but after the settlement Fitzgerald appeared at the Lake last year and was celebrated as part of the 30th anniversary of the Rose Bowl team. He hired David Braun, who talks about him as a mentor and friend though he was smart enough to avoid wearing the forbidden Cats Against The World t-shirt that led to a reprimand to and lawsuit from former offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian. There is a giant likeness of a faceless Fitzgerald on the wall of the new stadium along with Darnell Autrey. You still see 51 jerseys at Northwestern games, and there is a rump pro-Fitzgerald faction of fans, although Fitzgerald’s indifference and ineptitude in the new landscape of college football while leading his team to some of the worst records since the fallow 1980s has dimmed their enthusiasm. The fact that Fitzgerald was seemingly in no danger of losing his job after a 1-11 season until student journalists began investigating the hazing allegations was a testament to his stature at the school.

Pat Fitzgerald’s Michigan State team looks eerily familiar. It reminds me of when Bill Carmody took over Holy Cross and somehow made the NCAA tournament and had his team playing the exact same Princeton offense with the same sort of janky rec spec aesthetic except it’s now a team in green playing the exact kind of late-stage Pat Fitzgerald toiletball that went winless in the continent of North America. The Spartans have not been particularly impressive and have lost star running back Cam Edwards for the season, although they did manage an impressive comeback against a reeling Illinois team that sent the game to overtime and featured a blown call on an onside kick and Fitzgerald losing his mind and blasting middle fingers at the Illinois sideline.  

The Michigan State game will also be a homecoming for Aidan Chiles. Chiles was recruited by former Spartan coach Jonathan Smith at Oregon State then followed him to East Lansing where he played for two years. Chiles was benched towards the end of last season following an up and down career where his improvisations led to disaster as much as they showcased his brilliance. Michigan State is facing multiple former quarterbacks this season with Chiles, Illinois’s Katan Houser, and Eastern Michigan’s Noah Kim all returning to Spartan Stadium. Though it was possible for players to transfer and face former teams in the past, the new freedom of movement in college has created a new phenomenon where the best word to describe programs encountering former players is “haunted.”

Northwestern is ranked and should be favored on the road. But I think this game will take place in a sort of Madness Vortex that makes it impossible to predict. Both Fitzgerald and Braun downplayed the emotional valence of this game, saying it was about the players. That is bullshit. Fitzgerald is I am sure foaming at the mouth to win this game. Northwestern fans, at least those who wanted him fired, desperately want this game as a cathartic refutation of his hold on the program. Aidan Chiles wants to beat his old team and the quarterback that was elevated over him. Too many people want revenge on other people. This game is an emotional maelstrom.

If this game involved any other program, a situation where a coach was fired in disgrace then successfully sued his own school and immediately took a job at a sort-of rival program while the original team snared that team’s quarterback– this sort of melodrama would be a major story in college football. Instead, it has been shunted off to Peacock and buried under a series of major games between college football powers happening at the same time. This is partly because nobody cares about Northwestern, and there has already been more Northwestern on national TV this season than I can remember. I also imagine that nobody on TV wants to talk about what was going on at Northwestern that led to Fitzgerald getting fired– the announcers of the game would rather impale themselves on Sparty’s sword than have to do anything other than make oblique references to “allegations of hazing” once before showing a montage of Pat Fitzgerald in purple puffing out his neck and pumping his fists after Northwestern wins a game 9-5.75. 

Ever since Fitzgerald was hired, this game loomed on the schedule unpleasantly like a colonoscopy. I just want to get it over with. As fun and cathartic as it would be for Chip Kelly to razzle dazzle Pat Fitzgerald’s lumbering oafball back into the Big Ten West, beating Michigan State isn’t going to reverse the sad and horrifying revelations about what this program had been. I don't think Pat Fitzgerald will prove some sort of point by beating his old team. It will mostly be seeing Pat Fitzgerald lose a football game involving Northwestern, something we all have witnessed too many times to count.

Running It Up

Last year, Northwestern went into Beaver Stadium for Penn State’s homecoming game while every fan in the stands spent the entire game simultaneously doing the insane laugh Charlton Heston does in the beginning of Planet of the Apes when he is telling the other astronaut who landed with him that everyone they knew has been dead for thousands of years. Northwestern won 22-21, and flighthawarethirsty Penn State fans got their wish to pay James Franklin the GDP of a micronation to go away. The Nittany Lions had the opportunity to avenge their homecoming humiliation and to ruin the opening of Northwestern’s gazillion dollar palace and reestablish themselves as a Big Ten contender after an embarrassing last-second loss to floundering Wisconsin. They did not do that.

Northwestern obliterated Penn State. The Nittany Lions had no answer for Northwestern’s running game as the ‘Cats carved them up for an astonishing 413 yards on the ground. Chip Kelly baffled them with archaic wing T formations, triple options, and wide receivers positioned like they are playing Canadian football. After years of hapless offensive performances, Northwestern’s new coordinator was doing bits. It is possible that Caleb Komolafe is still shrugging off hapless Penn State defenders and Joseph Himon is sprinting his way towards Happy Valley to start juking the faculty and Board of Trustees.

The Penn State defensive line after getting repeatedly run over 

The Wildcat defense, down three starters in the secondary, stifled Penn State and added two interceptions on beleaguered quarterback Rocco Becht. Becht, an Iowa State legend who followed coach Matt Campbell to Penn State, has not had the success he had in Ames this season. As a public service to my readers, I have tried to tap into Penn State Thought by visiting the most deranged message boards I can find, the ones where you can tell everyone posting there is insane because they indulge my favorite message board convention of referring to the coach by a C followed by his initials– the C stands for Coach, and they feel they must give him his title like he is a minor Russian nobleman in a Tolstoy novel. 

It turns out that Penn State fans are not happy with the work that His Excellency Viscoach Matt Campbell is doing over there, and they are not thrilled with the retinue of players he brought from Iowa State. The Nittany Lions host USC this week, a mirror program where fans are at late stage James Franklin levels of frustrated with their own coach in the type of misery bowl that happens to very good teams whose fanbases have been driven completely insane by the curse of being only very good for an extended period of time.

