Well This Doesn't Bode Well

 It looks like it may be another one of Those Seasons.  Northwestern followed a Big Ten West winning season in 2018 with a three-win campaign in 2019, and the 2020 season seems to be headed toward that same disastrous conclusion.  Pat Fitzgerald has once again unveiled the 2019 Menagerie of Quarterbacks, and what seemed like a position set in stone even after the Michigan State loss now appears to once again be in flux.  More worryingly, the defense that has carried Northwestern through the Pat Fitzgerald era seems to be struggling against Power 5 opponents, with running backs carving their way through the defensive line and receivers slicing their way through the Wildcats’ vaunted secondary.  Fitzgerald is used to punting and trying to advance the ball through one of those party games where you pass it down the field using only your neck but I am not sure he will be able to handle watching his beloved linebackers get pancaked into the depths of the Earth every week.

Pat Fitzgerald looks like he is about to be attacked by a terminator robot in this picture

 

At 1-2, Northwestern is not out of anything yet, although the Big Ten does not appear to be as delightfully chaotic as last year’s deranged Pandemic Season.  Still, even if things continue to go south for the Wildcats, we can take comfort only in the looming showdown with Illinois under Bret Bielema and the possibility of the greatest football game ever played hopefully with cameras on the coaches the whole time so we can watch Fitzgerald and Bielema bellowing at each other until one of them suffers a serious neck vein injury and needs to be airlifted to a clinic for the Severely Pissed Off.  

 

I had wanted to put a picture of Bielema yelling here but what I found was 

this headline and I think we can all agree that this is better
 

DUKE-NORTHWESTERN RECAP

This week, BYCTOM has brought back special correspondent Karl Ove Knausgaard to go analyze this matchup.  Knausgaard, the brooding Norwegian author of the six-part My Struggle series of autofiction about being a brooding Norwegian author and the forthcoming The Morning Star, shares his thoughts on college football.

 

 

I told my agent a thousand times that I would not under any circumstances write about American football.  Every day I am assailed with e-mails from American editors saying Karl Ove how about you write a feature story for our magazine about the Los Angeles Rams and I tell them I cannot because it is absurd.  I do not know anything about football, I have no interest in it, the visceral violence is appalling, the beer-soaked facepaint atmosphere is ridiculous, and frankly the concept of a Los Angeles Ram is insane to me.  Several times a day, I log onto my e-mail account and I tell them I will not write about the Jacksonville Jaguars even if you are telling me that they are an avatar of futility and meaninglessness and try and tempt me by saying that I bet it reminds me of my friend Geir knowing that I know several dozen Geirs and it is likely that one of their lives resonates in some way with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Ultimately, what they get you with is the money.  I am not too proud to admit it.  One thing that nobody tells you when you become an international literary sensation is that your expenses soon outpace your own earnings no matter how many conventions you do where thousands of people watch panelists chuckle-talk at each other and then ask you what you meant when you spent 237 pages writing about having a tedious and embarrassing parent-teacher conference because your daughter had been hogging all of the glitter and then running into the teacher in the supermarket and having to make awkward small talk after he took an hour implying that she was not learning about glitter sharing at home before spending the rest of the afternoon ruminating on the concept of Masculinity.  There are payments due on rustic brooding sheds and fresh divorces and lawsuits from angry family members.  So at some point I simply had run out of ways to say no to a prestigious American publication when all I had to do was watch a football game.  
 

I had no idea there was so much football.  I assumed I would be writing about the National Football League, the one with the Super Bowl and the Los Angeles Rams but I was shocked when the editor insisted that I write about college football, which I did not know existed.  This is football played in universities by university students-- not normal university students who spent their time listening to Roxy Music and desperately navigating the politics of the student literary magazine, but hulking young men who play on national television every week.  The editor explained to me that these university games on the biggest level were played in thundering stadiums of 100,000 people with pyrotechnics and bands and sometimes live animals in cages with unruly mobs of drunken students howling and sometimes taking to the streets to burn couches.  But then I was told I would be watching a game that was not like that at all and would be played between two middling programs in front of a sparse crowd for almost no stakes.  The e-mail explained that this is also an important college football experience, and to understand the game as most fans enjoy it, as a revel in the pointlessness of it all housed in “a simulacrum of college football pomp.”  I wanted to kick this person in the throat but had never met him before and I had taken his money.  I had never been so humiliated by an editor that actually used the word “simulacrum.”

