On "On American Soil"

The times you see someone using the phrase “on American soil” in 2023 are in a Congressional hearing where a representative named something like Ladd Hacklin gets incredibly angry about children’s toys and after Northwestern’s big win over UTEP last Saturday. It is true that Northwestern had not recorded a win since last year’s opener against Nebraska in Dublin. It is also true that the Wildcats had not secured a victory within the de jure sovereign territory of the United States of America since October 16, 2021, a 21-7 victory of Rutgers. That distinction is meaningless in college football but it is important to point it out because winning a weird one-off Week 0 game overseas against Coach Scott Vomit and then getting absolutely roasted by every other team is very funny. It is also disingenuous to count the nearly 700 days between Northwestern wins “On American Soil” because they were only able to play games on 20 of those days, although to be honest I prefer not to think about what Northwestern Football is up to off the field.

Another milestone from that game is that is the last time fans were able to watch Northwestern football with subsidized beer

The notable thing about this game is that Northwestern looked so awful and discombobulated at Rutgers that UTEP, a team that managed five wins last year in Conference USA, emerged as a slight betting favorite on the road. And for the first half, it looked like that was the right call. The Miners’ opening drive looked like a pretty good facsimile of how Rutgers gradually ran over Northwestern in a way reminiscent of the gag in Austin Powers where a very slow-moving bulldozer runs over a guy who screams frozen in terror for several minutes. The game was tied at the half only because UTEP missed a field goal in the waning seconds. But then, in the second half, the defense starting getting stops and turnovers, the run game got going, and Mike Bajakian began feeling himself and rotating through quarterbacks. The result was a strangely dominating Northwestern win in front of 55 people.

It has been mildly fascinating to see how the Big Ten Network would deal with the ugliness surrounding Northwestern's football program. I have been watching the interviews with David Braun to see if he will ever say something interesting or even to identify anything about him beyond existing as NCAA Create-A-Coach Young 2. The interviewer alluded to the hazing scandal but never broached it, mastering the type of subtle courtly etiquette one would expect from the retainers surrounding the Sun King Louis XIV and the Big Ten Network. I do not expect a sideline reporter to ask Braun “how do you feel Northwestern can have success without organized dry humping rituals” but the interviewer never mentioned it other than referencing a difficult offseason. After the game, an elated Braun and the team celebrated. Braun got to frame it as the team triumphing over adversity. What was the adversity? Uh, gotta go.

Head Coach David Braun remains a mysterious Vest Cipher.

A convincing win over UTEP does not necessarily mean that Northwestern is now good. Even in 2021, the Wildcats managed a big win over Ohio as well as over FCS Indiana State and then went on to win the famous Victory Over Rutgers in the United States that Wildcat fans had clung to and cherished lo those 693 days. But the win managed to show that Northwestern was still up to the standards of a struggling Big Ten team, and had, at least for one season, managed to stave off a 1980s-style football apocalypse season where they would just get effortlessly clobbered by all comers until they lose 34 consecutive games and then throw the goal posts into Lake Michigan. 

It is not surprising that Northwestern football has faded from the news the second that the college football season began actually playing games and can now function as a team that essentially no one cares about and that television broadcasters will have to spend 30 seconds awkwardly discussing why Pat Fitzgerald is not in his normal Ozymandian position on the Wildcat sidelines in case there is an as-yet discovered human being who is watching a Northwestern football game but is not aware of the hazing scandal. That will likely change when the lawsuits begin and more ugly news leaks out, but for now Northwestern can remain tucked safely and anonymously into Big Ten Network regional action playing in front of the smallest Big Ten crowds imaginable. The announced attendance for Saturday’s game was less than 15,000 people, a miniscule crowd even for an early September non-conference game at Northwestern, and one that was padded by hundreds of local high school band members.

