The Quarterback of Monte Cristo

Iowa and Northwestern can be reasonably relied on to put together a truly obscene display of disgusting Iowa-style football and the first half gave all of the twisted perverts who opened up a browser window in incognito mode to watch this everything we wanted: Iowa 12, Northwestern 7. Iowa getting a safety. Northwestern scoring its only points on an interception return on a pass that was precision targeted at defensive back. The sky was darkened with punts. 

 

 

Showing this to a Big Ten West fan and saying "see anything you like?"

 

Then Iowa decided to just blow out the ‘Cats and the game went from delightfully awful to just awful. The catalyst for Iowa was a quarterback switch from Cade McNamara to Brendan Sullivan, the former Northwestern quarterback. The freedom of movement granted to the players from the transfer portal came with some unimaginable consequences and one of which is watching Iowa batter Northwestern with its own quarterback in a psychologically devastating “why are you hitting yourself” situation while the grim specter of Pat Fitzgerald bedecked in Iowa clothing haunted the sidelines.

 

I am not going to lie, I turned this game off and deleted it from the DVR pretty shortly into the third quarter after googling the score. Life is too short to watch Iowa put up 40 on you; regretfully I missed the other Northwestern touchdown on a punt return. Two weeks after a hilarious aerial assault against Maryland, the Northwestern offense has seemed to have stayed in College Park. The Wildcats now own one of the worst offenses in all of college football. Watching Northwestern try to move the ball right now is like watching one of those giant Scandinavian strongest man guys wearing a Volkswagen with suspenders trying to walk 50 meters shaking and turning the color of a pencil eraser. 

 

The Northwestern offense attempts to move the ball 10 yards

 

The hopes of a bowl season have all but evaporated. The fun atmosphere from the novelty of The Lake is now gone, replaced by away games and the hideous bog surface of Wrigley Field. And David Braun’s incredible achievement last year is fading into memory as he faces questions about the future of the program in a cutthroat conference with no room for error. On the other hand a lot of those negative feelings can be held at bay with a successful visit to Purdue.

 

THE ROMANCE OF PURDUE

 

There is something almost romantic about Purdue/Northwestern. It was a matchup that was a punchline for awhile, often the grimmest game on the Big Ten schedule until the arrival of Rutgers. And yet now, something about it is wistful. It's Purdue/Northwestern at 11:00AM in November, shunted off to the narrowest band of regional coverage that would be allowed by broadcast contracts. Northwestern and Purdue were protected rivals in the pre-Rutgers and Maryland Big Ten. Then they continued to play annually in the Big Ten West as a pillar of that division’s dedication to Ass Football.

 

The expanded playoff format has only broadened the TV networks’ obsession with the championship. But while their rosters of square-jawed analysts squinting into the teleprompter for the 330th consecutive hour of discussion about the same 10 teams, they have forgotten that there’s a whole universe of football out there, an army of fans who care desperately about their crappy teams. I am not dismissing anything out of hand, but it seems unlikely Northwestern and Purdue are going to meet any time soon in a game that means much of anything to the fabled Playoff Picture. And yet they’ll play nearly every year on gray Sunday mornings desperately trying to scrape a conference win off of one another, in a matchup that perhaps means more to the soul of the sport than a million Big Noon Saturdays.

 

 

Purdue/Northwestern games have had serious implications for the Quick Lane Bowl

 

It is perhaps appropriate that a Northwestern-Purdue game served as the swan song for Ryan Field in a ridiculous game that saw numerous missed field goals and repeated Purdue turnovers at the two yardline. Northwestern was fighting for a bowl berth and to bring the stadium out on a win; Purdue was trying to win a football game for a weird change of pace.

 

Fans of disgusting Midwestern football have a lot to look forward to on Saturday. Purdue, at only 1-6 on the season, its lone win coming against FCS Indiana State, is clinging to a near win against powerhouse Illinois in between clobberings from Big Ten powers. This should be a fiercely-fought game, largely because for both teams this represents one of the only remaining chances for a win this season. 

 

This should not be a barn burner. Purdue ranks 109th in offensive yards this season. Northwestern sits second to last, barely sputtering out 271 a game. Northwestern’s defense is ranked much higher than Purdue’s futile unit. The question is whether the the Wildcat offense will be able to stay on the field long enough to prevent the defense from getting exhausted, whether they can score or get reasonably close on defense or special teams, and whether David Braun will be able to temporarily quell his addiction to truly silly field goal attempts with a moonlighting punter.

 

GODDAMMIT BRING IN THE PUNTER! David Braun shouts on 4th and 1 on the opponents' 35 as he knocks his goblet off of a table

 

There is something comforting about a game like this. It feels like a family affair between Northwestern and Purdue fans. It is virtually impossible to imagine an otherwise disinterested college football fan choosing to watch this game over anything else unless they have the type of gambling problem that requires them to call one of the 800 numbers that is breathlessly micro machines manned into the end of 40% of all commercials that run on sporting events. One of these teams is going to be elated to get a Big Ten win, another is going to be crushed, and the result beyond that will be utterly meaningless in a beautiful way.

ROSS ADE STADIUM, WEST LAFEYETTE, INDIANA

 

This week's fiction section is features a municipal election in West Lafeyette in 1922 where the construction of a new stadium for Purdue featured prominently in one candidate's platform. Here is a speech from Menley Quackow, transcribed from the West Lafeyette Crackpot Archives.