An American television with cable has thousands of channels and seemingly dozens of college football games on at any time.  I could, for example, watch Mississippi State versus Memphis or Georgia Southern vs. Arkansas or even Wyoming vs. something called “Ball State” but my game would not appear.  I logged on the web.  Eventually I learned that the game I wanted to see was on something called ACC Network, which I did not have.  The ACC Network website gave me a list of cable companies but mine was not listed.  They told me to call my cable provider, so I did.  I waited for minutes while getting blasted with hold music and a robot reassuringly telling me my call was important to me while I seethed.  I have never experienced anything as bleak as being told that there was nothing I could do in order to get access to the ACC Network.  

My friend Geir had told me there were certain websites out of Eastern Europe where I could illegally watch this game.  I did not know where to find these websites.  I entered “Duke Northwestern Bulgarian??” into my web browser but nothing useful came up and I also did not want to risk getting a computer virus and wiping out my work.  I had been asked to write a guest issue of the Spider-Man comic for a series pairing comic book characters with international literary sensations for an experimental Marvel imprint and had a freestanding essay on Hitler and the nature of evil that was going to be delivered by the Rhinoceros that I had not yet backed up onto floppy disk.

“I am sorry, but I do not have ACC network and cannot watch this game,” I wrote to the editor, hoping that would be enough to get me out of this, but he simply wrote back “sounds great!” It was like trying to argue with quicksand.  When I was 15 years old my friend Trond took us out on his brother’s boat.  The boat was not much.  It was a rickety rowboat with peeling paint and when the three of us got on with the stash of beer we managed to hoard throughout the summer by carefully grabbing one can at a time wherever we could find one. The boat could barely float, but we felt like kings.  Trond was not supposed to take the boat.  His brother had told him that if he touched his boat while he was away on a monthlong expedition with his beekeeping friends he would lock him in the barn with the apiary and spray him with illegal pheromones that agitated the bees that he had ordered from the back of a catalog if he was lucky, but that did not stop us at all.  The sun washed over us on the lake and the beer was so cold and before long we were singing and taking turns diving off the boat when Gunnar said that we should go to the pier where there were probably some girls and try to get them on the boat with us.  Trond was worried because the only way through was a narrow, rocky passage but our oars were already digging into the lake.  It seems so obvious where this was heading now but at the time, it simply did not occur to me that anything could go wrong.  After all of the subterfuge to get the beer and the boat that we had to clandestinely carry hundreds of meters from the house and even the cooler that I had spirited away from my father, all of that worrying and sneaking and preparation had paid off, and I was enveloped in a drunken happiness.  We didn’t even see the first rock.  It should have been impossible, on such calm water and at such low speed for this to happen, but the boat was already riding low because of all the weight and then we rammed right into it.  Gunnar and I had no idea what we were doing so while Trond frantically tried to tell us which way to paddle, we got confused and went the opposite way and managed to get the boat wedged between rocks; when Gunnar panicked and tried rocking the boat between the rocks to free it we heard the first crack.  “Gunnar you fucking idiot!” Trond yelled but it was too late.  The boat was taking on water.  I futilely tried bailing it out with beer cans but we had to jump out and made our way to the shore ro watch it sink.  Gunnar was talking a mile a minute about salvaging it, and I paced back and forth saying “oh fuck. Oh shit.” to myself and Trond just stared, clinging to a single oar.  It took us nearly an hour to walk back to his house, not because it was far but because we did not want to get there and we were soaked and miserable.  I had lost a shoe in the lake and cut my foot on a sharp pebble.  I didn’t see much of Trond the rest of the summer.  We were not very close to begin with and the only thing we really had in common was Depeche Mode and the boat scheme, and every time I saw him I was overcome with disgust and guilt.  That was now the same feeling I had when I opened my web browser to track what was going on with the Duke and Northwestern football game that I could not see or write about.  Duke was winning by 21 points already, and I had no idea what that meant but it probably was not very good.  One of the players for Duke was named “Jake Bobo.”  

I tried watching one of the other games that was on but frankly it was indecipherable and meaningless.  Every time I thought I had figured out what was going on they would call some sort of penalty and undo it. It was maddening and I understood why everyone was drunk all of the time.  I thought about getting drunk but I had to go to a children’s birthday party later on and glower at all of the adults.   I explained all of this to my editor and he said he would “punch it up.”  I could not imagine anything worse.