Fortunately for Penn State fans, someone was thoughtful enough to counterprogram this game with a Virginia Tech game where James Franklin himself was performing a classic blowing the game masterclass against Pitt that ended with a field goal that floated high above the goalposts and required numerous tedious replay reviews to figure out that it missed.

Controversial calls in Big Ten games go to a very funny mission control-style Big Ten Review Command Center where this year television broadcasts are playing the conversations between the officials on the field and in the center as part of the impossible task of trying to find a way to stop fans from being mad. The Big Ten replay review center is in the Big Ten's Rosemont headquarters, infamously next to a Brazilian meat restaurant chain, and I think they should get a sponsorship deal where an official immediately flips over a meat delivery card and gets untold amounts of beef delivered to the workstation station when announcing after a twenty minute deliberation over a catch that it "stands as called." 

It has not been a particularly great couple of weeks for Pennsylvania sports. It started with mummified quarterback Case Keenum being unwrapped for the first time in centuries in order to wreak havoc on the Eagles’ secondary in a Monday night horror show. Then, Penn State got dismantled partly at the hands of former Eagles coach Chip Kelly, who many Eagles fans still seem to be mad at for some reason. The Phillies were eliminated from the playoffs on the same night that Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers lost to the debaculous Cleveland Browns while Rodgers screamed at his coaches and stewed on the sidelines like someone had turned off his youtube video about Medicinal Dirts right when they were getting to the good part about how the Medical Establishment is once again suppressing Dirts Research. Then on Sunday, the Eagles blew a lead to the Rams that climaxed with fans throwing things at the Rams’ coaching box and then going on their beloved local newscast and cutting professional wrestling promos about how mad they are about the Eagles, which seems to be such an innate part of Philadelphia civic identity I assume that all Philadelphia students have a special unit in sixth grade about saying to a reporter “I’d like to throw this coach in a snow blower.” 

I would hope to hear someone with a Philadelphia Yelling At The News Accent say "oh no, it's Caleb Komolafe"

Northwestern has consistently had a good defense under David Braun, but the emergence of an actual offense has them looking like a serious team in the Big Ten. This is partly because the Big Ten is in a state of early season turmoil. While heavyweights Ohio State, Indiana, and Oregon (after an embarrassing non-conference stumble) look steady, expected contenders Penn State and Michigan, in their first year with new coaches, look wobbly and inert. Illinois, steady under Bret Bielema, has fallen to Purdue at home, allowing the Boilermarkers their first Big Ten win and their first road win of any kind in three years, a stat I could not believe when I saw it. The last time Purdue fans saw their team win a Big Ten game, they had not yet been defeated for the first time by Boo Buie. Bielema spent the entire fourth quarter looking like he had just been removed from a hot dog roller. Northwestern is right in the roiling middle with jabroni-killing Nebraska, blood-smeared Minnesota, resurgent Wisconsin, and Bob Chesny’s robust UCLA. 

Northwestern has looked credible on three consecutive national TV broadcasts, they are getting the attention of the types of national football writers who would never deign to mention them unless something horrible has happened, they have attracted some very minimal and premature potential outsider Playoff hype; I don't want to get too excited here, but Northwestern is Also Receiving Votes.

On Saturday, Northwestern welcomes Ball State to the new stadium for homecoming. Northwestern appears to be a pretty good Big Ten team; Ball State looks like one of the worst teams in the MAC. The Cardinals have not come within 13 points of an FBS opponent this season, although one of those games was them taking a large sum of money to get whaled on by Ohio State. I am not going to pretend to know anything about Ball State football this season, so I am passing on this in-depth scouting video of them:

Northwestern should win this game unless something goes horribly wrong. That can happen. We’ve seen a Northwestern team that went to the Big Ten Championship Game lose a very stupid game to a historically crappy Akron team. We’ve seen a team that went to a bowl game fail to score a touchdown at home to Illinois State. But this also looks like it could be the best Northwestern team we’ve seen in awhile, and I wouldn’t mind if they just ran over Ball State. I don’t expect a legion of Ball State fans at this game, and I think Northwestern will manage to have an actual home game on homecoming.

It is the fifth game for Northwestern, and the first they are playing during the day. For some reason the game is at the unholy time of 11:30am. We’ll see what the stadium looks like in sunshine without the blaring purple lights. We’ll also see if the Nite ‘Cats have somehow developed schedule-derived vampirism that makes them unable to tackle in direct sunlight (I apologize for this but I can't help myself: Bloody Clocks). It is possible that Ball State could be a classic trap game, but that would only make sense if the next game on the schedule was an emotional maelstrom that would make everyone involved with it on both sides completely psychotic. 

STADIUM ARCANIUM

While Northwesten’s offensive line was busy burying Penn State’s defense in the new Ryan Field turf, the broadcast became an infomercial for the new stadium. We saw glamor shots of the field from drones, the sideline reporter was dispatched to rove around the stadium pointing out various places where you can buy the same crappy nachos that you’ve always been able to buy at Northwestern games– despite touting the Great Chicago Food Festival as a Premium Food Experience, it was gratifying to see excitable meme announcer Robert Griffin III leap out of the booth so he could consume a classic desiccated Ryan Field hot dog-- and the sundry features of the new facility. There was plenty of footage of the Ryan family, including the swaggering and curiously Pat McAfee-hued Pat Jr. swaggering around the $875 million dollar Football Stadium Experience. 

As baffled as I am by the need for Northwestern to attempt to be on the forefront of college football stadium technology, I have to admit the thing looked cool on television. The student section is as close as it is possible to the field without the Big Ten disallowing the use of that endzone. This effect, I think, will be similar to the Welsh-Ryan renovation where a relatively small number of students hover over the court closely enough to be a legitimate menace to opposing teams. The partial canopy over the stands and the practice of encouraging the students to kick the bleachers behind them like they are minor league baseball player Izzy Alcantara ensuring that the catcher would not prevent him from charging the mound seems like it will lead to a loud, raucous atmosphere beyond what you could find in a fucking library. The game certainly looked and sounded like a genuine Northwestern home game on TV. The question is what happens when Wisconsin or Iowa show up and all of that noise is blasted directly at the Wildcats’ offense.

