When Kevin Warren, then the Big Ten Commissioner, went out shopping the rights for the glamorous new Enormous Ten, he was pitching the television networks on the excitement of Ohio State and Oregon, Michigan and USC meeting as a regular season game and not in one of those early 2000s Rose Bowls where the Wolverines got regularly obliterated, and even a disgusting Iowa and UCLA matchup which featured numerous cuts to punt-crazy Iowans reacting incredulously to sunlight. What he had in his back pocket was Northwestern-Purdue, a game that no one has any interest in yet for now continues to be a part of Big Time College Football because these teams were tackling each other in mud pits before the players got shipped off to battle the forces of the Kaiser.
Here it was in 2024, the Fine Print Bowl between teams buried in Big Ten Network Regional Action featuring a team that has yet to defeat an FBS team and a team that cannot fill its own temporary 12,000 seat stadium. Purdue, for all of its football woes, still has value to the Big Ten as a basketball power because people will tune in to see the inevitable eight-foot oaf that plays on its basketball team who is unveiled in a Carl Denham spectacle every fall. Northwestern is still currently in the Big Ten, according to the Big Ten website.
Anyone deranged enough to tune into this game, including the crowd that admirably packed Ross Ade Stadium to no decipherable end, got what they were looking for: an exciting overtime shocker filled with football action that can best be described as inexplicable and silly. There is no situation where a college football team tells announcers they’re going to be working in another quarterback for a couple of series as a designed plan that is not an admission that the staff is baffled by their passing situation and desperate to do something– both teams did this in this game. Northwestern’s switch was more disastrous, leading to an immediate interception and an end to the quarterback switching experiment, whereas Purdue’s was more of a switch between ineffective passing attacks before Hudson Card had success moving the ball in the second half as part of Purdue's comeback to tie the game.
The main takeaway from this game will be Ryan Walters’s baffling decision to go for it on 4th and 6 in the first overtime period. I guess Walters was correct in believing that he could not settle for a touchdown in this situation since Northwestern scored a touchdown almost immediately in their overtime period, but as an isolated decision, a bet that your defense could not stop the 2024 Northwestern Wildcats seemed to me to be insane. At that point, though, Walters had engineered a second half comeback while Northwestern faltered. Ryan Braun, the Maestro of Timeouts, had already conducted his symphony of play stoppages and left the Wildcats with none left by the early fourth quarter, which left them unable to stop the clock with the ball on a potential game-winning drive at the end of the game. The Wildcats squandered a 17-3 first-half lead and were lucky to hold on for their fourth win, while Purdue continues to build a comfortable home at the bottom of the Big Ten standings.
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Northwestern has folded up its lakefront bleachers and put the Endzone Obstruction Poles back in storage and moves to its second home stadium at Wrigley Field. Northwestern’s games at Wrigley have each been minor disasters. In the first attempt, they were legally barred from using one of the endzones and the turf has a mystery surface that either turns into a giant slip ‘n slide like it did against Purdue or into a series of sinkholes and pits as it did last year against Iowa. The novelty of a game at Wrigley Field only increases the interest from opposing fans and somehow turns the park into even more of a home venue for the visitors than the swarms of fans at Ryan Field. Northwestern has also never won a game there, most recently falling victim to Iowa after the Hawkeyes completed their sole pass of the season to set up the winning field goal. The Wildcats have never won there.
Tom Wolfe wrote that you can't go home again, and for Northwestern this is true because Pat Ryan has dynamited its stadium. This year's homecoming festivities will therefore be celebrated at a baseball stadium that I'm guessing will be at least 75% fans of the other team. I suppose it made sense to schedule things this way because for much of this year Wrigley Field had a huge leg up on the temporary lakeside stadium by existing. Nevertheless it is strange to put a homecoming game somewhere no one has come home to, even if I spent a not insignificant amount of my time at Northwestern trying to buy cheap Cubs tickets off the street so I could heckle Todd Hundley. I do not know if they still do a homecoming court, but it will seem more like a government-in-exile.
A WELL-RESEARCHED FILM AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF NORTHWESTERN'S MATCHUPS AGAINST OHIO STATE
Northwestern and Ohio State will play a legally sanctioned football game on Saturday at Wrigley Field.
OHIO STADIUM, COLUMBUS OHIO
In 1922, Ohio State began construction of its stadium, known as The Horseshoe. Today's fiction section is a letter protesting this construction from Dr. Augustus Morgan "Pepper" Matschafter, professor of Physical Education, who was upset at the university's misplaced prioritization of football.
