Duck Off

Northwestern looked so lousy in the opening game of the season against Tulane that it seemed that the ‘Cats could struggle against FCS jobber Western Illinois in the home opener on The Lake. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that they could even lose, although you would like to think that even the lowest tier of Big Ten team could easily handle Western Illinois in front of a home crowd of several dozen Northwestern fans and the occasional windsurfer jauntily passing by the stadium. And they did. Northwestern bulldozed their less north and further western neighbors to a 42-7 drubbing and while I am skeptical that this tells us anything other than the difference in the type of athlete that even Northwestern can recruit over their FCS counterparts, I am also making the extremely brave and controversial assertion that it still fun to see them get a buttkicking win before getting fed into the Big Ten woodchipper.

Quarterback Preston Stone recovered from his tough first outing with a much better game with no turnovers and three touchdowns as he and receiver Griffin Wilde (pronounced more like Wildebeest than Wild) torched the Western secondary. Stone needed a little luck to avoid some turnovers– his first pass clipped through a defender’s hands like he was a character in a CD ROM football game before settling into Wilde’s mitts, and he also had a fumble bounce directly back into his hands with the practiced precision of an Australian football player– but he looked closer to the player that we saw in highlight reels from his first three years at SMU.

The highlight of the game for me was in the fourth quarter with the ‘Cats already up 35-0 when backup quarterback Ryan Boe ran the ball and stiff-armed a defender into orbit around Pluto en route to a glorious 58-yard touchdown run in garbage time. In a year that certainly looks like tough sledding for the Wildcats, I will take any play that results in a defensive player all but holding up a Wile E. Coyote sign before getting stiff-armed into oblivion.

Boe makes someone yell "B'oh!"

Unfortunately, the game had one disastrous outcome for Northwestern. Cam Porter, the steady sixth-year captain, injured his knee and will miss the rest of the season. Porter already recovered from a devastating knee injury once and has been a reliable presence in the backfield and on the sidelines since he first entered the program in 2020. With all of his accrued seasons, it is possible that Porter is the most Northwestern player, having played an unfathomable amount of Northwestern football. He’s also been a player that every teammate and coach has raved about, and it is crushing that the injury will likely end his tenure-track career in Evanston unless he is able to successfully apply for a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year by convincing the NCAA that it would be “a great bit.” 

I'm glad Northwestern got to wipe out an opponent in the home opener because the schedule makers have decided to make Northwestern go from blowing out an FCS team to having to face a rabid brontosaurus. Number four Oregon shows up as a profoundly unwanted guest this week.

DUCK SEASON 

Oregon comes to The Lake on Saturday after vaporizing both teams on its schedule. Last week they clobbered Oklahoma State and its coach, the physical manifestation of the Wilson volleyball from Castaway, 69-3. No one expects this to be a competitive game even after the Wildcats diced up the Western Illinois Leathernecks. Like every game Northwestern has to play against one of the terrifying title contenders in the conference, the goal here is not necessarily to win but to annoy and disgust the opponent with a display of what can best be described as Northwestern-style football. The 'Cats, for example, held national champion Ohio State to a 7-0 deficit for a decent part of the first half last season and though the game very quickly turned in the way that you would expect it to go, we at least got to luxuriate in 40,000 sour-faced Ohio State fans glowering and looking to comfort from the guy who puts on silver body paint as they furiously turned to their phones to see if it was legal for Northwestern to repeatedly throw complete passes for nearly an entire half hour.  David Braun, the Maestro of Embarrassing Field Goals, is likely itching to send out his kicking unit down 30 points in the fourth quarter.

The thing to me that is most interesting about this game is what the atmosphere will be like. This is the first time one of the new west coast teams will travel to Evanston and I believe that Oregon is one of the only Big Ten teams where there are fewer alumni and fans of a team living in the Chicago area than people affiliated with Northwestern. Because of the novelty of the setting, because Oregon is really good, and because I suspect some season ticket holders are more eager to turn a tidy profit than watch the team picked up and carried back and forth across the field for four hours, I suspect Oregon fans will still have an overwhelming presence at the game, but there will probably be more of them that had to get on an airplane to get here instead of a Metra train.