After all of the fooforaw about the marching band’s pregame, the broadcast showed what Ryan Field Entertainment thought was better– it was a student dressed in a t-shirt with the new scary cat eyes motif t-shirt wailing on an electric guitar while playing along with a recording of  Thunderstruck. This was funny to me both because I spent a small portion of last week’s post writing about the program’s AC/DC addiction (they also play “TNT” after turnovers and encourage the crowd to Oi along with the track with a jumbotron Oi graphic) but also because it reminded me of a podcast where the comedian Todd Glass spends like a half hour evangelizing about his insane practice of hiring a live drummer to play along with a DJ and sort of crashing a wedding where the bride and groom took his suggestion and then arguing with a wedding planner to ensure the drummer was in the proper place. 

Northwestern is fortunate that the stadium opening seems to coincide with the most exciting team in years. They are hoping that curiosity about the stadium and excitement around the program is enough to get people to buy tickets that are by Northwestern standards extremely expensive. But if the stadium is an $875 million dollar bet that they can make anyone care about Northwestern football, they've got their work cut out for them. I hope it works, but everything I know about this program tells me it is more likely that they built a Premium Visiting Fans Experience.

FICTION SECTION

This year in college football, the theme is everyone suing each other all of the time. Today's short story called Typing The MAC. 

The sound of vacuum jolted him awake as it rolled past his office door. It was 2:30 in the morning, and he had dozed off with a file folder spread open on his ample belly. Gene Blimp had been up all night waiting for final approval on this case after months of work. He just needed to get the call to press “send” on the email, but someone was dawdling. Blimp looked at his watch, sighed, and reached for the bottom desk drawer where he had a bottle of something to help pass the time until someone would let him make Sacramento State officially part of the MAC.

There is a certain delicacy in these types of operations. Blimp was nineteen years in acquisitions before getting in the football business. The men in big pinstripe suits who get on calls where they yell things like “we will merge and acquire your ass” or “guess what’s getting hostile take-overed: your ass” or “your ass is grass and I’m the cure”-- that was his old boss Geraldo Fourmillion– got the attention, but it took lawyers like Gene Blimp hours behind the scenes maneuvering between the words and knowing how to stay just below the radar of the SEC so that the suit men could get in their ass-centered bloviations.

Now Blimp was in the world of college football. Conferences were doing acquisitions and raids. There was a different SEC to worry about. He enjoyed it. This was a world almost without rules, and his ruthless pen could slice a school into a different football universe. Hell, he could turn on the TV and see it every week. He was not a sports fan, but he liked turning his TV on at 12:30 at night to one of the weird sports channels hidden in the cracks of his cable package and seeing some volleyball team bizarrely transported across the entire country because of work he did disentangling a program from one conference and ensnaring them in another just by moving around some clauses and determining who had to send a check. One athletic director even had the team sign a ball for him after he got them into the Mountain West. Where was that ball? Maybe he’d toss it around to himself. He stood up to go root through a cabinet that had papers falling off of it and sprouting like vines into piles on the floor, but he was a little wobbly on the feet. Maybe a little too much passing the time, Blimp thought.

He started to tunelessly sing the Moving To The MAC song that had been secretly written specifically for this occasion.

The money has been spent-o

The trucks are on cement-o

That’s where the hornets went-o

The MAC is in the ‘Mento

He heard a key enter his door lock. “Don’t worry about it, Tripe,” Blump said. Tripe was the night janitor. But the person who came through the door was not Tripe. It was a tall, thin man in an old fashioned flannel suit. He was carrying a dripping overcoat; the rain must have started up again. The man closed the door behind him. He stood ramrod straight, and his face was drawn so taught that Blimp could see his cheek muscles undulating as the man clenched and unclenched his jaw. The man’s hair plateaued into a perfect flattop except the middle which stuck straight up and formed a smaller flattop like a mesa rising in the middle of the desert. “Blimp,” the man said.

“Can I help you?” Blimp said. He tried to suppress a shudder. The suit man exuded a faint air of menace. Blimp was calmly searching his office for some sort of weapon, seeing how quickly he could lunge for a stapler while knowing he had zero chance of pulling it off.

“Yes, I believe you can,” the man said. “I’m R. Frank Gastromancy. I’m here from Football. I know you’re sitting here waiting for approval to send an email putting Sacramento State in the MAC. Well I’m here to tell you you’re not going to get that approval. You’re not going to send that email.”

Blimp was not easy to rattle. He had spent decades with Geraldo Fourmillion and the various Geraldos Fourmillion he dealth with bursting into his office berating him, screaming at him, and uttering all manner of unmentionable ass-related threats, but something about this Gastromancy character unnerved him. Perhaps it was that he didn’t seem to blink. “Where did you say you were from? The NCAA?” Blimp said.

“No, I’m not from the NCAA,” Gastromancy said. “I’m not here to find out if you bought a kid a hamburger. I told you where I’m from. I’m from Football. Let me ask you a question. Who runs college football?”

Blimp nervously buttoned and unbuttoned the middle button on his shirt. “Well, it’s hard to say. I’d say you’ve got the schools, especially the big ones. You’ve got the conferences of course, mostly the two big conferences pushing everyone around. And you’ve got the TV networks.”

“Interesting. So let me ask you this,” Gastromancy said. “Do you think this loose conglomeration of schools, conferences, and TV networks all with similar though distinct interests, are running college football? That his billion dollar enterprise is just floating around being poked by different people on the shore with long poles? Impossible. Stupid and unwieldy. Liable to lead to all sorts of bizarre changes. Like Sacramento going to the MAC.”