NORTHWESTERN VS OHIO

The Wildcats have a chance to get things right again against another struggling team when Ohio comes to town.  The Bobcats are winless this season, including a close loss to FCS Duqesne.  This is Ohio’s fist season after Frank Solich retired and led the team to respectability, including a victory in the Potato Bowl.  Solich left as the winningest coach in MAC history after getting run out of Nebraska so they could hire various charlatans and maniacs.

The biggest question for Northwestern is who will play at quarterback after the Wildcats went through three last week and whether another game against a lackluster opponent will allow the defense to cohere after a strong performance against Indiana State did not carry over to the Duke until the second half during Northwestern’s comeback.  A loss here would be devastating.

Northwestern will have to get right quickly before beginning Big Ten play with upcoming games against Rutgers and Nebraska.  Nebraska has become a laughingstock, and the ‘Cats have never lost to Rutgers even as that program has improved under Rutgers savior Greg Schiano.  What is on the line is far more important than berths in bowl games or Big Ten Championship games, but the ability to laugh at Nebraska and Rutgers, the most important prize in Northwestern football other than the Hat Trophy. 

Who Knows

Many people attempting to tune into Northwestern football last Saturday had the experience of watching Mack Brown make the exact face of an alderman who has returned home to see that the FBI is ransacking his office for documents and then within seconds the broadcast switched to show Northwestern lining up to block an extra point already down 6-0 after 13 seconds, and the game never really improved over that. 

 

This is how I believe many Chicago Alderman have looked when the FBI 

discovered several clearly marked folders saying "Meat Crimes"

 

With the exception of last year's unexpected and inspired buttkicking of a pandemic-discombobulated Maryland team, it is not uncommon for Northwestern to stumble around the opening portion of its season, at some point desperately fending for life while down to a school that has just started playing a football again after some tough-looking guys showed up on campus one day in a van.  This is a suspect tactic in most years; in a year when the Wildcats had to start against a mysterious Michigan State team full of dynamic new players, it was disastrous.  By the fourth quarter, virtually no hope for a victory remained and with I continued to watch only because Northwestern football is on television and because I needed to do some important scouting of Northwestern's quarterback even though my knowledge of quarterback technique involves using up to three passing plays in the version of the NCAA football game with Larry Fitzgerald on the cover.  All that was left was to grimly wait for the most brutal consequence of a loss to the Spartans: Magic Johnson enthusiastically tweeting out the exact number of yards that Kenny Walker had run against the Wildcats.

 

One way to react to the loss is to panic.  Mike Hankwitz, the wizened defensive coordinator, has retired and been replaced by Jim O'Neil fresh from helming fairly bad NFL defenses, and if you really wanted to savor and lean into a narrative of collapse and ruin you could say that Hankwitz had been propping up the program while Fitzgerald served as the enormous figurehead and now Northwestern is going to go back into the days where they lost every game 49-3 and the students will have to purchase earth-moving equipment to throw the goalposts into the lake in the rare event that they eke out a win against Western Illinois and on top of all that several smart-alecks on the internet may go so low as point out that Northwestern is no longer geographically in the Northwestern portion of the country.

 

On the other hand, it is possible to take comfort in the fact that Northwestern remains a confounding and impossible program capable of the highest highs and lowest lows in the same season.  Maybe the defensive performance will remain at the wretched level we saw Saturday or maybe it will improve; maybe the offense will figure out how to get an effective running game going or maybe they will be forced to operate in the Tecmo Super Bowl offense when the computer decides to start cheating by making its players several times faster than yours and the only play that works in the playoffs is trying to eke out a few lumbering yards on Mike Tomczak scrambles except for the few times he is maybe able to dink it over to the tight end before he is instantly tackled. 

 

To be honest I have a hard time writing about reacting to these wins and losses because frankly I am not football person, I am not grinding tape or crunching numbers or speaking to anyone even tangentially associated with Northwestern football and so when I analyze Northwestern football on my Northwestern football blog week after week it appears the best I can come up with is fuck if I know.  What we are trying to do here (using the royal we here because imagine that this blog was actually a functioning organization and there were people here scurrying around a busy press room to get me a poorly photoshopped picture of Pat Fitzgerald turning into a werewolf that can be hastily crammed with a caption that is comically small while I'm barking on my phone to get quotes about a swashbucklingly corrupt nineteenth-century Chicago aldermen who died because his mustache got caught in an industrial apparatus) is not to try to figure out why or how Northwestern can win a game to determine how funny each result is and also to make fun of P.J. Fleck's Coaching Acronyms.