This is also Fox’s Big Noon Game that will be nationally televised for some reason and involve Fox and its studio crew of noxious, yelping morons posting up at the lakeside stadium.  Gus Johnson is on the call and I presume that he has covered himself in Memento-style tattoos that say “Northwestern is not Wisconsin” after his embarrassing gaffe in the 2018 Big Ten Championship Game that I constantly bring up because it is one of the rare times Northwestern football was nationally prominent for something other than Allegations, Lawsuits, or Uniform Disrespect.  As I am writing this, Urban Meyer is loose and unaccounted for in the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area, and it is possible he has deactivated his tracking device and Fox Sports personnel have been urgently dispatched to the area's most depressing suburban steak houses. 

I still can't get over the scandal that Urban Meyer allegedly kicked the Jaguars' kicker like he is doling out an evil ironic punishment like a direct-to-video horror movie villain.

Oregon apparently has an enormous floating duck that it occasionally deploys, and there have been calls for it to appear on the lake during this game. I think it is a reasonable response that Northwestern fans immediately form into a Waterworld-style jetski gang to take that thing down as a warning to other teams with inflatables and also to P.J. Fleck.

 

September 2025, Oregon is now master of the Big Ten. Only the Northwestern Armada fleet stands before them- Lakes are now battlefields.

College football is goofy and unpredictable, but defeating this Oregon team seems like a nearly impossible task-- a win against Oregon would be the largest upset in the modern history of the program or at least second to the Wildcats' win over Any Football Team in 1982. The Ducks will be competing for the national championship while Northwestern looks like their goal will be winning a Big Ten game. 

Oregon has not been in the Big Ten long enough to annoy me. In fact, Oregon has never beaten Northwestern as the 'Cats hold a 1-0 record over them from a 14-10 road victory in 1974.  While I am sure that I will eventually grow disgusted with the Ducks after being exposed to them long enough, I would rather have them win over any other traditional Big Ten power whose harrumphing, gloating fans have infected Ryan Field since I have been going to games.

If somehow Northwestern by some minor miracle manages to win this game, I will write and release a single called “Body Clocks” on the most appropriate label.

THE CHICAGO BULLS DROP THE GIDDEY BOMB

Tuesday was a rough day for Chicago sports fans who had waited all offseason to watch their supposed offensive genius head coach and highly-touted second year quarterback only to instantly be reminded that they root for the Chicago Bears and will have to endure what looks like another season of grim Bears-style football.  That was the day that, with the sports radio lines clogged with men choking on the wettest beefs legally available while furiously calling for Tyson Bagent, the Chicago Bulls announced to an already deflated and miserable fanbase that they will have to put up with Josh Giddey for four years.

Giddey, a 22 year-old Australian who is already entering his 4th year in the NBA, had been in a standoff with the Bulls all summer.  The Bulls traded for him by sending beloved superstar role player Alex Caruso, a brilliant defensive menace, to the Okalahoma City Thunder straight up without even getting a token draft pick.  Caruso instantly became a key part of the Thunder's championship team while the Bulls were once again 86'd from the play-in tournament the Miami Heat as is their custom, this time by a profoundly crappy and injured Heat team that had not beaten the Bulls all season.  

Giddey reportedly demanded starting point guard money but as a restricted free agent in a league where no one had cap space and also have access to numbers that say that he is not particularly good that apparently elude the Bulls' analytics department that I think is just one guy playing spider solitaire who occasionally sends the front office one of those fake spread sheets generated by the Boss Button on the NCAA tournament streaming website, so he had little leverage. The result was the exact deal that everyone expected the Bulls to give him for months but arrived at only after his team and the Bulls exchanged vaguely hostile emails for three months.