“I already told you where I’m from, Blimp. I’m from Football. Within the sport, there are gears moving that you can’t see. Organizations within organizations. We’re hidden in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and we’re in plain sight. We have one member who is a vice-provost but because of us is far more powerful than the provost herself.

Look around you. The whole sport seems like it’s in chaos. We need someone to reel everything in. They’ve got kids getting paid left and right. People like you trying to move teams around. It disgusts me. This is college football. This isn’t for the longhairs and the freaks. They’ve got their own sport. The one with the frisbee. They call it ultimate because of the Whammo corporation. And they’ve got the other one where they throw the frisbees like golf. Let them have that, all that frisbee stuff. This is football, Blimp. This is Coca-Cola. This is Chevy Truck month. Of course there’s someone taking charge.

You know, I admire your work. You’re discreet. Quiet. It’s not easy to move an entire athletic department to another conference. These people love to talk. No one gossips more than football people. But they have no idea who you are, do they? They don’t know some industrious snake in his little snakehole office is sending their teams out to Delaware because some athletic director thinks it’ll make ‘em a buck. That they’ll suddenly on FUBO Regional Action Plus and somehow that means they’ll be Ohio State. 

Well, this time it’s not happening. Sacramento State is not going to the MAC. We’ll let them have football. Sure. Make those guys get on a plane and go get buffeted around Toledo for a few hours if they want to do that. But you’re not moving that whole conference to the Mid America. What else have they got there? Water Polo? That’s not Mid American to me. All that treading water. That’s European decadence. You can keep that in California. I don’t even know if the MAC even has water polo. That’s none of my business. 

So I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. I know it’s late, but you’re going to sit here and you’re going to rewrite those documents, every clause, and you’re going to get everything but football out of the Mid America conference and then you’re going to send in that contract signed, done, and dusted. You understand me? Blimp?"

Blimp took a breath. “I can't just do that. I have people I report..."

“You don’t seem to understand, Blimp,” Gastromancy said. I’m the boss here. You answer to me now. You answer to Football.” He put his hands on the desk and leaned over until his face was even with Blimp. He still was not blinking. Waves rippled across his cheeks. “Start typing, Blimp,” he said. 

Blimp started typing as Gastromancy stood over him gargoyleically. The phone rang. “Don’t you dare pick that up. Keep typing,” he said. The phone rang and rang and rang.

Friday Night 'Cats

 

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.

The Great Shushing

Northwestern’s final game on The Lake finally took place in the sort of tempestuous weather you would think you would get from putting a stadium next to a giant body of water in the type of Midwestern climate where you could spin a wheel for weather conditions and only the tiniest slice would not be a novel and miserable condition. The rain steadily pounded the turf and the spectators looked like sailors in a squall, but the conditions didn’t seem to affect Northwestern as the ‘Cats absolutely obliterated Colorado 41-7 in their most dominant win over a non-FCS team since David Braun took over.

Before the game, a reporter recorded the Colorado players hyping themselves up by screaming THIS PLACE FUCKING SUCKS and SHIT SOUNDS* LIKE A FUCKING LIBRARY. Little did they know that they were about to play what I believe is the only college football team to post a video of themselves looking menacing in a library; if this is what Colorado players thought about the Temporary Lake Stadium they were going into labyrinth with a minotaur that they thought was unthreatening because it was very bad at scaring people in labyrinths in the 1980s.

*I have seen some people interpret the player's screams as "shit smells like a fucking library" but that makes no sense unless he had said "shit smells like a rainy day at the lake, triggering a Proustian sense memory of rainy afternoons at my grandparents' house in a similar climate that were spent at the library reading books about football bloopers aaaaghhhh football football football." 

While the Colorado players reacted to the rain like they were in a sci-fi movie encountering water from the sky for the first time, it didn’t seem to bother the ‘Cats. Aidan Chiles continued to dart around out of trouble and into first downs. Chip Kelly kept scheming up ways to get Joseph Himon open, and he was able to catch three TD passes, looking as dangerous as he's looked in a Northwestern uniform. And while Northwestern’s defense allowed Colorado to run on them, the line tightened up and stopped several fourth down attempts. The game was capped off by Ore Adeyi picking off a pass and then doing the "Neon" Deion Neion Shuffle dance as Neion Deion himself could only watch fuming from the sidelines. 

Last week, I wrote about how funny it was that Deion Sanders, an iconic NFL player who immediately turned Colorado into a nationally relevant program just by coaching there and wearing sunglasses indoors, had found himself in a rain storm at the Temporary Lakeside Stadium, but the fact that he brought his team there only to get completely obliterated on a national television and see his own dance in the pantheon of 1990s Signature NFL Dances with the Ickey Shuffle and the Dirty Bird being turned against him by a Northwestern Wildcat is one of the funniest things to happen to him. While you and I know that Northwestern has transcended its awful reputation and been a solid Big Ten West-caliber team for most of the last few decades, perception of the program remains perpetually stuck in its 1980s nadir where no Power Four team thinks they should ever lose to them. Sanders probably should have had a Big Ten coach give him The Talk that every team gets in the conference which is that sometimes you just lose to Northwestern.

Sanders did not take the loss particularly well. In a fiery press conference this week, Sanders announced that he had kicked two players off the team because they had been laughing and joking around after the loss. He also said his quarterback has not yet “come around the mountain” and came as close as possible to doing the Carl Tart “I need dogs” bit without praising Shaboosie. 

 

Is Deion Sanders a sons merchant 

He also made one of the players who was caught on video making fun of the stadium issue an unnecessary and embarrassing apology. I don’t think that player did anything wrong; players can and do say all sorts of things to hype themselves up, and the Temporary Lakeside Stadium is kind of ridiculous. It is the sad fate of that player that the only reason why his comments that the stadium fuckin’ sucks and shit sounds like a fuckin’ library were recorded and disseminated to the internet is because the stadium has no tunnel and Colorado were entering the field from a grassy knoll with no privacy for pregame stadium disparagement. In the world of unnecessary apologies, this was up there with the time that former Bears offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer was caught complaining about Jay Cutler to reporters and Marc Trestman made him apologize to Cutler in front of the entire team– I can’t think of a funnier person to tearfully apologize to than Jay Cutler. 

