Northwestern Consultants Announce Restructuring of Penn State Football Operations

You would think that losing to Northwestern would get more coaches fired. But much to the chagrin of deranged message board posters who not only demand that every coordinator, coach, and official not only get fired but repeatedly run over by a truck with decorative testicles after their team suffers the indignity of a loss to Northwestern, it hasn’t really happened. Georgia Southern had to deliver the knockout blow to the infamous vomit-braggart Scott Frost after he traveled all the way to Ireland to lose to the worst Northwestern team in decades. Lovie Smith lost his job after getting trucked by a legitimately good Northwestern team in the brain-fog hallucination season in 2020, but that was more for his body of work than any specific Northwestern loss.* But last weekend, the Purple Reaper reached out and grabbed James Franklin, who will have to suffer the indignity of getting paid more money to not coach Penn State than anyone reading this will ever see in their life.

It is not a good sign when your coach is making the Brad Pitt Burn After Reading face on the sidelines, in my opinion 

*If anything, Lovie should have probably gotten canned after his six-win Illini got clobbered at home by a cratering, two-win Northwestern team that refused to even try passing the ball, one of the funniest and most satisfying Northwestern wins in recent memory. I can't think of a better way to describe the 2019 Illini than the sentence "They lost 35-20 to Cal in the Red Box Bowl."

This is likely the one time this season Northwestern football will be In The News for anything they do on the field, but almost nothing I saw about this game had anything to say about the ‘Cats getting what for now is a big win. The football media, as far as I can tell, viewed this game as solely about Penn State’s fall and how mad their fans are and whether James Franklin would get fired and how much money would it take to fire him and where would Penn State get the money to fire him and how funny it is that major college football programs have to meet a certain threshold of money to fire coaches they are mad at like it is a powerup in a video game where you have to amass a certain number of points to unlock the Fire His Ass menu and then once he got fired who would replace James Franklin. If Northwestern’s football team was mentioned at all, it was like they were an anonymous swarm of locusts who just came in and ate the opposing coach.

Beaver Stadium after the game 

Well, Northwestern was not just a malevolent force summoned to destroy James Franklin. They won that game. They beat up on Penn State. That was not easy! I don’t care how many central Pennsylvania psychopaths have spent the last week fighting each other for air rights to send the rudest airplane banner over Beaver Stadium or how logy Penn State has looked all season or the fact that their own stadium on homecoming was filled with angry bodypainted maniacs hopped up on vodka-infused hoagies who spitefully wanted the team to lose and that the Penn State team was flashing red like a boss with few hit points remaining. The ‘Cats still had to win a game over a team that has highly-rated recruits and NFL guys on the roster no matter how much they were reeling.

Northwestern won narrowly but they did not look overmatched. Their offensive line opened up holes for Caleb Komolafe to batter whatever linebacker or safety was unlucky enough to run into him. Their defense flew around and tackled Penn State's star running backs. They survived a blocked punt and a muffed punt return next to their own end zone. And no one on Penn State could cover Griffin Wilde, who galloped freely through their secondary on seemingly every big third down. The score could have been more lopsided had Joseph Himon not wisely decided to pass up a sure touchdown to wind down the clock. It is true that Penn State contributed with a virtuosic series of boneheaded, back-breaking penalties to extend Northwestern drives; it is also true that James Franklin, the Maestro of Clock Management, returned for one final valedictory masterpiece where he just sort of sat there watching the clock tick down for no apparent reason. Those are things that happen in football games, and the ‘Cats took advantage.

Penn State fans got what they wanted. Now they have to watch as their school goes through the skullduggery and subterfuge and rounds of fat new contracts handed out to every other name coach on the market and updates from people who use airplane tracking software that happens when a slot opens up at a big time program like Penn State. Franklin offered Nittany Lions fans a very good, relevant program that was never quite able to be one of the handful of teams capable of winning a national championship, a set of circumstances that is almost precisely calculated to drive fans of very good football programs into the ecstatic throes of madness. The program is now in its Booster Season when the most prominent people involved in Penn State are not coaches or football players but various ATV dealers and fracking magnates and the oily money-demons who are all in private Fire His Ass group chats. All I can hope is that the outcome for everyone involved is very funny.

James Franklin was an enjoyable foil for Northwestern. Northwestern first encountered him at Vanderbilt during one of the series Northwestern regularly schedules with the other private school power conference dregs. The ‘Cats beat Franklin’s Commodores in Evanston in 2012 and, weeks later, Vanderbilt canceled two future games with Northwestern presumably because the SEC added a conference game but as far as I am concerned they canceled the games from a fortified Nashville-area bunker because they were terrified of the power and prowess of Northwestern Wildcat Football.