The rest of college football media has turned away from Northwestern and to topics that actually affect the football part of college football-- laughing at Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney eating shit in early-season games or breathlessly reporting on everything that Deion Sanders does and says. The Deion controversy du jour involves Colorado State coach Jay Norvell attacking him for wearing sunglasses indoors, which is a serious charge; the documentary film They Live taught me that the only answer to another person demanding you put on or remove sunglasses is to suplex them into a parking lot dumpster for seven minutes. Woe be to the program that levels the ultimate football insult at Sanders: calling his players “rece davises.”

While Deion Sanders does not seem like a person I would personally want in charge of anything I cared about, the one thing I can't knock him for is being a flamboyant weirdo.  Above, please take a look at the greatest sports manager in the world, the NPB's Tsuyoshi Shinjo who goes by the nickname BIGBOSS, designs his own team's weird uniforms, and is shown here entering the stadium on opening day on a hovercraft.  Now try to imagine what would happen if a Major League manager  tipped his hat too extravagantly.

DUKED ONCE AGAIN

Saturday, Northwestern will take on apparently perennial non-conference bete-noir Duke. Unfortunately, the programs seem to be going in opposite directions. Duke won nine games last year and opened this season with a home win over ninth-ranked Clemson in what was by all accounts a ridiculous game where Dabo Swinney kept putting on the ACME bat suit and falling off of cliffs. Swinney is, even in the unhinged world of college football coaches who are all professional maniacs, a particularly ridiculous person who combines the berserk intensity of a football guy with the desperately oily flop sweat of a traveling nineteenth-century revival preacher. He looks he goes from city to city on one of those hand pump rail cars. It is always funny when his team, which is one of the very few to regularly travel in the juggernaut echelons of college football, gets completely smoked, but Duke's victory augurs poorly for the Wildcats attempting to prove they can actually be competitive.

Duke comes into the game ranked #21 in the country. They have an NFL prospect quarterback and a stingy defense. The Wildcats have their work cut out for them. One of the most dangerous developments from last week was having a Mike Bajakian offensive adjustment actually work, when he went deep into his workshop and discovered that he could use a running quarterback to run. Years of experience shows that it is nothing short of an emergency when Bajakian decides to get creative and decides to do a double jet sweep that leads to a 45 yard loss or some sort of wide receiver pass play that accidentally opens a portal to another dimension and looses an ancient, primordial evil upon the world that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons.

The defense, unable to get a stop against a Rutgers team slowly moving across the field like liquid spreading through a paper towel, fared better against UTEP.  David Braun is still calling the defense while also functioning as head coach, which has raised some other questions about the coaching staff.  Most pressing is where Assistant to the Head Coach Skip Holtz is during games.  Is he there physically or is he calling in from Birmingham Stallions Headquarters with one eye on the game and the other devouring game tape against the Memphis Showboats while moving players around on a giant map of the football field while using those little tank-pushing sticks?

Northwestern may be using a heavily modded version of NCAA 2004 in order to get Skip's advice

A Northwestern win under these circumstances seems unlikely. But who would know? The game has been taken off normal television and sequestered to the ACC Network, a mysterious channel that can only be accessed in this area by making a yellow mark in a certain park and then waiting to exchange precious metals with an underground cable operator who will come to your home and either install the ACC Network or perform some sort of devious bait-and-switch and leave you stuck with the PAC 12 Network, unable to watch Wake Forest or Louisville and left without redress to the authorities. Presumably there are some people in Chicagoland who will rig up giant antennas or call up a streaming service that instantly infects your computer with something even worse than a Northwetern-Duke game or people who are able to watch the game but only by constantly driving around the city in a van, and they will be rewarded with access to a game where the home team is favored by nearly twenty points.

Braun and Northwestern can be glad that they can retreat to the comfort of a win against a program from a smaller conference and getting televised on a network that no one has.  But should they somehow manage to pull of an enormous upset on the road, they may once again run into an opponent that the entire university and its athletic program cannot ever handle which is increased attention.