To the Robust and Vigorous Board at The Ohio State University,
Every year we are subjected to the same sights of battered, broken young men sacrificing themselves in the sport of Football for the entertainment of the dullard masses. And now, the University seeks to build an enormous stadium of poured concrete just for this sad spectacle so we can cram more students and yokelous onlookers into it to watch these youths smash and bash each other for their base amusement. Well I, and other high-minded faculty at this supposed Institution of Higher Learning have had enough. I demand that the University cease allocating resources to Football and immediately redistribute it to more important, educational ends. It is time for the University to immediately transfer all funding to the superior sport of Brains Wrangling.
I am frankly embarrassed that our esteemed school is hosting a sport where these young men sprint into each other while trying to gain possession of an oblong pig’s bladder. Ridiculous! These lads should be crashing into each other in tests of strength and brains-power by which I mean they should be trying to injure each other by bludgeoning each other with their own skulls. What sort of dullard is interested in “touch downs” or “half-backs” or those endless procedural meetings mediated by a referee who stops them for infractions for moving the wrong way or being too rough with each other? I cannot imagine thousands of people wanting to see this sort of dainty rules-mongering instead of scores of thick-necked oafs lining up on opposite sides of a field, taking a running start, and trying to headbutt each other in the torso.
The slack-jawed masses currently enamored with football will soon grow tired of its elaborate rules regime, especially when confronted with a more daring and vigorous sport where young people are spun around by the ankles and thrown into a crowd of opponents who must try to withstand a bludgeoning from the skulls of these human projectiles. Instead of fussy referees constantly trying to penalize the players, the officials will join in the fray, unleashing their own heads upon lollygagging competitors whose bashing of their opponents is feeble and underwhelming.
I urge the university board to reconsider building this palace to a sad, passing fad, a sport that will go the way of bear-baiting and train-punching. University funds simply cannot be allowed to be tied to a dying pageant of tedium where players are not thrown at each other via trebuchet nor allow biting of opponents when the referee has given the signal for legal mouth-combat. Every week, I receive a report from the top scientific minds at the Brains Wrangling Society (the most recent of which I have submitted with this letter) warning of a precipitous decline in football interest in newspaper columns and people shouting about it on the street and (while it may offend the delicate sensibilities of the Board to know that their game has been sullied in this way) I have certain intelligences that suggest that football has seen a significant downturn in underground betting parlors. The men who frequent such dens and shake their money in order to place bets have expressed what I have come to understand as an overwhelming interest instead in a sport where the competitors are dropped on each other head first from great height.
What, may I ask, will the Ohio State University do with an empty concrete behemoth once the greater Columbus dunce population grows tired of this boring, wearying sport? What happens when people, craving robust tackling action instead see a bunch of pointy-headed collegians carefully plotting out their so-called “plays” with protractors and slide rules and bump into each other while swaddled in helmets, like soft-headed children? What will fill the stadium? Chess matches? Competitive examinations? Petting zoos for local children? As you can see, a stadium for football would be another grave mistake and black mark for this University, an even larger error than the one this very board made funding my colleague Professor Brun Punda’s nonsensical paper proposing a sport called “Top Speed Bludgeoning” that made him the laughingstock of the entire field for how brazenly it copied the existing rules for Brains Wrangling that I published years ago.
Instead of spending untold sums of university money for a sport that may not even exist by the end of the decade, it would be far wiser to invest the money in an activity with staying power. With a mere fraction of the funds being spent on this concrete monstrosity, the Brains Wrangling Society could demonstrate a superior sport that would capture the imagination of sporting fans all over the country. For mere pennies compared to the stadium fund, my Brains Wrangling team could instantly attract the attentions of any town in the state by using an old-fashioned railroad pump cart to launch team members head first into someone’s torso, an arresting and daring feat that would instantly conjure up great interest in the sport.
According to the Brains Wrangling Societies’ projections from the esteemed professor Abel Bruus, a conservative campaign of literature distribution, newspaper advertisement, and a modest tour featuring demonstrations of pump cart headbutts would have Brains Wrangling eclipsing football in popularity in the state of Ohio by 1932. I know it sounds astonishing and I personally shook Professor Bruus violently when he presented the figures to me because they sounded so outlandish, but we both painstakingly checked the mathematics. According to our calculations, the University would require a significant stadium built to Brains Wrangling specifications just to handle the demand from crowds who would travel for hundreds of miles just to see Migal Yerop, the Iron Forehead of Bucyrus, put his entire cranium through a concrete block and then swing it wildly at competitors until the referees catch him in a giant net and subdue him with Sporting Grade Laudanum.
Please do not make the same mistake after you built the ridiculous arena for the short-lived Horseless Polo craze of 1893. You will soon make another horse mistake with this ill conceived boondoggle of a stadium for a sport no one will believe that anyone had ever watched.
Yours,
Professor Augustus Morgan "Pepper" Matschafter, PhD, President and First Secretary of the Brains Wrangling Society of the United States
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