But Franklin could not escape the ‘Cats for too long. He took over Penn State in 2014, where the Wildcats crushed Penn State as their homecoming opponent (Franklin suffers what I assume is the unique indignity of suffering losses to Northwestern in his first and last homecoming games). The ‘Cats also took Penn State down in 2015 in Evanston, an all time great Franklin Clock Management Game where he failed to take any timeouts and allowed Northwestern to wind the clock down all the way down before Jack Mitchell booted a game-winning field goal, which pointlessly took away any chance his team would get to come back. This man loves to squint at a clock, paralyzed into inaction as events spiral out of his control. He is the Hamlet of college football.

Franklin preparing to recite his famous Two Minutes Left soliloquy

Franklin got his revenge in the next three meetings, none of which were close, but he ends his Penn State tenure with a 3-3 record against Northwestern at Penn State. He has an all-time losing record against the ‘Cats counting his Vanderbilt days. I haven't looked it up, but I'm confident that there's not any coach in the twenty-first century making the kind of money Franklin made that carries a lifetime losing record against Northwestern around. The Wildcats put his ass in the blender.

I have nothing else to say about the Penn State job search other than one of the rumored leading candidates is Matt Rhule. Northwestern plays at Nebraska in two weeks and has the opportunity to do something extraordinarily funny.

SLOP SEASON 

The Penn State win has changed Northwestern’s season. The ‘Cats are now 4-2 with six games remaining. In a year where I looked at the schedule like F. Murray Abraham in Inside Llewyn Davis and said to myself “I don’t see a lot of wins here,” it seems possible if not even likely that the ‘Cats can go bowling. But there’s a landmine in front of them with an obvious tripwire that says “Winless In The Big Ten Purdue.”  

It is not clear to me how good Northwestern is right now. Every single win comes under circumstances that are hard to diagnose: hammering an FCS team and Sun Belt team, sneaking by a discombobulated UCLA team with an interim coach that looked dreadful at the time but now looks decent, and beating a Penn State team that had already caught itself in a bear trap. I think the ‘Cats have looked pretty good since getting wiped away by Oregon and much better than they did in the opening debacle against Tulane. They have developed an identity and will try to run teams over. Once again, the true test for the ‘Cats will be how they look against a bad but feisty Purdue team.

The Big Ten or whatever shadowy cabal schedules football games has done a tremendous disservice to the American people by scheduling this game at the very weird time of 2:00. The weather forecast for Saturday as I am writing this is unpleasant; Northwestern deserves to permanently close its lakeside residency with the first bad weather game we’ve seen in the two seasons at The Lake, an eleven AM slopfest against Purdue in a downpour where fans are sliding around the bleachers in yellow slickers like they are on a capsizing great lakes freighter.  

As great as The Lake has looked on television on more or less 9 picture perfect football days, I am perversely curious as to what it looks like when it is playing in gray, nasty Northwestern Football Weather 

A win on Saturday would already put Northwestern in the hallowed grounds of Bullshit Emergency Bowl Participant territory with five more shots to get an upset. For Purdue, Northwestern probably represents one of their two shots to get a conference win this season along with their upcoming game against Rutgers. I certainly hope Northwestern is ready for Purdue’s best shot in crummy conditions in what may be the last game they are favored in this season and their last home game before having to decamp to an Opposing Fan Convention at Wrigley Field. It will, barring any disasters with the new stadium, be the last time they play on The Lake.

One thing that has come up over and over again as I write this blog is that Northwestern, no matter what they do on the field, is perceived as a bad team like it was still the 1980s and they were losing dozens of consecutive games and not the mediocre to decent team they were for most of the 2000s and 2010s.  The recent and rapid changes to college football have certainly threatened their niche.  Northwestern was slow to adapt to NIL (to be honest, I have no idea what is going on there and do not intend to ever care), the transfer portal is more likely to yank away good players who want to play for a bigger program than deliver stars to the 'Cats, and the expansion of the Big Ten has wrecked the comfy cocoon of the Big Ten West.  I remain skeptical that Northwestern football is something that the Big Ten wants to remain in business with.