Colorado does not seem particularly good, but it is rare for Northwestern to obliterate a Power Four team like that and it bodes well for the season. In two games, the offense powered by Kelly, Chiles, and the three dynamic running backs, looks as exciting and functional as any recent Northwestern offense although . The defense is bending but not breaking and boasting what looks like an absolutely nasty line of defensive backs led by corner Josh Fussell. If the ‘Cats keep playing this way, they look like they are going to be a tough out in the Big Ten. Unfortunately, just being a tough out probably won’t be enough for them in their first conference game.

INDIANA IS KILLING EVERYONE

The Indiana Hoosiers are a legitimate college football powerhouse. This is the world we live in. Two years ago, the Hoosiers brought in a guy who looks like he has seen things in the Korean War and his band of James Madison mercenaries and they’ve been crushing everyone since. Every game Curt Cignetti stands on the sidelines chewing on car batteries and preparing to be on the game show Who's More Grizzled against Kirk Ferentz. They haven’t lost since being beaten by Notre Dame in a playoff game that happened in 2024.

The category is "domed stadiums."  

Indiana the last two years were the darlings of the college football world in an unprecedented and seemingly impossible rise from the absolute dregs of the Big Ten to a national title, the kind of ascent that was impossible outside of the NCAA video games. Indiana’s transformation is a sports movie inspiration and beacon of hope for other historical loser programs and a very funny source of derangement for the teams hovering on the periphery of the playoff but don’t win national titles who have been battered aside by one of the worst teams in the history of college football.

Northwestern and Indiana were on track to meet in the 2020 Big Ten Championship Game until the Big Ten, at the last minute, revised its covid forfeit rules to allow Ohio State in, here's a photo of Big Ten parents at the Big Ten Headquarters/All You Can Eat Meat Restaurant Rally to demand a 2020 football season

And while I am happy to see a fellow Big Ten laughingstock turn into a legitimate power and beat up the Alabamas and Ohio States that have been kicking sand in the face of every other football team in the country for the past century, it is also extremely annoying to see this happen to Indiana. Northwestern is in the roiling lower middle of the Enormous Ten and with the conference expanding and removing the bowling lane gutter bumper of the Big Ten West, every single Big Ten schedule is a gauntlet. Now that the Big Ten regularly slaps three or four teams with single digit rankings on the ‘Cats, they need to be able to count on the other crummy and mediocre Big Ten teams to stay that way so they have a chance to qualify for a bowl game. Taking one of the teams they could most reliably beat in the Big Ten and spraying it down with the ninja turtle ooze until it mutates into the most dangerous powerhouse in the entire conference is to me not inspiring but a huge pain in the ass. 

The Indiana miracle is not entirely that they hired the tough old coach and his band of overlooked guys to wreak havoc on the Big Ten. The bones of the Indiana team are those veterans from JMU who became superstars, but the Hoosiers are also awash in money and boast one of the most expensive rosters in college football. According to The Athletic, Indiana is among the dozen or so biggest spenders in football this year that includes a luxurious raft of transfer players led by former TCU quarterback Josh Hoover who replaces the top NFL draft pick Fernando Mendoza. 

This is what NIL and the transfer portal can do. Before overtly paying players was legal, the top power programs had an enormous advantage over everyone else because the incentive for good players (beyond the under the table bag man payments everyone pretended not to know about) was to go to top teams that would be on TV all the time and showcase their talent and get them to the NFL. Prestige was self-reinforcing. Now teams that had a hard time convincing players to go to their middling or crappy programs can theoretically offer more money. That won’t always work– the big programs also tend to be the ones with the most money and the most insane boosters who are dedicated to spending big bucks but now have found that their increasing power over the rosters based on funding it also makes them get angrier and more upset when their teams don’t simply win the national championship every year and seems like it will lead to intra-booster feuding that will divide some programs into warring city-states controlled by various powerful car dealers– but it opens a new lane for historical also-ran programs.

Indiana is not winning just because they are spending money. This is a perfect once in a lifetime shot with the perfect coach in the exact right moment in college football that I doubt we will see again. It does seem possible right now– pending whether Congress passes the draconian anti-spending law currently working its way through the Senate– for historically crappy teams to spend their way to be at least decent, and it looks like that is what will be necessary in the Big Ten to avoid being roadkill every year. 

I haven’t looked but I assume Indiana is favored by a billion points. They haven’t played any power conference teams yet but they’ve also effortlessly swatted aside their early-season competition. Northwestern looks fantastic coming off the blowout against Colorado, but Colorado may be terrible. It would be nice to see how the ‘Cats look against a Big Ten team that is not the defending national champion on the road. In particular, Northwestern’s run defense has looked suspect against both Colorado and South Dakota State, and the Hoosiers will certainly be happy to just bulldoze them for four quarters if the 'Cats don't figure out how to stop them.

Indiana is not unbeatable. Even last year’s undefeated championship team needed a miracle catch to beat a Penn State team that had lost at home to Northwestern. That Penn State team, though, was loaded with talent on paper and the ‘Cats beat them while the fans were in the middle of a month-long psychotic break as they packed the stadium on homecoming demanding the ouster of their coach. I’m assuming that having alumni pay to have airplanes fly banners over the stadium about how much you stink probably affects a team’s performance.

Indiana will not be like that. Fans will be excited and basking in their team’s coronation and ready to watch a Northwestern game without the nauseating fear of squandering one of the only possible wins on their schedule. They are not yet poisoned by expectations when a team gets good enough to win national championships but does not and they all go insane; rooting for one of those programs that wins 9-10 games and expects to qualify for the playoffs but gets bounced out seems to me like a miserable experience in contrast to the hoping to qualify for the Mail Order Loose Saw Blades Bowl lifestyle.

