Heartbreak At The Lake

One of my favorite Northwestern football relics is a poster from the 2005 season that says “Not Afraid to Work Overtime” and shows various Northwestern football players in a construction worksite wielding inexplicably inappropriate tools– the only job I can think of that would require multiple chainsaws and toilet plungers is probably Clue Murderer. The year before they won three out of four overtime games. In 2017, Northwestern set a college football record with three consecutive overtime wins. This is a program that has historically thrived in overtime and sought it out as part of a deranged obsession with subjecting America to additional Northwestern football. But the Wildcats’ occult overtime obsession failed them Saturday night as they collapsed against Duke sometime around midnight as the wind whipped the waves into a frenzy.

 

The business of big time sports has warped and distorted schedules to fill every crevice of the cable television and streaming schedule, and college football has changed from a metronomically regular Saturday product into one where it is impossible to tell when a game is taking place and what network it is on. In most years, a Northwestern and Duke game could be quietly tucked away into 11:00 AM Regional Coverage away from the prying eyes of national media, but now for some reason it was on a Friday night on West Coast hours and on national television, where too many people for my liking were exposed to the grimy punt-and-interception-based football that belongs in the shadows of a rust-covered Ryan Field.

   

Northwestern may have turned over its staff, but they are still playing some Pat Fitzgerald-ass football out there. The defense looks fierce and whatever they are doing different on offense is indistinguishable from previous years' slopfests. It seems like there is some ancestral memory baked into certain football teams. On Sunday, we watched the heralded New Bears Offense revert to the same Bears garbage we have seen from the Litany of Bullshit Quarterbacks and the team had to win in the same grotesque special teams and defense configurations that it was grinding out with Jonathan Quinn out there.

 

  

The Apex of Bears Football

The offense had been shaky all game but fully collapsed in the second overtime.  With Cam Porter cutting swathes through Duke's defense, new offensive coordinator Zach Lujan decided to read from the cursed Bajakian Booke of Doom-ed Trick Plays and sent in a quarterback run on third-and-one that that went backwards for nine yards and basically ended the game.

This made it six consecutive losses against Duke in this quasi-rivalry series.  I don't know how other Northwestern fans feel about Duke other than noting it is another small private school that was historically bad at football and also makes the NCAA basketball tournament, but losing six games to any school is annoying.  Northwestern has not had the luxury of many heartbreaking losses in recent years-- they were so lousy the past few years and started last year from such a horrible place that it was mildly surprising they were able to field a team let alone rattle off eight wins-- but the last truly gutwrenching loss I can think of was to Duke in 2022.  The 'Cats won't have a chance for revenge anytime soon since the Blue Devils vanish from the schedule for the foreseeable future, but I don't think anyone minds taking a break from this series and meeting them again when college football coalesces into a single superconference for the biggest teams and relegates the Dukes, Northwesterns, Stanfords, and Vanderbilts of the world into their own sad conference where squads of rowdy ultras attack each other in pregame brawls wielding copies of US News and World Report. 

 

The loss also strikes a major blow to Northwestern's bowl hopes.  Northwestern's conference schedule, shorn of the bowling bumper comforts of the Big Ten West, is brutal and the 'Cats need every win they can get if they want to be playing in a mid-December bowl game that passively plays out on sports bar televisions at four in the afternoon.  The fact that the game came down to a question of whether a few of a Duke player's shin molecules had grazed the turf after a fumble that would have let Northwestern seal the win is also unfortunate.  But this is what happens in the post-replay sports world where a fumble that looks completely obvious to the fans, players, and officials at the time and has the recovering team doing the excited Fumble Recovery Jump Point goes to an off-site computer lab where it is zoomed and enhanced until the question moves from was this a fumble to what technically constitutes a "ball."  This type of fine-grained analysis is slow, annoying, and robs big game-swinging plays of their immediate excitement as everyone knows we will be staring at replays for five minutes while the referees pause to take the necessary psychadelics for their epistemological inquiries, but as irritating and detrimental and widely loathed as replay is in every sport that uses it I think we can all agree that it is a necessary and useful when the outcome favors Northwestern.

EASTERN PROMISES

Northwestern faces off against Eastern Illinois at another night game on The Lake. I have decided to call the temporary lakeside stadium The Lake, as in "Northwestern suffers devastating loss to Duke at The Lake" or "The Wildcats must defend The Lake from Eastern Illinois."  I also considered "on The Lake" but that is not literally true even though the site of the stadium is technically on a mound of garbage used to expand the amount of land jutting into Lake Michigan because "actually we are on what would have been Lake Michigan in the early 1960s" would be cumbersome to explain every time I say it.