And yet, Northwestern is sitting at 4-2.  They are the same team we've been watching overachieve in the Big Ten for the last two decades with a pain in the ass defense, a running game, and (in the best years) a guy who can get open enough, and that has been enough for Northwestern to keep going to the Separate Shaving Device Specifically For Your Privates Bowl until the bottom fell out at the end of Fitzgerald's time.  David Braun seems to keep wanting to do the same thing.  It does not yet seem impossible for the 'Cats to be able to win games in this conference against other low- to mid-tier teams. As much as a win against this year's flailing Penn State team might not look particularly impressive as they absorb the body blows from the rest of the conference, maybe Penn State's loss might not look as bad as everyone assumes just because there's a purple N on the helmet. Maybe David Braun will survive to usher in the silly stadium Northwestern is building for no reason.

Or maybe they'll get shithoused by Purdue and everything will vanish like a mirage and they'll be back in the toilet where every media person (including me) had them before the beginning of the season.  Let's hope this miniature win streak doesn't get washed away in the rain.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

Every night, the Great Commissioner Tony Pettiti and Marco Polo would sit at Big Ten headquarters smoking as the Venetian described the cities of his empire to him.  One night, Pettiti said to Marco Polo, "every night you tell me about the cities in my realm and yet we sit here smoking. You do not ever seem to leave this Rosemont Fogo de Chao." "Commissioner," Marco Polo said while flipping over his meat card, "consider that a city that is not a fixed place in space or in time, but a collection of memories. These memories build and perhaps are more important than bricks, and mortar, and roads. Cities are a collaboration between the living and the dead in simultaneous realms, for without the dead the city is an empty husk, a collection of asphalt and steel imbued without any meaning. Do you have to travel to a city or can you merely rearrange collections of memories until you can see every city?" The Commissioner chuckled, not completely believing what Marco Polo said but also realizing that the alternative to listening to him was to watch a Rutgers football game.

Cities and Transportation IV: Lafaye

There is no way to get to Lafaye from a road or by boat. The only way to enter the City of Rails is on a train. The entire city exists on rails.  Every road, pathway, and alley, and even the floors of large buildings have been torn up and replaced with tracks and elaborate switching systems. Different trains are constantly moving through the city: zippy cars carrying passengers, ponderous freight cars, trucks that have been mounted on rails to move them from the outskirts of the city, hand carts pumped by Pumpoliers in colorful costumes who belt out songs as they pant that are immediately drowned out by the ferocious roar of a passing train.

Some people in Lafeye wear elaborate rail boots with wheels on the bottom. They propel themselves up and down the tracks with large poles that the push from side to side like kayak oars. The traffic as the tracks narrow through tunnels and around rivers matches the pace of the slowest train. There is no way to pass, so Lafayens are patient and unhurried. But not perfectly so.  Every so often, there is a dispute or a scuffle where two people shove each other with their train-oars and try to roll the opponent off the rails entirely where they will be trapped and flailing until a train car with a joist can lift them back onto the rails to continue their journey.

To move around Lafaye requires travel in a predetermined circuit. Everyone is always going the same way. No matter where you thought you wanted to go when you started out in your journey, the city of Lafaye will deliver you to where you are supposed to be. This does not seem to trouble the residents of the city, who exist with a good-humored fatalism.

The defining aesthetic of Lafaye is grotesque. The only art in the city consists of large, hideous statues of people with jutting chins and eyes dilated with madness wielding heavy bludgeoning instruments. These grotesques stand at every corner designed to surprise and terrify unsuspecting visitors. Some are spring-loaded to leap out unexpectedly at passing trains. The Lafayens know where all of them are at all times and they simply smile and smooth their blonde mustaches.

Take a Lafayen out of the city and this person will fall into the throes of confusion. Put them in a sunny plaza and tell them they can walk in whatever direction they want and they will stand still, unable to comprehend the idea. Tell them they can take a car or a boat and they will worry.  They will even regard a street car with some suspicion. Show them stairs and they will panic and fall down.

The Lafayens seem happy with their lot, boarding trains, taking them where they will go, and being deposited with the flow of the crowd or forced to continue riding around the city until the train stops. There is no concern with what to do next. They are content, even if every night they all end up in the same soot-covered train depot where the trains stop and rest for the next morning. The people of Lafaye do too.

Miniature Homecoming

On the first drive of the game, University of Louisiana at Monroe effortlessly ran through the Northwestern defense until a flea flicker left a Warhawk receiver streaking alone towards the endzone. ULM 7 Northwestern 0. The announcer who screams OH NO DISASTER was in my brain yelling “oh no disaster.” Northwestern was about to get torn apart in its most homecoming-ass homecoming game in recent memory in a Sun Belt paycheck game before having to throw itself into the gears of the Big Ten schedule. And then Northwestern rattled off 42 points and won the game easily.

