There was a time when watching/fast forwarding through Sunday’s game when it looked like Rutgers wouldn’t punt. Normally a person who has ascended to the level of derangement where they are watching a Northwestern/Rutgers game could expect punting– good punting, bad punting, exotic and perverse levels of punting heretofore unseen. The majority of the game could be spent watching Greg Schiano and Pat Fitzgerald standing on the sidelines performing some anime guy-style screaming and shaking as they order their punt teams onto the field for the fourteenth consecutive series because some fool has asked their quarterback to pass and they instead are grievously injuring the dial-a-down crew. But on Sunday, Northwestern’s defense allowed an unending series of backbreaking third- and fourth-down conversions over and over again and it looked like the Rutgers punter would stay safely ensconced in his Punting Chalet feasting on rare meat and listening to the growling type of metal music not needing to be unleashed and ready to don his cape and run onto the field under the roar of the punt-mad Rutgers crowd. Finally, with about two minutes to go in the second half, Northwestern got a stop and Schiano summoned his punter. The game was already functionally over.
Greg Schiano calls for a punt on 4th and 6
I am uncertain of which vat of chemicals a television executive fell in before putting a Northwestern/Rutgers game on national television in a time slot with few other options. This decision must have expanded the game beyond its usual viewership of beleaguered Rutgers and Northwestern fans and several dozen degenerates and weirdos who would usually watch this unfold on a juddering Big Ten Network feed with Matt Millen oscillating in and out of the broadcast like he is the Fugitive Ben Richards revealing the stunning truth about Captain Freedom. I assume at least a few rubberneckers tuned in to see how Northwestern football would look after its time in The News. The Wildcats appeared to continue where they left off from the death throes of the Pat Fitzgerald era getting scraped off the field after being flattened by a not particularly good Big Ten team.
Northwestern played like anyone with a passing knowledge about college football could have guessed. I am no college football expert but if you asked me how well do you think a team that won four total games over the last two seasons and is coached by a guy who has never done it before because the forever head coach was fired in the middle of a grotesque hazing scandal leaving players to deal with the national media paying attention to the program for the first time since Darnell Autry was getting Heisman votes I would guess they would not look particularly sharp out there, on the ol’ ballfield. The future of Northwestern football looks bleak. They are betting underdogs to UTEP at home.
The last few awful seasons and the program’s grim-looking future have seemed to instantaneously erase the fact that Northwestern was actually pretty ok at football for about 25 years. Few people seemed aware that the Wildcats were not the same team that lost 34 consecutive games in the early 1980s even as the team started regularly going to and even sometimes winning bowl games, though that was helped by the addition of approximately 98 bowl games sponsored by military contractors, corn thresher companies, and those mobile games that advertise on television by paying Arnold Schwarzenegger an obscene amount of money to run around for ten seconds screaming “YOU’BVE GODT TO FIUH DA LASUH NOOOOOWWWWW” and then they cut to the game footage and it’s like a blurry circle shooting dots at various ASCII symbols. It took about three years of losing to make it seem like Northwestern has gone 4-1,274 since 1983.
With 12 consecutive losses dating back to last season, we're about 35% away from The Record, which I'm keeping track of with the Lake-O-Meter.
The fallout from the scandal and the administration’s bumbling response to it and the increasing number of odious reports repeatedly surfacing from other athletic programs do not signal a particularly encouraging future for Northwestern football. The team is coached by group of hapless lame ducks some of whom already have other jobs in football, and it seems likely that the offseason will see an exodus of players through the transfer portal and difficulty convincing recruits to play football at Shrek Torment University.
But the largest threat to Northwestern football as a going concern comes from the summer’s ridiculous realignment bonanza that has moved conferences into a frenzy of backstabbing, greed, and ruthlessness that somehow seems rapacious even for a sport based entirely on the idea of shameless grasping. Right now, the conferences seem content to gobble each other in an orgy of additions that make no sense except as shiny trophies to display to a television executive. At some point, though, I have to imagine that the schools will start to wonder why they earn the same amount (or, in the case of the new erstwhile PAC 12 members, less) as Northwestern, a team that has no fans, no television audience, no outside interest beyond the very small pool of alumni that care about football, and a stadium that boasts the Big Ten's dirtiest tarp. Northwestern, along with its AV Club peers at the ass end of power conferences, would always be faced with this reality, but the fact that the program has completely immolated itself at this very moment is not likely to help Northwestern remain within the top echelons of college football as throttling fodder for the Big Ten.