 

David Braun will try to kick start his offense by making a change at quarterback, replacing Mike Wright with Jack Lausch. Lausch made several appearances last season as a change-of-pace running quarterback. You might think it reeks of panic to desperately change quarterbacks after two low-scoring games, but I prefer to see it as an opportunity for the coaching staff to confuse and beguile the opposition. You will often see a two quarterback system where one is a passing specialist and one is a running specialist like Northwestern in the Kolter-Siemian season, but imagine a system where Northwestern deploys a running quarterback and another running quarterback and defensive coordinators are forced to decide which is the true running quarterback and which one is the passing running quarterback as they flip through laminated play sheets in an increasingly frenzied reverie before losing their minds in the third quarter and then spending the rest of the game attempting to write extensive novels that are based entirely on acronyms. I would send this suggestion to Braun’s coaching staff but I don’t know if they are still using the Northwestern football email address Hashtag I Don’t Care.

 

One thing I do know about the quarterback change is that announcers are going to be very excited to call the game because Lausch was a standout baseball player, and announcers love when they can say that a person playing one sport is actually playing a different sport, what is referred to in the business as Greg Paulus Syndrome.  You can imagine a producer's eyes going wide the first time Lausch slides.  Lausch, for his part, is getting in on the action by telling reporters  "The best practice for the fourth quarter of a football game is hitting with two outs in the seventh inning with guys on base."

 

The Wildcats are heavily favored against their FCS opponent.  Northwestern blew out Eastern in their two previous meetings in 2011 and 2015, and this should be a final tuneup before having to face the dragons of the Enormous Ten.  Northwestern's defense has looked stout against two good FBS teams; the hope is that the quarterback shift does not look like a complete disaster.  These types of games have very little upside-- anything other than a very convincing win will feel bad and a loss represent the functional end of the season with the only solace that it is kind of funny when that happens.

CONFERENCE RE-RE-REALIGNMENT

This week, the PAC 12's remaining two members announced that they are bringing back the conference by poaching four members of the Mountain West.  Oregon State and Washington State filled out their schedules with Mountain West games as part of a loose association.  Now they repay that loyalty by stealing four schools, forcing the Mountain West to scramble and letting other conferences know that the PAC 12 is going to start trying to find at least two more members.  This, to me, seems like a rude betrayal by the two schools who immediately backstabbed a friendly quasi-conference.  It reminds me of when the Big Ten and ACC formed The Alliance against the SEC and then the Big Ten immediately forgot about it, raided the PAC 12 for four more schools, and left the ACC as an also-ran power conference with Clemson and Florida State attempting to sue their way out of it except they both kind of stink now.

 

A lot of the story about realignment has been about TV money and geography and tradition and how no one knows what conference any team plays in anymore but I think one thing that requires further elaboration is how all of these people ostensibly in charge of a university are all backstabbing each other.  I would like to read a long feature about how these schools are arranging these moves.  In my imagination, they are happening in torchlit antechambers and the Big Ten is announcing that UCLA has joined by firing a flaming arrow through the offices of the PAC 12 and the provost of Oregon State awakens to see that someone has dropped a poisonous asp into his office and it is writhing and hissing all over his folders full of accounting documents as a warning.

New Arizona State president Armand Jean du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu meets with Big 12 officials

If anyone wants to make a very expensive serial drama about conference realignment that somehow takes place in 17th century Venice and involves British character actors screaming "YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH THIS" at the cackling President of USC and his scheming athletic director dressed in his signature colorful robes, I would definitely watch it if it wasn't on one of the twelve streaming networks I don't pay for.

Any time I see how quickly and heedlessly these moves happens, I of course get a little nervous because it seems like Northwestern's time in one of the two most important football conferences despite being literally Northwestern football and struggling to fill its 12,000 seat stadium is limited.  But for now, Northwestern somehow remains in the epicenter of college football, playing at The Lake and hopefully crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers.

Potemkin Stadium

  

At some point they must have played a football game. But at Northwestern’s opener against Miami on Saturday, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the hastily-constructed pop-up stadium built on a soccer field. I have been skeptical about what seemed to be a desperate and hare-brained scheme that had Northwestern scrambling to find somewhere to play the majority of its home games despite the fact that they had been planning to tear down Ryan Field for two years and had been locked in legal combat with a lawn sign army the entire time. And yet, by all accounts, they seemed to have pulled it off. They played a football game there and the bleachers did not collapse, the turf didn’t roll up, and no gangs of bloodthirsty pirates besieged the stadium with cannon fire, boarded the stadium, and menaced David Braun with a cutlass.

The temporary stadium looked spectacular on television. The game kicked off on a picture perfect late summer afternoon with the sun shining, the lake shimmering, and the sky clear enough to see the skyline of Chicago, the city that I would like to remind you that Northwestern is the official Big Ten Team of. It is wild that it sits so close to the lake. Cameras showed boats cruising on by carrying Northwestern and Miami flags. The stadium is close enough to the water that it is possible for a team to literally take a boat to the stadium. I am not sure about the logistics of transporting nearly one hundred of the largest people that we can produce on a fleet of ships, but I think that would be a spectacular entrance, one that would only be matched by running out of a blow-up tunnel that features an annoyed-looking partially deflated panther and some smoke machines.