Northwestern at least so far does not look like a Big Ten bottom-feeder. It has an exciting and functional offense, what looks like their best quarterback in almost a decade, and the usual trappings of pain in the ass bend but don’t break defense. I think this could be David Braun’s best team, but one that might not look like it because they have to play teams like Indiana constantly. Imagine just three years ago feeling like a win in Bloomington would be one of Northwestern’s most improbable and greatest upsets in the twenty-first century.

And while it seems unlikely that the ‘Cats pull this one out, it is important to remember this: Northwestern has beaten Indiana’s precious men’s basketball time seven times in a row dating back to 2021.

The Lake Takes a Final Encore/Reviewing the Insane Joe Maddon Book

Northwestern's Temporary Lakeside Stadium has been temporary for a long time. Hastily put together after whatever other stadium measures the athletic department were looking into fell apart, the stadium on the lake is a gorgeous gem of college football located literally a few yards from Lake Michigan as boats sail by with plenty of areas for hanging out if you don't want to watch Northwestern football and clear views of Chicago's Big Ten Skyline from the north endzone. It's also kind of a weird place to try to watch football with poles obstructing the endzone seats, a seating capacity below most Big Ten basketball arenas, and a rickety set of bleachers. After Saturday night, it is supposed to be retired and returned to its natural function as the best lacrosse stadium in the country.

And what a finale. As Chicago's climate has turned early fall into a late extended summer, Northwestern games at the the Lake have usually had beautiful weather made for television with the sun shimmering off the waves and sailboats photogenically gliding into frame. Saturday's forecast, though, calls for nasty cascades of rain and potential thunderstorms. I have no idea what will happen if there is lightning in the vicinity-- there is nowhere to go, and the endzone stands look like a lightning catching contraption designed by Victor Frankenstein. The 'Cats also face a critical early season test.

 

Walking under the bleachers at The Lake which looks like you are seeing a commercial for word processing software in the 1980s 

Colorado comes to town after a narrow opening win over Georgia Tech and a clobbering of FCS Wildcats Weber State. The Colorado program has faded back onto the periphery of relevance after they shocked the sports world by bringing in NFL superstar "Neon" Deion Sanders. Sanders was loud and flashy and resplendent with sons, dubbing himself "Coach Neon" and coming off a bizarre and scandal-plagued charter high school system named "Neon Nighschool." He became one of the most prominent coaches to make bulk use of the transfer portal, essentially telling the entire dreadful Colorado team that he inherited that they would be replaced, likely by his offspring. 

Sanders made a lot of noise, got a lot of attention, and brought Colorado from one of the worst teams in FBS to being just sort of crappy. Then the next year, with superstar two-way dynamo Travis Hunter, he managed to go 9-3 and make Colorado seem like a phenomenon. They were on ESPN all of the time and were the toast of the college football world. It didn't last. Sanders's quarterback son left to enter the NFL draft and drive Mel Kiper, Jr. into the throes of a three-day on-air meltdown. The Buffaloes stunk last year, and after the initial fanfare and some serious health issues for Sanders, the Colorado hype machine is pretty much dead. They have settled back into a sub-mediocre Big Twelve program regardless of how many MC Hammer videos their coach starred in in 1994.

But there is a very funny clash happening here between the glamor and braggadocio of Coach Neon and the rough, slapdash Temporary Lake Stadium. I have been wondering for the last couple of weeks if Deion Sanders is the most famous person to ever set foot at The Lake. I don't think that when Sanders decided to coach college football he ever imagined himself on the sidelines in front of probably like 8,000 people in a potential squall facing a slightly favored Northwestern team on national television.

The 'Cats are coming off their precariously early bye week after a narrow until the final minutes victory over a very good FCS team. Colorado might not be great, but it is probably not much worse than some of the lower level Big Ten peer teams the 'Cats will have to beat in order to have a shot at going to a bowl game except for the benighted Rutgers. Hopefully, the early bye will allow the 'Cats to get defensive stalwarts Michael Kilbane and Migo Jackson back on the field after they missed the first week and iron out whatever issues were causing the incessant penalties that plagued them in week one. The Wildcats' brutal schedule means they need to win every game they can before getting thrown into the Big Ten meat grinder. After this game, they head to Bloomington to the most unexpected abattoir in the history of college football.

Whatever the outcome, one thing isn't changing: Northwestern is committed to David Braun. Northwestern reportedly extended its coach until 2031. These extensions, I understand, are important for recruiting in the three dimensional portal era and also to prevent another program from poaching him, provided they can do the impossible and name the coach of the Northwestern Wildcats.

 

The one thing about David Braun that I can note is that this guy can really open his mouth wide while yelling

David Braun is in his fourth year with Northwestern. After starting under the craziest circumstances possible, he has stabilized into a coach that pretty much delivers what Northwestern fans can hope for since the Big Ten expanded, got rid of the cozy west division, and regularly serves Northwestern up on a platter for the conference juggernauts. In his time here, Braun has never said or done anything memorable and looks like an NCAA video game create-a-coach. He doesn't seem to have any sort of public personality. I'm fine with this. David Braun can keep Northwestern in Detroit bowl berths and not super embarrassing losses to the galactico programs as long as he wants, assuming we never hear about him claiming to be unaware of decades of bizarre hazing rituals inexplicably centered on the Dreamworks motion picture Shrek.

THE BOOK OF JOE IS SOMEHOW THE FIRST COACH WINNER'S WIN THE WINNER'S WAY IN THE BOARDROOM NOIR

The Book of Joe came out in October 2022, and I got my copy from the library in December. The vast majority of this was written in early 2023 with the intention of pitching it elsewhere. But after the brief Joe Maddon interview cycle, any interest in this book died out and I never finished the review. Most of the attention came from Maddon's interviews where he bitterly railed against front offices. This is a shame because the writing in this book is incredibly insane and funny and needs to be seen to be believed. I've been thinking about Joe Maddon again with the Cubs 10th reunion and me listening to every episode of the oafish Anthony Rizzo/David Ross Cubs reunion podcast which naturally included a very Joe Maddonish interview with the old skipper. Here, completed and revised, is what I thought about the extremely weird Book of Joe.