Maybe I am wrong and the team will upset a Big Ten team or two this season. Maybe the administration will suddenly become capable of managing an athletic department and will hire an incredible coach or maybe David Braun is somehow that person and Northwestern can go from psychologically scarring its football players to merely ravaging them with vague “lower-body injuries” like a normal football team. Maybe the Big Ten in its maximalist imperial phase just sort of likes having the Wildcats around. Maybe Northwestern doesn’t really need to be in a superconference or in top division football at all. But now that the conferences have gleefully ripped of the very thin fig leaf of tradition that they pretended to care about when it was more lucrative to sell to fans than a spot on a streaming service called something like ESPN EDGE that is available only at the Antarctic McMurdo research station, it seems to me that all of this realignment is not working with Northwestern football in mind.
The numbers don't lie and they spell disaster for Northwestern in one of the Superconferences
GO FOR IT AND DIE
The Chicago Cubs spent most of the first half of the season looking like the Cubs of the last couple years: a flailing, mediocre outfit that would fall out of contention at the all-star break and then immediately trade any player vaguely worth anything so they can spend the rest of the season filling the team with a bunch of minor league oafs to waste everyone’s time for a couple of months while I checked minor league box scores. To complicate things further, the Cubs did not only have their usual assortment of bargain-basement relief pitchers that had managed to pitch competently enough to exchange for another team’s fourteenth-best pitching prospect, they had Cody Bellinger, a baseball superstar who had spent the past couple years hitting like a post trade deadline Cub and then inexplicably resurrected his career in Chicago to become the most valuable trade chip on the market. And then the Cubs won a few games in a row and the front office decided they were sick of watching a parade of Ildemaros Vargas and Johneshwies Fargas and wanted to try to make one of the now 55 available playoff spots and they’ve saved the summer.
The Cubs’ decision to hold onto Bellinger, trade for Jeimer Candelario, and try to cling to a Wild Card spot are in the long run likely bad decisions. The Cubs will not win the World Series this year. Assuming they actually manage to secure a playoff berth, they will likely get immediately escorted from the tournament like pajama-clad children found sneaking downstairs into their parents’ dinner party. On the other hand, the baseball playoffs are the stupidest system in pro sports where some mediocre horse shit team like the 2023 Cubs can inexplicably win multiple playoff rounds. And, more importantly, the Cubs have decided to actually play games that count into September; even if maybe the small chance of stumbling into a superprospect from yet another teardown would probably be worth sacrificing a doomed wild card campaign, it is far more fun in the short term to stare at Milwaukee's box scores every night and white knuckle through Jameon Taillon starts than to go to the ballpark hoping to see the next Frank Schwindel.
The Cubs are not a juggernaut this year. Their rotation outside of Justin Steele consists of Kyle Hendricks, who looks like Eddie Harris from Major League’s accountant, a bespectacled rookie lefty who resembles a Stanley Kubrick character who is seconds away from staring into the camera from an unsettling angle, and a variety of untested young players and washed-up veterans. Every day, David Ross keeps trotting out delightfully miniature slap hitter Nick Madrigal at third base who has to take these delicate little steps like a friction car revving up in order to successfully throw a baseball to first. The team is relying on Mike Tauchman, a 32-year-old fifth outfielder who last played KBO, as its leadoff hitter.
The Cubs somehow unearthed a Third Reushcel Brother
But somehow, the Cubs keep winning. The ballpark is humming. The former players from good teams are showing up. I was at a game this week where the Cubs came back multiple times for a delightful, thrilling win, including a rally that happened right after Carlos Zambrano commanded them to get some runs after singing the seventh-inning stretch; I assume the Cubs immediately started mashing dingers because they were terrified that Zambrano would otherwise pummel all of them with bats.
The pro sports scene in Chicago is otherwise a bleak wasteland. The White Sox have gone from a promising contender filled with exciting young players to a dysfunctional junk yard fire where the season highlights involve Tim Anderson falling down like Von Kaiser from Mike Tyson's Punch Out! after getting smacked in the face and somehow losing a game on a walk-off balk. The Chicago Sky, which had saved the previous two summers, lost all but one of their key championship players and saw head coach/GM James Wade leave the team for an NBA assistant coaching job in the middle of the season and now the team is, like all other Chicago teams, flailing to make the last playoff spot. The Bulls remain a calcified mediocrity that I am deluded enough to think will actually be pretty decent next season but that probably means maybe getting the last playoff spot if enough Eastern conference starters get hurt. I am not emotionally prepared to talk about the Chicago Bears, which are due for a psychologically devastating loss to Jordan Love tomorrow after finally seeing Aaron Rodgers use the powers of his mind to telekinetically teleport out of the NFC North.
The bitterly divisive Chicago baseball scene means that the Cubs' mini-resurgence cannot be embraced by the whole city. Instead, the baseball rivalry means that city's drunkest doofuses can only understand the sport by getting into embarrassing asscrack fights in the bleachers of both parks. But for those of us who do enjoy the Cubs, it's at least a salve from our floundering pro sports scene-- until they are somehow once again knocked out of playoff contention by the Florida Marlins.
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