PJ Fleck learning that he doesn't play Northwestern this season and can't literally row into the stadium

The stadium looked so good that I immediately started to see calls for Northwestern to abandon the ridiculous $800 million sarcophagus that Pat Ryan is building to carry his name and permanently stay on the lake in a cozy little stadium. This would be a disaster. 

 

The fact is that Northwestern is not meant to play in a fun lakeside stadium any more than a brand new palace on the ashes of the old Ryan Field. The school already had its own ideal stadium: a dilapidated shithole. Northwestern is not somewhere fans should be able to go watch football and marvel at the views. It should be a half-filled pit where no one would ever want to set foot. 

Northwestern will never play Big Ten home games– I don’t know how small of a stadium you would have to build to stop Chicagoland’s tens of thousands of Big Ten alumni from flooding every single structure Northwestern could play in but it is certainly less than the 12,000 of the lakeside stadium’s capacity– so the stadium should remain a fortress dedicated to the misery of opposing fans. I don’t want to see people rooting for Wisconsin sitting in sun-kissed bleachers watching a parade of sailboats blooming like flowers on a glittering lake. They should instead be pelted with sleet and spend the entire third quarter waiting in line for a hot dog only to be told they are out of buns and be handed a loose frank in a paper cup. Ideally, Northwestern should play in a stadium that is rigged to explode at the end of every conference game.

OK FINE HERE'S FOOTBALL

 

Last week’s post highlighted the stark changes in Northwestern’s football team, but one thing stayed the same: the Wildcats won yet another punt-driven 13-6 slog marked by dominating defense. The result is very good; Miami is coming off an eleven-win MAC championship season, the game was only as close as it was because of an ill-timed goalline fumble, and Northwestern’s untested secondary largely held up and kept the RedHawks out of the endzone. A team like Miami would have likely defeated many recent vintages of Northwestern Wildcats in the type of game where Pat Fitzgerald would have immediately been loaded onto a barge after the game and sent to Door County after being mistaken as a live mascot for a cherry orchard. At the same time, it would be nice to see a brand new offense headed by a dynamic quarterback who is electric running in the open field manage an offensive opener more exciting than The Mick McCall Gambit.

If Northwestern can't break 20 points Mike Bajakian will have to file another lawsuit against Northwestern, this time for plagiarism

This week, Northwestern will face off against Duke with an absurd eight pm kickoff on a Friday night. This game will be on national cable television for the benefit of the most degenerate college football fans possible and football maniacs who are too cheap to shell out for Peacock to watch the Packers and Eagles play in a venue even more ridiculous than the lakeside stadium. This game will undoubtedly be a blow for Chicago’s restaurants and nightclubs as late night revelers stay home to watch these two teams try to secure a vital win that will make it easier to qualify for the Spirit Halloween Novelty Dracula Fang Bowl.

Duke and Northwestern have been playing an awful lot lately, and Duke has been running away with the series. They’ve beaten the ‘Cats five consecutive times. Despite the fact that these two schools historically operate in the same sad dregs of the power conferences, I don’t think that playing them every year has congealed this series into a rivalry. But I also know that I am sick of watching Northwestern lose to Duke in football. I would like to see the Wildcats get a decisive win and then start a new tradition where they make the opposing mascot walk the plank into the unforgiving waters of Lake Michigan.

 

Northwestern lures the infamous Coach K Sheffsky into the stadium only to march him straight to the plank while he makes those hideous death mask faces that he used to make if the official dared to call a foul on his team

Between staff moves, the transfer portal, and the last of the Covid era players lingering for their ninth-year dissertation defenses, it is incredibly difficult to tell how good a team will be year by year.  Duke has a new staff headed by Florida journeyman Manny Diaz and a new transfer quarterback.  They beat an FCS team called "Elon" handily.  Northwestern is playing at home and will outnumber whatever Duke fans manage to float in.  It is at this point very difficult to figure out how confident I am in a Northwestern win and even whether we should Throw Out The Record Books for this quasi-rivalry that is now being played for The Basketball Legacy of Ryan Young.  Looking at the dragons that lurk on Northwestern's Big Ten schedule, they need this one badly.