 

Well folks, you can tell me a pig’s a pig, but I'll be checking to see if it makes bacon. Now I’m not a fancy big city Lafayette man like Mr. Ross or Mr. Ade, with their spats and their hats and their monocles and their handpicked candidate. But you know what? I think they’ve got some good ideas. That’s right. Now I know you’ve read my pamphlets showing a picture of me kicking them in their behinds until their top hats fall into the Wabash River and you’ve heard my campaign slogan “The Time For Kicking Has Begun” which I’ve also made into a song that my nephew performed on the washboard. But they are right about one thing: Our beloved Purdue University needs a new stadium.

 

Friends, Stuart Field where we gather to watch our Boilermakers play against Notre Dame, Depauw, and the hated Little Giants of Wabash whose tiny beanstalks we’ve seen Purdue cut time and time again, is no longer suitable for so-called “Big Ten Football.” And I have no problem with these fatcats shelling out for a new stadium, which they’re going to name after themselves.

 

But these men and the university are on the wrong track. In fact, they’re not on any track at all. Now, you can tell me a pig’s a pig, but I don’t need to wash the mud off if it’s mooing at me. These, well I can’t politely say what I would call these gentlemen here, but these fine folks want to build a stadium on a piece of land and make us come to it. Imagine that. Putting on your suit, your tie, and pipes you use to defend yourself in case the Rose-Hulman Tech Fighting Engineers gangs come here and menace us with their t-squares and protractors and going to a football game. I say that we in West Lafeyette deserve better. The people deserve better. We deserve a stadium that comes to us.

 

That’s why I’m proposing an easy solution to the stadium problem. Not a fancy new stadium like my opponent supports with gilded spittoons for the Rosses and Ades of the world but an honest stadium for honest hard-working people: I’m saying we put the entire stadium on a train. That’s right. The stadium that travels with the team. You want to play the Boilermarkers? Well, I say let our boys roll up on the rails with their own stadium, with stands and grass and goal posts and thousands of screaming Purdue fans and a band wailing the March of the Purduemen right in their municipal train station while the opposing teams all look at us with their mouths open in disbelief and get upset enough to lose 48-3. The first mobile, locomotive stadium. Right here at Purdue.

 

With a mobile locomotive stadium (I call it “The Train”), Purdue can take on all comers, even cowards that won’t come to play in West Lafeyette. The mobile stadium could even travel between campuses during the game with each team switching off whatever side the wind is blowing from the train's speed and with stops between quarters for fans to get on or off the train. Imagine the excitement when a player gets tackled out of the stadium completely and into a tree or a barn or even onto another passing train as the player who thought he was on the way to the end zone is now on the way to Tucumcari. The novelty will inspire other teams to build their own train stadiums and could fill the rail lines with wholesome football instead of with the swindlers and hoboes the currently clog our cars.

 

Folks, I’m sorry to say that my opponent Mr. Orville Pawpus does not support a train stadium at all. Maybe it’s because he’s attached at the hip to Mr. Ross and Mr. Ade. You can tell me a pig’s a pig when it’s suckling at a trough. No, he wants to build the same stadium that you can see all over the country that can’t transport an entire field and bleacher complex to Columbus Ohio with only 72 hours notice. Now, I’m a gentleman and I believe in a clean campaign so I would never insult my opponent. But I would make a general observation that people who cannot see the advantages of a stadium mounted entirely on rails as pretty light in the brain meat.

 

I’ll confess that I have been reading Mr. Pawpus’s pamphlets and listening to his speeches (I know, someone has to), and I don’t think that he cares much about Purdue’s stadium at all. No, when it comes to this critical part of infrastructure for our state and our country my opponent is strangely silent.Instead, what Mr. Pawpus seems interested in talking about is that Purdue football needs to be represented by a grotesque mannequin that he has invented.

 

Frankly, Mr. Pawpus’s creature is disgusting. People don’t want to look at it. He says it should look like a person but have a giant bulbous head and vacant eyes. He calls it Football Jack and wants it at the games, at the schools, and in your community. While you and I and the other great hardworking people of Tippecanoe County are wondering about putting food on the table for our families or figuring out how Purdue University can have the first operating train stadium that whisks it from Greencastle to South Bend, time and time again my opponent insists his most pressing concern is that Football Jack should be “wielding an implement.”

 

And when it comes to the stadium, my opponent wants his horrible Football Jack all over the place. He wants to have students dressed as this odious cretin wandering around the stadium and accosting children. He wants it capering around the field for amusement, to amuse him and his perverse friends in the legislature. Friends, I have been told that Mr. Pawpus has drawings of a large mechanical version of Football Jack’s head so the Boilermakers can run out of it at the beginning of games like it is vomiting them all over the field. That is an insult to me and you and the entire game of American football.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to search inside of yourselves and really think. Do you want our boilermakers, our lads playing football in a palace devoted to a balloon-headed specter? Or do you want our boys traveling in comfort in their own stadium on their way to thrash Milikin? I promise you I will fight hard for train stadiums for football, basketball, track and field, and even swimming. That is my promise to you. God bless you and the great state of Indiana.

 

Menley Quackow and Orville Pawpus received a combined 3% of the vote. Pawpus lived to see Purdue unleash Purdue Pete onto the world in 1940 and when he saw him he instantly died.