The score is a little deceptive. ULM drove the ball effectively, but missed a field goal badly and got stopped on 4th down deep in Northwestern territory when they had an opportunity to make it an actual game in the first half. But it’s hard to find fault with a Wildcat team that was firing on all cylinders, dominating the lines of scrimmage, and, much like a civilization unlocking a new tech tree in a complicated strategy video game, discovered the new invention Receivers Other Than Griffin Wilde. Stone did not even complete a pass to Wilde until the third quarter, though his top target still piled up 64 yards and a touchdown. 

 

All of those people in the stands are rooting for Northwestern 

The fundamental issue for Northwestern or what I would refer to as the Northwestern Question if I was a muttonchopped nineteenth-century guy, is that it has far fewer fans than almost any FBS program and certainly any “Power Four” program in the country. Northwestern literally has tens of thousands of fans in Chicago and across the country; this is still closer to zero fans than any other team in the Big Ten. As anyone who has ever attended a Northwestern game and attempted to cheer for the home team in a Big Ten game can attest, the stadium is almost always overrun with visiting fans. This was true in Ryan Field (R.I.P. in its gnarly rusted glory), it is true in the tiny lakeside stadium, and it will be true in Patrick Ryan’s billion-dollar Xanadu where you will still have the experience of being tut-tutted by a Michigan fan who is upset that they are only up by eighteen except now you have to pay like two hundred dollars for the experience.

Pondering the Northwestern Question 

It is only during the non-conference schedule where smaller, far-flung teams are trucked into Evanston that you can experience a pure Northwestern home game. At the old Ryan Field, that meant the stadium was about a third full of parents, onlookers lured by cheap tickets, and high school marching bands all lolling in the blazing early September sun. Northwestern’s quirky quarter system meant that most students were not even on campus for the first several games. But in the diminished college football microdose ecosystem on The Lake, those same scattered fans are a dominant force, the vast majority of the capacity crowd. In some perverse way, this homecoming game against a Sun Belt team from northern Louisiana that has never played Northwestern in football before may have been the most overwhelmingly pro-Northwestern homecoming crowd they’ve ever had by percentage, and perhaps ever will have assuming that they revert to playing homecoming games against Big Ten opponents; in that case they are homecoming games because they are being played closest to their opponents’ homes in the greater Chicagoland area.

There is one game left at The Lake. The stadium is still a minor college football wonder. It feels like pretty much every game there has been in picture-perfect weather designed to look gorgeous on television; the game on Saturday was played on an uncharacteristic and frankly alarmingly warm day for October in Chicago. The end zone seats still have a vast and impenetrable network of poles in the way but this year they have oriented the speakers so you can actually understand the announcer when he bellows that it is time to move the chains instead of hearing him as a warbling Peanuts adult and then you have to turn to the person next to you and say “he said it’s time to move the chains.” I even heard the psychologically satisfying Wildcat Growl noise, which I only learned over the weekend is taken from the intro to a Janet Jackson song and not from an effects library entitled Royalty Free Sports Yowls.

The ‘Cats are now 3-2 with no more FCS teams, Sun Belt squads, or reeling Big Ten teams with recently-fired coaches to feast on before heading into the abattoir of the Big Ten. But a funny thing happened to that UCLA win, and it involves their next opponent.

PENN STATE REALLY BEEFED IT

Last week, while Northwestern’s backups were mopping up the remaining ULM players, a remarkable thing was happening in the Rose Bowl. UCLA, thought to be the worst team in the Big Ten coming off a string of embarrassing losses and a surprisingly feisty loss to Northwestern last week, was leading Penn State in the Rose Bowl. The Bruins jumped up to a major lead, led by their superstar quarterback Nico Iamaleava who finally looked like the guy who justified all of the transfer drama and by interim playcaller Jerry Neuheiser, a former UCLA quarterback and son of former UCLA coach Rick Neuheiser and California Hair Guy whose whimsical blonde coiff is as we speak being digitally scanned by a company that specializes in selling comical 1970s-style toupees for the insecure bald guys who refuse to get the Brian Urlacher Hair Treatment. Penn State rallied back and it came down to a fourth down near the UCLA goal line with the game on the line. Penn State farted around and blew it and produced one of the worst losses in the history of the sport. They showed this on the jumbotron at The Lake and I hope Penn State fans are aware that their team suffered the indignity of being guffawed at by a large group of Northwestern fans.

