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.
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