 

Northwestern's next game is against Indiana State, which will serve as an important test case to see if Northwestern can beat Indiana State.  Anyone looking to panic will find what they are looking for in this game; there is no amount of points that Northwestern can score against the Sycamores that can convince the skeptics that the Michigan State game is a fluke and anything less than a completely dominant performance can effectively augur doom and gloom.  Games against FCS opponents offer little more than a cheap win or the very amusing and satisfying upset for everyone else if a power conference team loses at home and then has to cut a large novelty check to the opponent and one can imagine a loss here would finally force Fitzgerald to tearfully admit that he is a "Rece Davis."

 

It is difficult to get too high or low for Northwestern.  While many of the people reading this have been lucky enough to support the Wildcats in their Golden Age of Decency and the years of crushing futility are now decades past, they still, I believe, maintain a hold on the program.  And leaving the 1970s and 1980s behind, the expectations for Northwestern football are still fairly modest: have a winning season, go to a bowl, and irritate the hell out of the Big Ten West.  While losing individual games can be a bummer, it is still kind of funny imagining a fuming a Northwestern fan storming out of the room after watching a desultory loss to, say, Minnesota and then angrily explaining to someone who doesn't watch football that "they're going to the Music City Bowl" when "I wanted them to go to the Outback Bowl." 

 

THE RETURNS

 

I am not really a pro wrestling guy-- even though I enjoy the concept of wrestlers getting unexpectedly betrayed then bonked on the noggin or how a wrestler will startle an opponent by appearing with the full fanfare of a theme song while everyone in the ring just stands there in a slack-jawed summerstock reverie while the music finishes up or even how much fun it is to imagine a professional wrestler who is just podcast personality Marc Maron who says things like "oh we're hitting each other with chairs now? really?" I don't really follow it or know who anyone is who is not a withered hot dog man who fought against Mr. T. or a member of the 1985 Chicago Bears.  But I did enjoy the video of the wrestler walking into the United Center and having people lose their shit for several minutes because I appreciate that a spectacle of athletic violence where people leap off of cages and occasionally slice their own faces open for dramatic effect is at heart a sentimental business.

 

This weekend Kris Bryant returned to Wrigley Field.  He is the first of the World Series players traded at the deadline to return to the park (Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber returned earlier this year after being let go last offseason).  A tearful Bryant got a rapturous ovation, a sentimental video, a piece of the scoreboard, a 2016 banner, and a photo with the team owner who ostensibly is the reason Bryant is no longer on the team.  The fact that Bryant is not a creaky retiring player but is in fact in his prime and an impending free agent that the Cubs traded only because they do not want to pay him what he and his agent think he is worth made this whole thing a little confusing.  The only more cynical tribute I can think of is the Bulls welcoming Luol Deng with a warm video after nearly killing him with an unnecessary spinal tap.

 

Regardless of the circumstances, I always eat up these videos and tributes to players coming back because I am a sentimental idiot.  It is always heartening to see players return to where circumstances-- usually a draft that consigned a player to years toiling for a crappy team-- allowed them to flourish and grow up and connect to fans.  Bryant and the other traded Cubs will eventually form bonds with other fanbases but right now they are just hired guns here to help get a team over the hump.  No one has felt this more acutely than Javy Báez, who has found that Mets fans are less accommodating of his tendency to swing at pitches that are currently being thrown at Yankee Stadium and reckless attempts at derring do on the basepaths because he did not help them win their team's first World Series in 108 years.  Báez and his teammates got involved in one of baseball's funniest controversies this season when he admitted that he was making a thumbs down gestures at the fans to boo them because he could not go to their places of business and heckle them, causing them so much distress that they run out of work and lose their pinky toe to a street cleaning machine.

 

The Mets immediately issued a press release claiming that 

Javy had been "very unfair to Mets fans with the thumbs" and that 

they are "looking into it very strongly."

 

It was impossible to imagine that the Cubs could do anything after the trades this season other than roll around and die in an undignified manner, but they somehow have been staggering through because of the improbable play of three 30-year-olds who have never had meaningful playing time in the majors and now are guys that Cubs fans may remember in ten years.  Patrick Wisdom has been bashing home runs since he came up in May and Rafael Ortega has delivered dramatic, game-winning hits.  But no Cub has more quickly endeared himself to fans than Frank Schwindel.  Schwindel, called up as part of the baffling array of players conjured seemingly from thin air on July 31, has been hitting the ball at an impossible, Roy Hobbsian pace.  

