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.