Giddey is a weird player.  He is very big for a point guard at 6'8" and he is an excellent rebounder and passer who routinely flirts with triple doubles and puts up combinations of stats that allow the Bulls broadcast to put up graphics that say things like "the only people who have ever scored 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 16 assists twice in a calendar month under the age of 22 are Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and  Josh Giddey" even if he put up those numbers in a depressing loss to the Charlotte Hornets. He largely steers a fun, uptempo style of play installed by Billy Donovan after the Bulls ran out of NBA-caliber defensive players last season and is responsible for one of the greatest Stacey King calls since Andres Nocioni dunked on a backup center and he started screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY FAMILY GUY" because of the center's oblong-shaped head reminded him of the baby character.

On the other hand, Giddey despite his size is an abominable defender, a lackluster shooter, and an oafish dribbler who is constantly giving the ball to the opponents. He is also not particularly athletic for an NBA player; he moves like he is a recently-enchanted broom from the movie Fantasia.  His game is pretty much the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art NBA star in 2025, and it's possible that what he can't do is much worse for a team than his box score stuffing contributions.  You can read from actual Basketball Knowers about Giddey rather than taking my word for it; I couldn't even watch Giddey's disastrous first half of the season because the Bulls played on a channel that I needed to buy an antenna to watch and now shows nothing but low-rent MMA events that look like montages in one of the several dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies where he enters an underground fighting tournament.

The Bulls had a star for years with obvious shortcomings in his game that fans and the general NBA world fixated on in Zach LaVine, but LaVine was better at the much more important skill of scoring than Giddey is at anything, and the Bulls were barely able to give him away because of his crummy defense and mediocre playmaking.  I don't expect that the Bulls will do much better with Giddey as the focal point.

There are a couple of troublesome aspects of the Giddey contract in the broader strategic sense.  One of them comes from the annoying metagame involving the Bulls salary cap.  Giddey, whose four-year $100 million deal is fairly modest for a starting point guard, is still making a few million dollars more per year than the Bulls could have perhaps gotten away with if they had really pressured him.  I don't want to care about how much money players make nor root for front offices to squeeze them, but in a salary cap league where individual payments are apparently so important that there are very popular and influential podcasts where guys just list off how much money everyone makes for hours every day like a bizarre numbers station, it is true that any dollar Giddey makes theoretically takes away the Bulls' flexibility to bring in better players to put around him-- this is of course assuming that bringing in good players was the goal of the Bulls instead of Arturas Karnisovas doing a weird avant-garde art project with a basketball roster to prove a point that eludes me.

I am also very sorry to bring up Giddey's effect on the the profoundly depressing metagame of tanking.  Giddey and the style the Bulls play with him is probably good enough for them to win enough regular season games to take them out of the running for what analysts say is a draft laden with potential stars near the top.  That doesn't mean they will have no shot at drafting a Rowdy Boozer Son-- assuming the Bulls have another season hovering around the desolate environs of the Eastern Conference play-in tournament race, they could still jump up in the draft order.  The Bulls were apparently a coin flip with the Mavericks away from landing prized Duke freshman Cooper Flagg; the state of the Chicago Bulls is such that they are even getting their asses kicked by coin flips.  I personally hate tanking and find the idea of wasting everyone's time trying to intentionally lose a disgusting pursuit, but it pains me to admit that it is also the most viable way to land a superstar unless you are the fucking Los Angeles Lakers.

The fact that Giddey is merely a flawed basketball player who won't make the Bulls better than mediocre is not something that really bothers me since that is basically every basketball player the Bulls roster. Even as the Bulls have been a largely crummy and enervating to watch the last few years, the players on the team seemed to be good guys who liked each other and had fun playing uninspiring basketball. Giddey, who came to the Bulls under a cloud of gross allegations, is not someone I particularly want to root for, and it's a bummer to have my favorite team chained to him for four years.  Fortunately, the Bulls are going to vanish from my TV unless I pay an exorbitant amount of money to watch Jerry Reinsdorf's horrible sports teams, so perhaps the Josh Giddey Bulls will no longer be my problem.