The beginning of the first quarter in Seattle looked like a quintessential welcome to the Big Ten moment for Washington. The Huskies were at home playing a Northwestern team they expected to beat easily and instead had gotten sucked into an unwatchable vortex of punts, the fate of too many Big Ten teams that had signed up to play Northwestern with the intention of playing a football game. Then Washington was able to get their offense going and Northwestern was not and the whole thing fell apart for the Wildcats.
It happened late in the third quarter. Northwestern was down 17-2 after the Wildcat defense scored a safety on a Washington intentional grounding penalty. The 'Cats had recovered a fumble at Washington's 33 and managed to drive all the way down to the one yardline. They had barely been able to move the ball into Washington territory all game, so this was a rare scoring opportunity. After three tries to get into the endzone, David Braun called for one of the most pointless and cowardly field goals I've ever seen to put Northwestern down 17-5, which brought them from down two touchdowns to down two touchdowns.
Sing us the Song, O Coach, of the Pointless Field Goal
At some point when a team is getting its ass kicked in a football game, the coaches have to make a decision whether they are going to keep doing risky things to at least make a token effort to get back in it and potentially lose by more points or try to minimize embarrassment. There is nothing wrong with this; the concept of trying to find a way to lose with some semblance of dignity was the fundamental question occupying Northwestern football for large swathes of its existence. But when Northwestern kicked a field goal in that exact situation it raised a concern that I was not ready to contemplate: whether the score 24-2 or 24-5 is funnier.
Northwestern's beginning to conference play did not look particularly promising, but they hope a return to The Lake can galvanize the team into a win over holy smokes it's an undefeated, ranked Indiana team.
WHAT THE HECK INDIANA IS A JUGGERNAUT
Well who saw this coming. Indiana fired Tom Allen after several years of listless Indiana-style football and brought in James Madison mastermind Curt Cignetti. Cignetti, who turned JMU into an FCS powerhouse then brought them into the Sun Belt where they went 11-1 and were ranked and overcame a very stupid NCAA rule that would not let them play in a bowl game because they were in their first year in FBS but fortunately there are no so many bowl games that they can't find enough teams to play in them anymore so the Dukes got to lose to Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl as is their right.
Under Cignetti, the Hoosiers are looking downright terrifying. The team, fortified with an army of hungry transfers, has been demolishing teams, putting up 77 points on Western Illinois and absolutely crushing UCLA and a Maryland team that at the time looked decent. Indiana is averaging more than two and half times as many points per game as Northwestern's sputtering offense has managed to scrape up.
Northwestern has had its ups and downs this century, but Indiana served as a rare Big Ten program that was consistently lousy and decent bet for a conference win. The Hoosiers have not won in Evanston since 1993; even though Indiana has an overwhelming fan and alumni presence in the Chicago area, they could not be counted on to consistently outnumber Northwestern fans because they didn't want to come watch their horrible team and sit on cold bleachers and listen to the Wildcat Yowling Sound for three and a half hours. Instead Indiana fans tended to swarm into Welsh-Ryan arena to watch their basketball team dunk on the 'Cats although now they mainly tend to roam the country like they are discredited doomsday preachers trying to convince people in every town they travel to that Boo Buie pushed off.
You hate to see an entire fanbase turning to Bryon Davis Thought
The last two games will be interesting tests for the temporary lakeside stadium. Northwestern has asked the important question of how small they can make the stadium and how expensive and annoying can they make the ticket purchasing process in order to actually get a Northwestern home crowd at a Big Ten game. I suspect that the current setup still will not work. A fired up group of Indiana fans and the always well-traveling Wisconsin fans will bring their crimson hordes to bear from land and water on the new stadium and taunt Northwestern fans by reminding them that the very small stadium is in fact small like they are a group of Patricks Beverly. The most important question will be if eight to nine thousand away fans are enough to make Northwestern have to go on a silent count at home again or whether any Indiana fans will try to gain access to the stadium by taking a boat from across the lake and then stealthily swim up to it while trying to assure stadium security guards that they are soaking wet because of a mishap involving the network of toiletmobiles.
Northwestern is coming off a bye week. Top running back Cam Porter will return after missing the Washington game, and Zach Lujan and his staff have hopefully had an additional week to try to duct tape together something that resembles a functioning passing offense. Northwestern's schedule already looked grim at the beginning of the season and the introduction of a rampaging Indiana team and what looks like a pretty good Illinois team that is already showing signs of Hat Madness certainly don't help things. But Northwestern can do something that few Wildcat teams have had the opportunity to do this century: get an absolutely enormous, field-rushing upset against the literal Indiana Hoosiers.
MEMORIAL STADIUM, BLOOMINGTON INDIANA
This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.
The following is a letter concerning the construction of Indiana's new Memorial Stadium from 1958, and it appears courtesy of the University of Indiana Made Up Archives.