 

Schwindel has the unassuming look of a guy in suspenders knocking down cans of corn from the top shelf with a wooden pole.  He doesn't sound like a real ballplayer in 2021, but Frank Schwindel sounds like a name you would use if you were writing a lightly fictionalized version of the 1919 Black Sox and needed a name for a minor character who wasn't on the take and keeps trying to rally the team with dopey motivational speeches after they continue to lose World Series games with a series of spectacular errors. Schwindel was selected in the 18th round of the 2013 draft by Kansas City.  After five years in the minors, he managed to cling onto the major league roster for a few weeks before getting sent down and bouncing through a couple more organizations.  He played a bit for Oakland this year before they released him.  The Cubs did not so much promote Schwindel as unleash him.  He has hit .361/.414/.684 as a Cub with ten home runs in only 145 plate appearances and after hitting a home run is often found in the dugout soaking it up and making endearingly goofy facial expressions to the camera.

 

 

The central question when it comes to a player like Schwindel is whether this is sustainable.  Of course it is not.  It is unlikely that a 29-year-old journeyman minor leaguer is all of a sudden a version of Miguel Cabrera you would get if a video game did not have the rights to his likeness.  Every year, guys we have never heard of go on tears for a month or two at a time before coming back down to Earth; we've even seen almost the exact version of this in Chicago this year with Yermin Mercedes who terrorized opposing pitchers as The Yerminator before getting into a profoundly stupid controversy with Tony LaRussa  over Baseball Decency and then watching his OPS lower itself into a vat of molten steel.  

 

But the question I have is who cares?  I'm not the general manager of the Chicago Cubs so I don't have to worry about who their first baseman will be next year.  I'm not popping into a ballgame with the green visor of baseball statistics to mutter something about small sample size and regression to the mean with a set of numbers developed to help people win fantasy baseball leagues and general managers avoid spending too much money on free agents. I am not concerned if Schwindel follows the path of Cubs All-Star Brian LaHair and ends up playing overseas next year.  Every single one of his at-bats has counted.  He had a stretch where he single-handedly won a bunch of games with home runs, grand slams, and the first time I have ever seen a slide into first base work.  He is a former minor leaguer on a team that has given up as profoundly as any team has in the twenty-first century and he is going out there and exuding magic so that the Cubs can make an otherwise depressing series against a Pirates team that seems like it is actively trying to lose to blatantly that it requires an investigation fun, and he has made himself from a player toiling fruitlessly in the minors for years into a household name in Chicago however briefly.  I have seen multiple people wearing Frank Schwindel replica jerseys.  I am very sorry that I referred to him when he first came up as "Frank Schalmiel."

 

The central condition about baseball is that there is so much of it.  It is almost absurd how much baseball there is.  They play nearly twice as many games as the next major pro sport in this country and they are on every day and anyone who just casually flips on a game every now and then immediately gets to know the players whether they are formerly anonymous journeymen or superstars.  It is unlikely that Schwindel or Wisdom or Ortega get the type of ovation we just saw for Bryant at Wrigley Field.  But they play an important role even if their job is ostensibly just being there and not costing the owners a lot of money as they try to unearth the next Bryants and Rizzos and Báezes.  I am not sure how much I will remember this brief late Summer of Schwindel, but there he is every day, for real.

Mergers and Acquisitions

The consolidation of college football's most powerful teams into a superconference at this point seems inevitable. Once the college football powers that be had four playoff teams, the question became why they did not have more. Once the committee established that there is nothing a non-Power Five team could do to actually enter the playoff short of entering Bryant-Denny Stadium in the middle of an otherwise desultory Alabama win and challenging the Tide right then and there and then beating them handily, and once it became evident that the SEC was the only conference that mattered save for a smattering of other teams, then we would eventually reach a point where it seems like the sport is headed for a superconference that picks out the powerhouse teams and makes an entire season of the playoff while the remainders bludgeon each other in increasing obscurity and it is not clear to me if this is even bad.