Penn State fans have been in a state of absolute meltdown for the past week. The Lions, returning the core of a playoff team and fortified with expensive transfers, were lauded before the season and started play as the number two team in the country. They looked kind of mediocre against a very weak schedule building up to a major showdown with Oregon at home at night in a famed Penn State Whiteout game that they lost in overtime. The Oregon loss was another blemish against James Franklin in his dismal record against highly-ranked teams, and the letdown from that game plus what Franklin later described as exhaustion from travel in the first known case of an eastern time zone team claiming a Reverse Body Clocks situation climaxed in the historic collapse against a winless UCLA team. 

"They did Reverse Body Clocks," a despondent Franklin says at his press conference. "It was simply too late for our boys." 

So there you have it: a UCLA team that Northwestern dominated in the first half and sort of crapped around with and unnecessarily made the game come down to the closing seconds in the second was gashing through an expensive Penn State defense. The entire thing was extremely funny except for the fact that Northwestern now has to travel to Penn State (as the homecoming opponent, naturally) letting us enjoy a funny transitive victory for a week. 

Do you have any idea what is going to happen in this game? It could be that Penn State is so broken mentally and riven with conflict and hostility radiating from a maniacal crowd that Northwestern could take them out. The Nittany Lions could also be so mad that they take out all of the frustration out on the ‘Cats and annihilate them. After five games, I don’t really have a good handle on how good Northwestern is. They looked abysmal against Tulane, overmatched against Oregon, and took care of business against Western, ULM, and UCLA. Northwestern has looked better and better each week, but all we have learned is that they had a terrible game to open the season and don’t look good against one of the three best teams in the sport.

 

The Playoff Committee punished Penn State for its brutal loss. But they've waited a week, and now they're going to get revenge... on the Northwestern Wildcats

For many years, we watched Northwestern teams that were on paper much worse than their Big Ten peers manage to go into their stadiums and slop them around so badly that the ‘Cats manage to hold onto a win by their fingernails. It is not impossible for this to happen now, although the presumed gap between a Penn State team with its playoff pedigree and Northwestern is theoretically much greater than the usual scenario of Northwestern surprising a Nebraska team that is getting too big for its britches or a Minnesota team with a backup quarterback. Despite the turmoil and horrible vibes in Happy Valley, the ‘Cats are enormous underdogs.

My guess is that Northwestern will go into a Penn State stadium echoing with chants about firing the coach and the Nittany Lions will win comfortably while its fans grouse the entire time in a very annoying way and then get mad that they didn’t win by enough because everyone who roots for a college football team with expectations is functionally a toddler. The Penn State fans you see catastrophizing on the internet about this game have not watched a single second of Northwestern football since the last time they played Penn State and are just using the Wildcats as a vessel for their angst. But I would invite any of them who claim they actually want Northwestern to win because they are that mad at James Franklin and who have a ridiculous Philadelphia/Delaware County accent to immediately send me a recording of themself saying the words “let’s go Caleb Komolafe.”

Or maybe Penn State is in such disarray that James Franklin does some of his world famous James Franklin-Style Clock Management and they lose and then he instantly flees to a waiting blimp to whisk him off to Stillwater and immediately install him in Mike Gundy’s disused Antler Palace.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

At first Marco Polo and the great Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti could not communicate in the same language. Polo was mystified by what Petitti and his court meant when they kept demanding to see a “deck.” But Petitti soon came to understand Polo’s description of his conference’s far-flung cities that he would never see because there are so many of them through a series of gestures: Polo stomping around like an ungainly giant meant that there were fullbacks there, grabbing his head and pretending to angrily undo a chin strap meant that the city featured an inept Big Ten West-style quarterback, squinting into the middle distance meant an overmatched coach on the hot seat. Eventually, Polo mastered the Commissioner’s language and the Rosemont dialect spoken in his court, but after several conversations, he and Petitti soon decided that the gestures told him much more.

Cities and The Future I: Happylis

The city of Happylis is the great unfinished city of the conference. Every person you talk to in Happylis is excited to tell you about the great treasures that the city will have eventually. Every place you stand is the site of a future monument or edifice. And every person has a different idea what it will be. For example, you can stand in an alley and talk to one Happylisian and he will tell you that you are the foundations of what will be a great museum. Run into another person (the Happylisians are very busy) and she will tell you that you are standing where there will be a brilliant spire with decorations that will bathe the city below in different type of light depending on the position of the sun, turning the entire cityscape in its shadows into a psychdelic art project. It is a city that is becoming.

