LET 'EM OFF THE HOOK

No person has ever better explained the feeling of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory better than former Northwestern head coach Dennis Green when he screamed “they are who we thought they were, and we let ‘em off the hook!” before slapping a microphone stand and stomping away after his Arizona Cardinals blew a Monday night game to the Bears. Northwestern had Michigan down one with a couple minutes left and everything on the line: a bowl berth, a win in the cursed confines of Wrigley Field, a win against the eternally annoying Michigan Wolverines, a win against Michigan in a Wrigley Field completely full of Michigan fans none of whom woke up that day with the thought of losing to Northwestern even occurring to them; and they let ‘em off the goddamn hook. 

In Green's rant he also managed to make the single most accurate and existentially true statement about the Chicago Bears ever recorded. "The Bears are what we thought they were" should be inscribed at Halas Hall.

Perhaps it is not surprising that they lost. Michigan outplayed Northwestern in this game. They successfully bottled up Caleb Komolafe, which is a problem because the Wildcats’ offensive gameplan is a BASIC computer program that says “<10> give ball to Komolafe” and GOTO <10>. On defense, Michigan just kept running the same RPO play where Bryce Underwood would throw to a wide open Andrew Marsh for the best day in their young careers; you can understand why Pat Fitzgerald once got so mad at that play after getting torched by Daniel Jones that he described it tn the most damning phrase a meathead who grew up in the 1980s could muster, calling it “pure communism.” 

Fitzgerald, a well-known amateur scholar of Marx, was of course referring to Marx's lesser-known follow up to Kapital Das LaufenOderPassenOption

But Michigan’s offense made enough silly mistakes to keep the ‘Cats in it. The Wolverines' offense either resembled a smooth yards-chewing machine or a sputtering turnover factory. Northwestern recovered five of them in this game and these takeaways, along with a desperate switch from the oozing across the ground offense to one where Preston Stone just started hucking balls to receivers making insane catches after three quarters of passes getting repeatedly battered down at the line of scrimmage or skipping across the field like a fucking baseball as the announcers constantly reminded us because this football game was actually being played at a stadium where they usually play baseball got Northwestern back into the game and clinging to the smallest lead you're allowed to have.

But when Northwestern just needed one more stop to ice the game and revel in glory, they couldn’t do it. Despite a heroic effort from the defense all game long, Michigan marched down the field one third down at a time, set up a field goal with no time remaining, and blasted it through. Fine. Crown their ass.

I watched the final drive in fast forward, knowing what was coming. It was an obscene and frankly alarmingly beautiful day on Saturday and instead of sitting at the TV getting mad, I chose to spend the time outside and only watched the game after the sun had set. In the third quarter, with Northwestern looking hapless and down 21-9, I decided I had enough and looked up the score and was startled to see that they had come all the way back but fell short. I still didn’t know what happened, but as the game clock ticked down and I saw that it was going to be a walkoff field goal I somehow got mad at something I already knew was going to happen in a strange temporal distortion. A gut punch doesn’t hurt less when you see it coming.

A win on Saturday could have exorcised the demons at Wrigley, ended their losing streak, and stuck it to Michigan, but they lost in heartbreaking fashion. Now they are clinging to a bowl berth with the tips of their fingernails. They need to figure out how to win at this ballpark.

PLEASE STOP RUINING THE CONCEPT OF "WRIGLEY FIELD" FOR ME

Wrigley Field in the summer is one of the country’s great ballparks built for long summer days watching a ballgame slowly unfurl itself over the course of a lazy afternoon. But in the fall, the ivy turns into sticks, the clouds form a gray ceiling over the park, and Northwestern loses a football game. As much as I enjoy watching baseball there, I have come to dread Northwestern games at Wrigley ever since Mikel Leshoure put 350 rushing yards on them while players were barred from using one of the endzones because it was a brick wall. Northwestern has never won a game here. It is the graveyard of Wildcat football.

This is a problem because if the ‘Cats want to achieve their most important goal imaginable and qualify for a crummy-ass bowl game they are going to need a win against Minnesota in this cursed stadium or have to beat a very good Illinois team in Champaign. In my expert football opinion, they probably should have considered simply winning the Michigan game.

Minnesota is in theory a less daunting opponent than the last two ranked behemoths on the schedule and even Nebraska. They are 6-4, but winless on the road, and, with the exception of a 24-6 beatdown of the Huskers, have gotten walloped by good teams and squeaked by the sagging lower middle of the Big Ten. I was very surprised to see that the oddsmakers have Northwestern favored in this game, which might be the first time that’s ever happened at Wrigley.

How much of a “road game” will this be for a Minnesota team that is inept outside of the Twin Cities? I expect Minnesota fans to flood Wrigley like all Big Ten opponents, but the fact that Northwestern has sent me several emails offering discounted tickets to this game and the fact that the vibes for Minnesota seem kind of lousy this year– their fans have become grimly resigned to the sobering reality that other than beating a hobbling Wisconsin team that is playing like they just got caught in a bear trap and are waiting for Walker Texas Ranger to punch them in the face, a win against the ‘Cats would be their biggest and most impressive of the season– means that it is possible that Wrigley looks less like its festooned in maroon wallpaper and more like a post-Labor Day afternoon crowd when a 75-win Cubs team is playing the Reds for fourth place in the NL Central.