If there is one thing I can appreciate about the College Football Playoff is that they
invest the proceedings to determine whether Ohio State goes to the playoff or the
Fiesta Bowl with the grim aesthetic seriousness of inventing Yugoslavia from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire

The fact of the matter is that the nebulous world of college football--the major conferences, the powerful schools, the television networks, and the NCAA sort of stumbling alongside them as a deputy emerging from a bathroom with a trail of toilet paper stuck to its shoe to ask players how they managed to afford those pants-- is going all in on a model that prizes the national championship picture over all else and represents a stunning misunderstanding of the sport. They understand that this championship focus is the surest way to bring in advertising dollars and cable carriage fees and sponsorships and even more money trickling to players for top schools in their NIL deals. It is the obvious thing to do by the rules that govern the operation of all sports and entertainment enterprises as vehicles for making money for grasping middlemen who don't have to get tackled by 365 pound nose tackles, but a myopic version of the sport that demonstrates a lack of understanding that the chase for the championship for most fans is a silly and irrelevant sideshow compared to watching their own teams slop around for twelve stupid games that mean nothing except everything to the people there.

What the college football establishment is doing is attempting to build a delicate floating island resort for top teams that can compete for championships over the awful, roiling ocean of football chaos. There are horrible things down there-- triple options, overtimes, toppled goalposts, Ryan Field filled with opposing fans on a gray November Saturday where teams combine for 17 total points and a sinkhole claims the special teams coach. But, for most fans, that cauldron of 11AM kickoffs in half-empty stadiums between godforsaken teams vying for a spot in the Pinstripe Bowl is the experience of the sport and will be until the United States finally makes college football illegal.

With Texas and Oklahoma set to join the SEC, there are few other teams left out of that conference that have any playoff resonance. There is Clemson, of course, and then Florida State and maybe Miami, there is a rusted Notre Dame still held aloft by enough load-bearing red-faced midwestern uncles, and maybe the desiccated husk of USC if they want to consider the west coast television markets. And then there is the big one, Ohio State, currently idling in a Big Ten with no actual challengers after rendering its rival Michigan into a pitiable program that mainly excels at sending strongly-worded letters. The Big Ten, ACC, and PAC 12 are attempting to fight off the SEC’s power grab by forming a hilariously gossamer alliance in a stunning exhibition of cunning and skullduggery in torchlit zoom sessions where they all banded together and vowed that they would hold a vague press conference.  Should the SEC or whatever name the superconference ends up going by attempt to gobble up their remaining glamor teams the way it has just done to the Big 12, they will come together in an attempt to salvage their piece of the pie by furiously trying to shovel each other into the superconference’s maw until they are all devoured, picked clean, and left as rotting piles of Marylands and Washington States.

******

Whatever shape that college football consolidation takes, it is obvious that there is probably no room for Northwestern. Northwestern managed to grimly hold on to its spot in the Big Ten long enough to get onto the cable television gravy train and become a genuinely annoying enough presence in the conference to repeatedly gatecrash the Championship Game, but even so it is very hard to imagine the Wildcats qualifying for the Playoff or contending for a national championship against the elite programs bursting with NFL players. The program offers little to the sport as an entertainment enterprise; outside of the smattering of Northwestern fans, supporters of the week’s opponent, and gamblers so degenerate that they are acquiring VHS copies of Wild & Crazy Kids to bet on, it is impossible to imagine anyone tuning into a Northwestern game so they can watch some fundamentally sound linebacking and Pat Fitzgerald get an experimental plastic surgery to he could have one of those lizard frills installed on his neck that he can flare up to intimidate a referee who has called a horsehit pass interference penalty.

 

Artist's rendition

 

Northwestern and the vast majority of other teams outside the top echelon of the sport operate in a nebulous shadow world of football that orbits around the playoff and championship picture. This is fine because the entire process of choosing the playoff teams and crowning a champion exists as the sports world’s most convoluted, ludicrous, and stupid procedure, one that revolves around a cabal of unaccountable bureaucrats twisting themselves into agonizing contortions to get the teams that will get the best television ratings into the playoff while sanctimoniously pretending they are not doing that and instead are carefully weighing criteria such as Game Control and Body Clocks and whether or not some alumni chartered enough airplanes with a banners over an opponents’ game while everyone from conspiracy-laden maniacs frothing on message boards to the most serious men who have ever lived grimacing in a suit on ESPN all yell about it. From an outside perspective, this makes an entertaining and funny way to crown a champion, but if it affected the team I care about, I would get driven insane to the point of writing slightly longer blog posts.