But while the optimism for the future radiates through every person in Happylis, all of them are despondent about the present. Here, any existing museum is a dump, any existing spire is a ruin, and any existing structure is only a placeholder meant to be demolished and paved way for something larger, bolder, and better. Everywhere there are signs on walls depicting what is going to eventually be there and contrasting signs with differing visions. 

On one building, largely considered the finest and most intricate in Happylis, the entire edifice has been covered in placards going up ten or eleven stories where residents have been feuding for decades about whether it is going to be a luxury hotel or an elaborate arena for laser tag; this argument for several stories until, as you reach the upper floors, the placards give way to personal insults about the person who had made the placard immediately below it. For two stories, the placards go back and forth in threats where the placard-writers threaten to fight each other, sending each other hypothetical combat moves. 

“Pig fucker!” one placard reads. “All you do is write on placards. When I see you in the arboretum (which will eventually be replaced with a helipad) I will do drum fills on your skull with my nunchucks.” “Swine-rutter! I have sketched a picture of my elbow on this placard to exact 1:1 scale so you can prepare for it to meet your solar plexus!” No one, as far as I can tell, has ever fought, and both placard-writers seem content that they had made their point.

The one thing everyone in Happylis can agree on is that the current leadership in the city cannot fulfill their future vision. Everyone spends all day with plans to depose the leader, to throw him in an oubilette. Every poster with his picture, warmly smiling on the site of hypothetical construction, immediately becomes a site for outdoor bowel relief for even the fanciest citizens. Those in their regalia, tails flapping in the wind, elegant evening gowns enmeshed in elaborate scarves that are cut to seem like they come directly from the neck, stop immediately and erect elaborate screens that they carry for this purpose to they can befoul pictures of city leadership. “He will not build the sky library,” one of them tells me as he laps up water to assault an etching of the city leader at a bus station. “That maniac wants to build a sky library” another one on tells me as he charges toward the same image.

For the traveler who is cursed to see Happylis as it is, the city is bustling and idyllic. But after spending any length of time there, the traveler begins to see the city becoming. The entire city becomes subsumed to becoming, the present becomes poisoned. The charming neighborhood becomes a slum, the parks a blemish. The streets curdle and disintegrate. Happylis drowns in its prosperous misery.

You Had Better Have a Coach If You Want to Beat Northwestern At The Lake

The titanic Showdown On The Lake between two Big Ten bottomfeeders scraping for a rare conference win turned out to be a tense, exciting game that came down to the final seconds where Northwestern triumphed as the Kings of the Rot Pile, and I was miserable and fuming.

UCLA came out looking every bit as lousy as advertised. The ‘Cats ran the ball on them at will with Caleb Komolafe steamrolling through their defensive line like it was made out of papier mache and Joseph Himon flying around the outside. They let Griffin Wilde run free in the secondary. Northwestern, a generous donor of the ball early this season, did not turn it over. The UCLA offense, led by heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava, moved the ball a little but continually stalled out. At halftime, the ‘Cats were up 17-3 and on their way to what looked like an easy romp against a profoundly crappy team and one of the most convincing wins against a Big Ten opponent in years.

But in the second half, the game took a turn against the ‘Cats. UCLA got another field goal. Northwestern went on a long, punishing, run-heavy drive that took up a large chunk of the third quarter and into the fourth that got them all the way down to a first and goal at the three, but the ‘Cats couldn’t punch it in, and the field goal was blocked. Somehow, Iamaleava took an offense that was doing little other than getting hit in the solar plexus by Robert Fitzgerald and led a quick drive down the field. All the Bruins needed was a field goal to send the game into overtime. The game went from a casual Wildcat romp to the ‘Cats desperately holding onto the lead with the tips of their fingernails.

Calmly watching the second half of the UCLA game 

The ‘Cats could not get the drive they needed to finally put away UCLA and the Bruins got the ball with 86 seconds left to get into field goal range. I was watching this at like 11:00 at night and had spent the entire afternoon in a hermetically sealed internet bubble to avoid knowing what happened and I was quietly losing my mind and pacing around, anxiously fast forwarding from snap to snap. But there was nothing to worry about. UCLA mounted no real threat to score and the clock ran out on them with the Wildcats triumphing and remaining in a strong position to not be the worst team in the Big Ten this season. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be their biggest win.