CHICAGO BEARS FANS HAVE HOPE AND I'M TERRIFIED

Look, the Chicago Bears don't have quarterbacks.  My entire life they have sent out some new jabroni to throw for 167 yards while the Bears lineback the other team into submission.  For a long time, the Bears didn't seem to even care about the position; their approach to quarterbacks seemed to mirror a gang of street toughs menacing Jean Claude Van Damme in that each of them would do a couple of moves before falling down or getting thrown through a plate glass window.  The Bears now have the most hyped rookie quarterback since Trevor Lawrence, a full complement of competent wide receivers, and an offensive coordinator whose previous experience didn't watching Aaron Rodgers run around for 15 seconds and then heave a perfect pass across his body to a wide open guy and then saying "I told him to do that."  I genuinely don't know what to do.

Bears fans have been through the ringer with their last two great quarterback hopes.  Mitch Trubisky was such a pud that he was booed by fans on draft night and spent the entirety of his career here being reminded that he was drafted over Patrick Mahomes.  Justin Fields, handed a nonexistent offensive line and a cadre of wide receivers that were made up of kick returners and XFL players, produced some of the most incredible highlights I've ever seen from a Bears quarterback, but never found rhythm in the passing game.  I put a lot of hope into Fields, who was an absolute monster in college and a person who seemed to bear the inept management of his career that looked almost like sabotage with an admirable grace.  I still am very defensive about Fields and instinctively lash out at anyone who dares to call him a glorified running back.

The 2024 Bears hype has been fueled by their first appearance on Hard Knocks, the HBO and NFL Films documentary series that follows a team in training camp.  I have no idea if this is how Hard Knocks is or because Bears ownership mandated that they remove all of the swearing, but this TV show was unbearably boring.  The NFL Films crew does a great job filming game and practice action-- a sequence from the final episode that seamlessly stitched together a bunch of Caleb Williams practice throws was delightful-- but there is little the gravelly voiced NFL announcer can do to get you hyped up to watching a bunch of guys in athleisure talking in meetings.  It doesn't help that the Bears management and coaching staff have zero personality.  Matt Eberflus, one of the most baffling and oafish coaches I've seen whose blundering through the first half of last season made me astonished that he had not yet been fired, made a dramatic offseason change by growing a beard and getting a new haircut and apparently in NFL logic this makes him good now.

Eberflus had a dramatic beauty transformation from a "find me the girl" henchman to a "get me the launch codes" henchman

Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of pressure.  Bears fans are not just expecting the first good quarterback they've had in most fan's lifetimes, they are expecting a superstar and fast.  It is unlikely that a rookie, even one as talented and magical as Williams and with his supporting cast of star receivers, will be that good that quickly.  Williams, for his part, seems to welcome the hype.  Fields, cast in a similar role, seemed to bear the psychosis of generations of quarterback-scarred Bears fans belching giardeniera into sports radio call lines with a stoic determination.  Now he's trying to win the grimmest quarterback battle in the league against a chalk outline in the shape of Russell Wilson.  As Fields knows, Williams may never be as popular in the city as he is right now.  A lifetime of experience has hardened me against hope that the Bears will ever have a functioning passing attack. 

 

Chicago is already a rabid Bears town above all other professional sports, but the Bears optimism has reached a deranged pitch because the rest of the city's professional sports scene is dreadful.  The Cubs have been floundering all summer making their last desperate lunge for an unlikely wild card spot.  The Bulls have traded their two best veterans for underwhelming returns including a deeply flawed and unpopular young player and seen their two all-stars turn into untradeable albatrosses that have no interest from the league; they need to desperately lose as many games as they can so they don't lose their 2025 draft pick.  The Chicago Sky are still several players away from building anything around their two exciting rookies.  I have been told we have a hockey team here and it is also bad.

But it is impossible to frame how bad professional sports teams are in Chicago without talking about the White Sox.  The White Sox have already lost 109 games.  They seem to win a game once every two weeks.  They are inept in ways that defy belief-- in a recent game their entire outfield and left side of the infield collided in the shallow left field, allowing two runs to score on a routine popup hit by a guy who started the season playing for them as the DH because he was somehow worse at fielding than that.  The 2024 White Sox will finish the season the worst major league team in modern history.  They are run by a cadre of fools led by Jerry Reinsdorf and somehow immortal croaking corpse Tony La Russa, both of whom seem like they would rather have this team become a national laughingstock than find someone who has a functioning understanding of baseball in 2024.  I understand that Reinsdorf is very old and rich enough that he never has to interact with anyone who isn't going to flatter him, but I do not understand why a person would want to continue owning sports teams in a city where the possibility that you might have some weird emergency that requires you to leave your house without a retinue would instantly result in a mob of sports fans trying to capture you and parade you around the city in the type of restraints made famous by the late, great Hannibal Lecter.  To me, that sounds like a bummer.

This city needs a winner badly and they are counting on a rookie quarterback on the team that destroys quarterbacks for as a reflex.  It is natural to go into this Bears season in a defensive crouch, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But life is hard enough as it is.  If Caleb busts, he busts.  If the Bears stink, they stink.  Why not at least have hope, for both football teams that play on the lake.