When you're going to see some green seats in the upper deck 

Regardless of what happens on the field, another Wrigley game has guaranteed more tortured baseball references from announcers. I would hope that someone has told the announcing crew that this is the fifth Northwestern Wrigley game in three years and Wildcat fans simply cannot listen to a guy say “he threw that like a dang shortstop” one more time. I just looked up who the announcers were to see if maybe there was a repeat crew that had used up all of their baseball material but this game has been swept to the dregs of the Big Ten Network and, while I do not want to alarm readers, if you are watching this on television you are inviting Matt Millen to be a part of your Saturday. Maybe that announcer choice, along with the offer of low-priced ticket-and-hotdog combos are part of the effort to get people to this game and not watching on TV.

I would like to think that the fact that Northwestern hasn’t really been blown out except against Oregon and in the second half against USC only after blowing a touchdown and being victimized by some of the most shameful punt-chicaneries ever inflicted on an honorable football team means that they will easily bulldoze an equally mediocre Minnesota team, but of course that is wishful thinking. This is a Big Ten West Legacy Game in a very silly place to play football and Minnesota and Northwestern are evenly matched. Northwestern needs this win like water for a realistic shot at a bowl game capping off a vastly more successful season than anyone imagined, but Minnesota needs this one only slightly less.

The formula for the Northwestern this year is simple. They need to run the ball on long, agonizing drives that speed up the game on offense and avoid big plays on defense. They will give up that same goddamn sideline route on third down constantly and if the opposing quarterback can hit that pass, the ‘Cats will be in big trouble. It’s the same Hope A Big Ten West Quarterback Is A Big Ten West-Style Lummox strategy that got them to so many Ticket City-style bowl games in the 2010s. 

Being a football fan is a goofy enterprise even if you are rooting for a big time team with real ambitions. It is much harder to explain the concept of getting insanely mad that a team that will never actually win anything could miss an opportunity to play in the America’s Gizzard Producers’ Innards Bowl in front of 3,900 people against a team that is somehow simultaneously in two conferences because of an administrative error. Please let them just get this out of the way before they get down to the much more serious and important Hat Business.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

The Great Commissioner brought his foreign envoy Marco Polo to the seat of his empire’s greatest crown jewel. It sits at the nexus of all known types of transportation with rail lines and great highways and even airplanes landing majestically overhead. He takes them through a complex of inns and sites of great exhibitions of goods from lands that even Marco Polo has never heard of. It is ringed by portraits of an unsettling man with an uncanny head of hair impossible to exist in nature. 

The Great Commissioner takes Marco Polo to the seat of his empire, an ornate palace that shares a parking lot with a meat restaurant. It is across the highway from a minor league baseball stadium named for a hot dog where the ketchup mascot is regularly imprisoned and humiliated to reflect the tastes of the populace who abhor that condiment. 

“Tell me, Marco Polo,” the Commissioner says. “In all of your travels and all of the cities you have told me about, could you ever envision a city like this?”

“No,” Marco Polo said. 

Cities and Language V: Minna 

One arrives in the great city of Minna by road or perhaps even by the river through the gates and marvels at the enormous inflatable buildings and structures ingeniously designed to shield its residents from the harshest of the elements. The city is prosperous and tidy as residents bustle around conducting their business. It is only when a visitor attempts to speak to a Minnan that they will be utterly befuddled by how they communicate in this city.

The residents here speak in an almost impenetrable argot of slogans and acronyms. For example, a visitor simply attempting to greet a stranger and perhaps ask for directions will be told “Board the Train!” and when they ask for further clarification being told that “train” is an acronym that stands for “take risks and invalidate naysayers” before the person will chestbump the visitor. 

Even those practiced in Minna-speak can get tripped up. An experienced guide who spent a happy childhood in Minna and then left to pursue studies in other parts of the Commissioner’s vast kingdom before returning to serve as an interpreter for visiting dignitaries suffered a humiliating breakdown while trying to convey the meaning of G.A.R.G.A.N.T.U.A.N. somewhere around the second G. Even years later he could barely get through the story without holding back tears. “That is too many letters for a motivational acronym,” he said. “A child could see that.”

Despite the bizarre and oblique methods of speaking by telling each other to “readying hard means going hard” when “h.a.r.d.” is an acronym that in some tortured way ends up meaning trying hard, the people of Minna understand each other. There is a sort of labored poetry to their words. Unfortunately, this type of speech can lead to problems. I once witnessed a man greet a friend with “maximum drive means driving your max” and the two men disagreed with whether the V in drive stood for Velocity or Vicissitude. The two men came to blows on a sidewalk, pulling each other’s dri-fit quarter-zips over their heads exposing the shirt and tie they wear underneath and pummeling each other until passersby urged them to be K.I.N.D. (kindness is never donnybrooking).

The residents are kind and welcoming, largely because they are happy to sit down for hours and explain what their various sayings and acronyms mean. They are excited because it has taken their ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years to compile such a beguiling and twisting language that follows its own logic, even if it is kind of silly. But because they cannot speak without their comforting store of aphorisms and sayings, every conversation mushrooms into an even more impenetrable nest of references. I recommend staying away from Minna at all costs.