When you root for Northwestern, you can’t really get mad at a win. You can watch them flail around against a crummy team or win because of a very stupid mental error by another team or because of what a scientific analysis of other teams’ message boards after losing to Northwestern has determined to be an extremely unfair amount of uncalled holding penalties, very nasty holding penalties, it’s a disgrace with the holding penalties and we’re looking into it very strongly. So I am not going to go on the internet and complain that Northwestern did not win a Big Ten game enough in a period of time where they are averaging like one big ten win a year. We got ‘em. The Bruins came into The Lake with their interim coaches and their fucked up Body Clocks, they didn’t come back, and you can go ahead and chisel that W on the Wildcats’ schedule.

 

Welcoming the west coast teams to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone, uh file not found for the Oregon game

Maybe it will mean something. Maybe Northwestern can somehow manage to get another couple of wins from more combobulated Big Ten teams and get in prime position in case ESPN runs out of bowl teams. Maybe it will just mean that they won a Big Ten game on The Lake before they fold it up and put the stadium into storage like a crooked circus.

A HOME-STYLE HOMECOMING

As far as I can tell, schools try to schedule their homecoming games against a team they think they can beat, which is why Northwestern plays what seems like at least three road homecoming games every season. Last year, because Northwestern was desperately trying to assemble the lakeside stadium out of scrap metal and lincoln logs, they scheduled one of the funniest homecoming games possible: a late November Wrigley Field game against future national champion Ohio State in a venue that was at least 90% Ohio State fans. I wrote about this last year, but watching all of the stadium attractions programmed to Northwestern Mode in front of probably the most overwhelmingly away-team heavy crowd I have ever seen at an ostensible Northwestern home game was surreal. These people, I thought incredulously, don’t even know who Corey Wootton is.

You think that's Steve Schnur 

This year, Northwestern has taken the opposite tactic. They’re playing on campus at The Lake against a Sun Belt team from Northern Louisiana. I don’t know about the traveling predilections of ULM football fans, but it seems likely that Northwestern’s homecoming will actually feel like a home game, as much as it can feel like a home game in a stadium so small that the crowd noise on the television broadcast sounds like a golf tournament, and not even one of the rowdy golf tournaments like the Waste Management Open where Scottsdale hospitals spend the day full of cases like “fell into pool of own vomit, cactus” and “the warning from the Cialis commercial.”

I would never lie to the readers of this blog unless for some reason I thought it was funny, so I will admit that I know nothing about ULM football. I am not sure I have ever watched a ULM football game, not even the 2012 AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl. Northwestern has never played the Warhawks; even if a ULM team from the earliest days of its program in the 1930s wanted to get on a steamer and head up the Mississippi looking for midwestern football teams to tussle with, they would have to go through far too many squads and take far too many violent 1930s style tackles from Normal Schools and dental colleges especially tough air force reserve programs before they even got to the Quad Cities.

ULM comes into the game 3-1, with wins against FCS Saint Francis, a UTEP team team winless against the FBS, and conference foe Arkansas State. Their only loss was to Alabama, who wiped them out 73-0 in what was probably an expression of the complete derangement of everyone around that program who have reacted the program merely being “pretty good” by a descent into total madness. Northwestern is heavily favored, but the ‘Cats are also a big target. Any team that comes to Northwestern for a paycheck game sees the Wildcats as a rare opportunity to pin a Power Four pelt on their wall.

It’s hard to measure these things, but ULM is possibly a tougher matchup than UCLA. Sure, they don’t have a million-dollar five star transfer quarterback, but their run defense does not appear to graciously usher tailbacks to the first down marker with linemen spreading garlands of flowers before they ineffectually fall down. It’s clear that this year’s Northwestern team wants to just run the ball at ball people as much as possible with their large offensive line, sit on the clock, and happily punt. For six quarters against Western Illinois and in the first half against UCLA, Northwestern looked dominant doing that. If they have to start trying to move the ball beyond just letting Komolafe run over guys and Himon run around them, things may get precarious.