To the Regents of the University of Indiana and The Government,
I am disappointed although admittedly not surprised that the university is preparing to erect a new, larger Memorial stadium without the consent or participation of my family, from whom the Stadium takes its name. And yet, instead of taking this opportunity to once again revive the thick packet of grievances, insults, rude telegrams, slaps in the face both metaphorical and literal, and times that my father and I have been physically thrown out of meetings by the Board of Regents and their vanguard of square-headed Hench Men, I would like to offer the construction of a new stadium as an opportunity to make things right. I am extending the proverbial Olive Branch. All I ask for is that in commemorating the war dead, whose sacrifices I and my family deeply respect and also wish to honor, you also consider the stadium, in a small way, a memorial to the victims of Indiana's various Horror Creatures and Monsters that have been ravaging the good people of this State and for whom my father Vincent Memorial had asked to be included in this name for decades dating back to its original construction. I have included my father's original letter for your the record:
Gentlemen,
I have seen in the papers that you are going to build a new football stadium called Memorial Stadium to honor the soldiers of the War. But if you are going to be commemorating people, you should also consider the many men and women and children who have been carried off and devoured by the Monsters and Ghouls haunting this particular State. You probably know some of them like the floating eyeball out in Crawfordsville but there are dozens of known Creatures that go around lurking and haunting in the forests and the lakes and every year more citizens than you think are attacking people and putting them under the control of their Dark Magicks. I humbly ask that these victims also be included in your your stadium as a Memorial to the brave War Dead and Victims of Indiana Monsters.
Several years ago, I had the misfortune of encountering one of these Creatures outside of Bruceville. I had taken the cart out to gather some firewood and hunt for rare mushrooms. It was me and the horses and the old hound Spark and I guess we had lost track of the time looking around the creek because it had started to get dark pretty quick. Well we were on our way back because I knew my wife Patunia (it is a nickname I gave her, her real name is Patricia, to be honest she did not care for it) would be mad at me for dawdling again but at this point it was pitch black in the forest and Spark started howling and pointing and his fur was spiking up around his neck. I told him to quiet down but soon I heard some rustling through the leaves. Now I'm not a person who scares easily and I've heard every type of rustling there is in the woods, a deer or a coyote or even a every noisy squirrel so I immediately knew that was a different type of rustling. We kept moving and the noise kept with us, like it was following us. Then I heard a chomping noise, it was a loud wet noise, like nothing I've ever heard, a chomping and a slurping noise which was not of the Natural World, so I lit up a torch and then a few hundred feet behind us I saw the Monster. It was big and sort of looked like a person but it had gangly legs and a gigantic head and the largest mouth I've ever seen, the mouth took up most of the head and it was stumbling towards us and chomping and gnashing and drooling as it shambled forward. We high-tailed it out of there real fast and I told everyone about the Monster, I called it the Bruceville Biter, I thought that was a good name for it on account of the mouth.
A few days later my wife Patunia said she was going to go into the woods to get some firewood because she was sick of watching me sit on my behind (she did not understand the various Projects I had undertaken, you might be aware of the letters I had been writing to rename Terry Haute to Pterry Haute in honor of the flying prehistoric beast Pteranodon) and I begged her not to go into the woods because the Biter was in there but she ignored me. Well I waited and waited but she didn't come back so I headed out into those woods with the biggest rifle I had and I went back over to the creek. I heard the rustling and now I was following it and I listened for the chomping and I whipped the lantern around and nothing. It was gone. I even yelled out, come on out Biter. Bring my wife back you tooth monster. I was scared to death but I wandered those woods until sun up and I saw nothing. I knew Biter had gotten my wife. The sheriff was help at all but I will not waste your time as I have written several letters about this already and it is not university business.
So as you can see there are hundreds of us suffering in silence on account of the government doesn't want to hear about monsters, but this is real. And even worse since these people vanish and the monsters do all sorts of Daemonic tricks for example I keep hearing from people that there's a woman who looks exactly like my Patunia named Patty Schulz married to a man named Frank Schulz up in Indianapolis and I urge you to explain that other than the machinations of a Beast operating with forces that we cannot understand.
Please consider the people lost to Indiana's monsters of the Forests and the Lakes when you are naming a memorial, for their loss hurts as much to us as the brave men who lost their lives in the War and weren't even dealing with mysterious Tooth Creatures who harm innocent people.
Sincerely,
Vincent Kubbnilk
As you know, the university regents have consistently ignored my father's requests. They never responded to his letters and repeatedly removed the plaques he made and installed at great effort and expense to remember the victims of Crypto-Zooligical Creatures within the Stadium. My father even received no response from the regents when he legally changed the family name to Memorial in order to claim that the stadium was now named after his late wife. But now, as you seek to build a new stadium bearing the Memorial name, you can undo the harm you have caused to not only my family but the hundreds of persons suffering from effects of attacks from Indiana's various Monsters.
I look forward to appearing at the ceremonial Ground-Breaking as a representative of the Memorial Family. As a gesture of good will I have purchased my own Golden Shovel in order to spare the taxpayers of Indiana any further expense. I also ask to be able to discreetly spread a portion of my father's ashes under the stadium, although I will of course carry most of them in a small pouch on my belt, as per his final request, so I can use them to blind any Monstrous Creatures that I may encounter and then make my escape or perform an opportunistic attack to the Monster's weak points including eye-balls, eye stalks, exposed brains or visible reproductive organs. All we ask for is a small gesture to make up for the decades of insult and ridicule to our family name and to come together with the University to collectively mourn and celebrate our people lost to the horrors of War and Supernatural Monsters that terrorize the countryside. The people of Indiana deserve that much.
Terrence Memorial
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