It seems to me that the Book of Joe was trying to be one thing, which is a boilerplate airport book biography of self-styled quirky baseball genius Joe Maddon about his slogans and his philosophies about baseball and also Important Lessons For Business and Life and then in the middle of writing it he got shitcanned from the Angels and it became a bitter jeremiad about how the pointy heads in the front office don’t let you manage anymore.

The book is credited to both Joe Maddon and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, but it’s written in the third person about Joe Maddon while being entirely from his perspective. The effect is sort of strange, a melding of Maddon biography as-told-by-Maddon as well as extended quotes from Maddon about Joe Maddon and the Joe Maddon Way; it’s a profile written by the subject. There’s an entire chapter that consists solely of listing cars that Joe Maddon owns or has owned in the past.

 

A lot of the Book of Joe seems repurposed from Verducci’s The Cubs Way written to cash in on the 2016 World Series where Verducci established Maddon as a brilliant manager and an innovative thinker who marries an open mind for analytics with a vaguely affected sort of Time/Life Magazine 1960s counterculture flavoring. This book, though, gives Maddon more room to pontificate:

“I still believe I could have been a football coach, a very high-level one, too. I mean a head coach. I think what I believe and how I do it could have worked there, too. No doubt in my mind. Zero doubt. Just teaching different things. Mechanics, fundamentals, but teaching the same mindset. No doubt.

I do believe I could run a large company. I still believe I could, based again on the same principles I’ve utilized. Building relationships. Creating trust. Exchanging ideas. And being able to be constructively critical. Hell, I believe I can do that with any company right now. And I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious in any way, but I just feel that. I do.”

The book is structured like a motivational speech with each chapter named after a Joe Maddon saying such as “Do Simple Better,” “The Process Is Fearless,” and “Embrace the Target.” Each one presents a biographical anecdote of how Joe learned that lesson and coined that phrase either through a revelation (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional” comes to him in a Moses-like flash after he had been drinking with his uncle) or as something he read in a book of motivational quotes that I think you can send away for that is advertised on the back of a coaching whistle catalog. 

Maddon imparts what he learned to do and not to do in his early life phase of coaching and then he explains how he has applied it in certain baseball scenarios. The whole thing is jumbled together, and the ideas themselves are often not coherent enough to sustain an entire chapter, but each chapter does seem to evoke what it would be like to be lectured by Joe Maddon at a corporate function where the company has paid him like 75 grand to give employees an hourlong presentation about Winning the Way Winners Win.

The whole thing reads like a fairly boilerplate coach-to-Hilton-Garden-Inn lecture circuit book, except for some reason Verducci has decided to indulge his literary impulses and make choices that seem completely insane to me. One of the things he does is start chapters with disconnected stories that then whiplash the readers directly to a motivational Joe Maddon story. Here, and please forgive the enormous block quote but I think once you read it you will understand why it needed to be there, is how he begins Chapter 2 (“Be Uncomfortable”):

One day in 1871 in the snowbound Swiss Alps a twenty-three-year-old doctoral geology student lost his footing and fell off a steep cliff. He went hurtling toward his death. In the handful of seconds between going airborne and meeting his expected fate, something very strange happened. Time stretched like an accordion. The student, Albert Heim, had time to think about how he would never get to deliver his scheduled university lecture in five days. He thought about how news of his death would reach his loved ones. In his mind he consoled them…Then his entire life played out before him in a series of images. It was like watching a stage production in which he was the main character.

…

At 12:47 p.m. [sic– it was 12:47 a.m.] on November 3, 2016, Joe Maddon experienced one of those moments when time slows and a lifetime plays out in the mind. As the throw from Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant perfectly landed hat-high in the first baseman’s mitt of Anthony Rizzo on an unusually warm night in Cleveland, ending the longest and most famous championship drought in North American sports, Maddon saw with absolutely clarity the people and lessons from his sixty-two-year-old life that had made the World Series-clinching moment possible.”

Tom Verducci has also made a bold choice where he appears to have wanted to write a hardboiled detective novel from the 1940s but also about Joe Maddon. Here is the opening to Chapter 8 (“The Five Levels of Being a Professional”):

“Joe Maddon pulled into the parking lot of the Under Armour Performance Center at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, on the dank morning of February 18, 2019. His windshield wipers strained to keep up with the cold, hard rain, and his headlights illuminated the sheaths of gray gloom. He looked at the outside temperature on the car’s thermometer: forty-five degrees. An ominous chill was in the air around the Chicago Cubs, a chill that would prove prescient. As was his wont, Maddon chose to interpret the digital readout optimistically.”

Joe didn’t see the first goon in the dank alley behind the Under Armour Performance Center but he certainly felt him. More specifically, his fists. It seems that the General Manager had not liked what he had to say about the Nine Levels of Winning, and he’d sent his friends to give him a few rebuttals. A couple of other toughs added some addenda with kicks to the midsection. But Joe had a few ripostes planned with his fungo bat. “Attitude is a skill,” Joe said as he made his point directly to the biggest one’s skull. “That’s a lesson you can learn on the field…or in the boardroom.”

Sometimes Verducci combines these tendencies towards weird, tangential anecdotes and overheated detective narration, as he does in Chapter 11 (“Never Forget the Heartbeat”):

“Fog crept over Los Rodeos Airport on the Spanish island of Tenerife like the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Fate Symphony. Portent, allegro con brio, hung in the air on the afternoon of March 27, 1977. It had already been a very bad day.”

This anecdote is about a massive plane crash that killed 583 people that Verducci uses to segue into a chapter about making decisions about Bullpen Usage.

The main reason why I was interested in The Book of Joe was that in the midst of doling out lessons on How to Win at Baseball and at Life, Joe Maddon was fired in the middle of a twelve game losing streak just after having shaved his hair into a Rally Mohawk. Maddon then appeared in the media railing against the encroachment of front offices on the manager’s role and came across as the classic guy who thought he was the smartest guy in the room supporting innovation until another innovator sweeps him aside and then innovation is bad and a manager should be allowed to trust his gut. I was curious how far down this path the book went.