If Northwestern manages a win, they will be 3-2 heading into a gauntlet of a schedule that includes three ranked teams and a Friday night game in Los Angeles against a dangerous USC team. Northwestern does have some games against fellow Big Ten West Slop Alumni, but I have absolutely no idea how competitive the ‘Cats can be against the likes of Nebraska, Minnesota and Even Purdue this year. Whoever took a reeling, Fickell-addled Wisconsin team off the Northwestern schedule this year must be found and held accountable. I don’t have high expectations for this season, but any shred of hope would die with a loss on Saturday. But I do believe that this year’s homecoming has to be better, if only because I assume ULM doesn’t have some weird self-proclaimed mascot guy running around the stadium in body paint.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES I

Tony Petitti does not necessarily believe Marco Polo when he describes the various cities of the Big Ten. In the life of any Conference Commissioner, there is a pride in conquering vast swathes of new territory and a melancholy and relief of knowing he should give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes in the evening, with the smells of unlimited Brazilian meats waft into his Rosemont headquarters and the traffic from the Jane Addams intensifies into a steady roar of passing cars rather than the grind of stalled traffic, and the din from the Chicago Dogs baseball stadium has died down. Only through the tales from the Venetian explorer could Commissioner Petitti grasp the subtle patterns.

Cities and transportation infrastructure 1: Angelina

Angelina is a great city of roads. The roads form a great circuit around the city and the residents travel through them all day every day to unknowable ends. The city is divided into those who can still remember the purpose for which they set off on the road and those who have forgotten and only travel upon the roads for lack of understanding of what else to do. 

Travelers are constantly broadcasting their complicated routes to other travelers and describing the parts of the city they have heard about– the beaches, the gardens, the tar pits, the elevated street taco place that’s still authentic– they are all constantly explaining these plans and meticulously broadcasting them to other travelers who are making and explaining their own plans. The travelers all take to the airwaves to talk about their routes and then appear on other travelers’ broadcasts to have the same conversation.

Somewhere nestled in the mountains through ribbons of road there is a large, flat, bowl. The sun sparkles on it before setting into a picturesque scene, like a softboiled egg nestled in a purple broth. And yet, the bowl is empty. Travelers discuss games that take place there, they relay explanations of complex plays and detailed descriptions of violent tackles, but no one can verify them since they are not there. They have played an infinite number of games, each one altered by a traveler who has not seen it but has heard of it, the games warp in the retelling and become another game. In some accounts these games turn into perverse spectacle and others turn into farcical comedy, impossible comebacks, the endless, recursive return of onside kicks into touchdowns.

No one has seen the games because no one is there. The travelers of Angelina are circling the stadium in loops simultaneously arriving and departing until it is impossible to determine which is which. It all blurs into the same road.

Cities and waterfowl 1: Eugenia

The citizens of Eugenia complain of neck pain because they are always looking up. Their necks stick that way. Older residents are no longer able to see their own shoes and need to have them placed on by children with more pliant, flexible necks. Toddlers crawl and call out obstacles on the ground to older relatives, an imperfect system since they do not have a keen eye to discern obstacles, but they have been deputized for this important job by being lowest to the ground.

The residents of Eugenia must keep their heads up at all times because the city has a duck. Every day, the man-sized duck flies across the city on a nest of zip lines. The tallest buildings have been repurposed into zip line towers, and this duck zooms around, low to the ground, its webbed feet constantly clattering into unaware heads as distracted citizens are knocked into creeks and merchant stalls filled with fresh fish. Before the Eugenians adopted their signature pose, the duck was knocking scores of people to the ground every day as it zips around toward a purpose that no one has discovered.

Every day, the Eugenia go about their business to the din of the zipline and enter their low-ceilinged buildings where they read and write on their own ceilings and hang their belongings so they do not trip on them. Doctors say it takes five years for outsiders to be able to look up vigilantly enough to avoid the duck and unaware visitors expect to get kicked or belly bumped by a ziplining duck at least three times each day, depending on the duck’s activities.

The people of Eugenia like their duck and are horrified at any suggestion that the duck should be harmed or stopped from maniacally ziplining into the populace. You should get out of its way, they say to anyone who protests. This is simply what the duck does in this city. You should not carry large bundles of eggs or panes of glass. 

The duck is whimsical. Every small joy of looking forward or bending over to smell flowers or even to avoid stepping into a pothole or pile of animal waste is subsumed to the enjoyable spectacle of a duck flying around, hopping from line to line, expertly lining up in front of a baker carrying an enormous layer cake unaware of the duck’s whereabouts. 

No one needs to bicker or spread gossip. The only acceptable topic of conversation in Eugenia is what the duck is up to or speculation about where the duck might be going next or even talking to each other as if they were the duck him or herself even though the duck’s own thoughts are entirely inscrutable. People come to Eugenia with hopes and dreams and fears but they happily subsume them to hopes and dreams and fears about the duck in an annihilating relief.

The duck also has a motorcycle.