 

Since Northwestern emerged from hibernation in 1995, it has been a fairly consistent pain in the ass for the Big Ten, starting the twenty-first century with Randy Walkers’ track meet squads that forced teams to chase a pesky, undersized quarterback all over the field for four quarters and evolving into the program’s apotheosis under Pat Fitzgerald as a team of anthropomorphic neck rolls who turn every game into the aesthetic equivalent of Borat tackling his nude producer in a hotel ballroom for three and half hours.

 

Is there a role for Northwestern in the picture of big time college football? Will the Big Ten, enamored with tradition, desperately attempt to stay together even as the money that has driven it to rapaciously expand onto the Eastern seaboard is now poised to pull it apart? There is a future where the Big Ten rallies and tries to form a rival superconference to the SEC. There is also a future where Ohio State and maybe a few of the biggest names get picked off, leaving a rump Big Ten desperately clinging to its berth in the Music City Bowl.

Either way, I don’t think it makes a difference. Everything about Northwestern football that matters is because in the larger scheme of college football, it doesn't matter. If the Big Ten manages to plod on, Northwestern will continue to play its grim Sisyphus football and occasionally ruin a promising season. And if college football consolidation forms that superconference and the Big Ten becomes a gentrified MAC, the Wildcats will still be able to perpetrate sloppy, drooling messes against Illinois in the cold November rain for a trophy shaped like Abraham Lincoln’s hat, which is all any of can really desire from this wretched sport.

 

2021 NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL PREVIEW

 

Of course Northwestern thrived in the grotesque football season that should not have existed. They played college football with a shocking indifference to the raging pandemic, and the swashbuckling monstrousness of the entire enterprise really put a damper on the funniest Big Ten season in years. It started with Scott Frost offering to wander the Earth to find a team willing to play Nebraska in college football with the bravado of a first guy to take a swing at Steven Seagal in a pool hall with similar results and ended with the Big Ten calling an ad hoc Constitutional Convention to allow Ohio State into the championship game and in between a traditional conference power got stomped into a fine powder by Indiana every week and the result of all this fuss and secret maneuvering was forcing America to watch more Northwestern football.

The Wildcats face a tall order trying to repeat this year. Peyton Ramsey is gone. Paddy Fisher is gone. Greg Newsome and Rashawn Slater went in the first round of the NFL draft. As I write this paragraph, Isaiah Bowser is bludgeoning Boise State in a UCF uniform and his successor Cam Porter will miss the season with an injury. They also have some returning building blocks including veteran linebacker Chris Bergen and young stars Brandon Joseph at safety and Peter Skoronski at tackle. The most important returning player will be Hunter Johnson, one of the quarterbacks during a rough 2019 who will get another shot this time in Mike Bajakian’s offense and who I am excited to see because “Hunter Johnson” should also be the name of a character Arnold plays in a 1994 movie where he is a postal inspector tracking dangerous packages in an investigation that constantly requires him to fire antitank weapons in a city center and then say to a horrified bystander “he didn’t use enough stamps.”

Inspectah Huntah Chonson is heeuh to stop da mail froo-awdt

 

For some reason the Big Ten has decided to open the season with conference play so instead of getting to ease into the season with an alarmingly sluggish game against a local dental college, they have to play on a Friday night against Michigan State. A miserable Spartans team cost Northwestern their only loss of the regular season because Rocky Lombardi turned into a midwestern Michael Vick.  This will be a tough test for a team that traditionally eases into the season before powering up in October before they get FCS Indiana State, quasi rival and fellow member of the ACC/Big Ten/Pac 12 Unbreakable Blood Pact Duke, and Ohio before getting to play a Nebraska team that feels like it will have to cancel a game because Scott Frost has decided that he needs to drive the bus with purpose and a manful chin jut before confidently swerving off the highway and motoring directly to the Yukon.     

 

There is still a pandemic by the way and they probably should not be playing football but we’re at a point where people are either vaccinated and confused about whether they should be doing anything anymore or unvaccinated because they can’t get a shot or are hesitant because of nonsense conjured on social media or are one of those maniacs mainlining horse pharmaceuticals and no government entity will ever shut down anything ever again even if there is a variant that turns us into werewolves that cough a lot so I suppose the central question from a Northwestern football perspective is whether college football will remain reckless enough to feign a normal season or if things will get dysfunctional and stupid enough to allow Northwestern to once again win the Big Ten West. They might as well, while there’s still a Big Ten West to win.