It turns out, Joe Maddon’s attacks on modern front office practices form a relatively small part of the book, mainly the final chapters. They focus on his growing list of grievances with front offices starting with his sour 2019 with the Cubs. Among the indignities suffered, Maddon was told he had to be more hands-on with players and that some players thought his t-shirts and slogan shtick had become self-promotional. At his nadir with the Cubs, team president Theo Epstein forced him to read a Managing Millenials for Dummies book, which is one of the funniest things I can imagine doing to Joe Maddon.

Maddon argues that the front offices have numbers and algorithms about platoon splits and pitcher fatigue that override the manager’s feeling and relationship with the player and that teams just want to hire puppets that will do what the front office wants. On the one hand, this is a ridiculous argument coming from Joe Maddon who marketed himself as a guy who could play ball with the new model front office and didn’t reflexively react to the concept of on-base percentage by stabbing it with a broken beer bottle. 

On the other hand, though, he has a point: who wants to leave baseball increasingly in the hands of these front office dweebs? You may find Joe Maddon relentlessly annoying and his entire position to be the traditional tantrum of a powerful old man who has suddenly lost power and immediately pivots to yelling You Can’t Even Bunt Anymore, but as a baseball fan, it’s hard to not see something sinister undulating under a business guy’s Investment Vest.

In the early 2000s, it was very easy to support the new-look data driven front-offices because the people railing against them were deliberately and ostentatiously stupid, an army of potbellied wheezing 57-year-old baseball lifers and local columnists photographed using typewriters in 2002 screaming about mother’s basements. But the last twenty years have seen an explosion of data from more sophisticated formulas and cameras tracking every move a player makes on the field including their spit trajectory and standard deviations of crotch-adjustments, and we’re now in a period where the sport is so awash in data that is so abstract and kept secret by teams that it seems to have crossed a threshold where it can be used by front offices as a bullshit misting tool.

The advances in baseball during the first Moneyball stats revolution of the early 2000s were devastating in their simplicity. Baseball teams had been relying on statistics originally derived arbitrarily in the nineteenth century, which had missed an obvious and understandable point that players that did not hit well but walked a lot and smacked dingers were far more valuable than batting average would indicate. Baseball is not the only sport plagued by this type of thinking; the NBA appears in its second decade of understanding how much more valuable a three point shot is than a two point shot. But as teams have assimilated and copied these enormous insights, the margins of the information advantage have gotten slimmer and slimmer. It is obvious that there is still a cutting edge in Major League Baseball in that some teams such as the Rays and the Dodgers continue to excel with an unending army of unstoppable relief pitchers and some clueless teams like the Rockies that refuse to even approach the basics of modern practices that keep the team mired in doofus hell. But at the same time, the arrival of Big Data in baseball makes me suspicious because the concept of Big Data almost everywhere you look in society has served as a convenient mask for bullshit.

One of the benefits of Big Data in sports for teams is that these numbers are always presented as Advanced Analytics beyond the comprehension or interest of the vast majority of fans, presenting teams with a black box they can use to justify weird decisions. Just imagine an incredulous Troy Aikman saying “well the analytics say to go for it there, Joe” with The Analytics invoked like a mysterious mountain sage when a team tries a daring but failed fourth-down conversion, or the Cubs explaining what will happen when they get this guy in the Pitch Lab when they acquire a reliever with a 5.43 ERA because ownership no longer wants to spend money. Once teams claim to be wielding highly complex proprietary data beyond the grasp of the few weird fans who really get into the weeds on this stuff, they can use Data and Numbers as an argument ender. Most baseball fans see things like that the same way computers are portrayed on those NCIS shows beloved by septuagenarians where a hacker is able to type fast enough to make sparks come out of a server rack and blow up a hospital.

The issue I have with Big Data is that when so much of it becomes complex, abstracted, and proprietary, it is very difficult to tell what is actually information and what is bullshit that is being used as a disguise to do what companies want it to do. I can’t help but think of the time that the Facebook algorithm forced every online publication to make us stare at terrified bloggers talking into webcams in washed out rumpus rooms for a couple of years and then the entire thing was based on a single fake metric whenever a team decides to go all in on the nebulous concept of pitch framing. Most of what baseball front offices and ownership want to do is cut payroll and save money, and I believe that “advanced analytics” has appeared as a handy smokescreen for that tactic. 

Outside of sports, whenever you see management spouting about analytics and efficiency that is almost always code for the single idea of management consultants which is layoffs. In 2026, the part of the appeal of LLM "AI" for business guys is having an anonymous and non-corporeal oracle that they can fob decisions and blame onto-- we've already seen this creep into sports front offices where "what can we say, the complex data model AI said that we should do this" is being trialed as an excuse for executives to try to save their jobs.

When Joe Maddon rails against the encroachment of spreadsheet-wielding front offices, he is not upset about these things. He is simply mad. In the very specific case of Joe Maddon, I don't blame him because the front office imposing Data and Analytics upon him was the brains-trust of the Los Angeles Angels and frankly I'd rather let washed up egomaniac Joe Maddon cook in terms of his bullpen usage than Perry Minasian even if I believe that Joe Maddon personally shortened my life with his pitching decisions in game seven of the 2016 World Series.

The fact of the matter is that as insane and pointless as this book is and as annoying as Joe Maddon can be, I am still happy to let Joe Maddon talk Joe Maddonishly about Joe Maddon things. Maddon got my favorite baseball team that was so historically bad at baseball that every time they made the playoffs there would be b-roll of graveyards showing the generations of Cubs fans that literally died waiting for them to win anything a World Series Championship. He did a bunch of dumb, goofy shit that took baseball precisely as seriously as it should be treated. And so I think that Joe Maddon is entitled to release as many disposable As Told To books about Management Success that he wants to. It’s been ten years and no other Cubs manager has been even close to the World Series. For a brief time, whatever the fuck Joe Maddon was talking about in the Book of Joe worked.