Last year, Northwestern went into Beaver Stadium for Penn State’s homecoming game while every fan in the stands spent the entire game simultaneously doing the insane laugh Charlton Heston does in the beginning of Planet of the Apes when he is telling the other astronaut who landed with him that everyone they knew has been dead for thousands of years. Northwestern won 22-21, and flighthawarethirsty Penn State fans got their wish to pay James Franklin the GDP of a micronation to go away. The Nittany Lions had the opportunity to avenge their homecoming humiliation and to ruin the opening of Northwestern’s gazillion dollar palace and reestablish themselves as a Big Ten contender after an embarrassing last-second loss to floundering Wisconsin. They did not do that.
Northwestern obliterated Penn State. The Nittany Lions had no answer for Northwestern’s running game as the ‘Cats carved them up for an astonishing 413 yards on the ground. Chip Kelly baffled them with archaic wing T formations, triple options, and wide receivers positioned like they are playing Canadian football. After years of hapless offensive performances, Northwestern’s new coordinator was doing bits. It is possible that Caleb Komolafe is still shrugging off hapless Penn State defenders and Joseph Himon is sprinting his way towards Happy Valley to start juking the faculty and Board of Trustees.
The Penn State defensive line after getting repeatedly run over
The Wildcat defense, down three starters in the secondary, stifled Penn State and added two interceptions on beleaguered quarterback Rocco Becht. Becht, an Iowa State legend who followed coach Matt Campbell to Penn State, has not had the success he had in Ames this season. As a public service to my readers, I have tried to tap into Penn State Thought by visiting the most deranged message boards I can find, the ones where you can tell everyone posting there is insane because they indulge my favorite message board convention of referring to the coach by a C followed by his initials– the C stands for Coach, and they feel they must give him his title like he is a minor Russian nobleman in a Tolstoy novel.
It turns out that Penn State fans are not happy with the work that His Excellency Viscoach Matt Campbell is doing over there, and they are not thrilled with the retinue of players he brought from Iowa State. The Nittany Lions host USC this week, a mirror program where fans are at late stage James Franklin levels of frustrated with their own coach in the type of misery bowl that happens to very good teams whose fanbases have been driven completely insane by the curse of being only very good for an extended period of time.
Fortunately for Penn State fans, someone was thoughtful enough to counterprogram this game with a Virginia Tech game where James Franklin himself was performing a classic blowing the game masterclass against Pitt that ended with a field goal that floated high above the goalposts and required numerous tedious replay reviews to figure out that it missed.
Controversial calls in Big Ten games go to a very funny mission control-style Big Ten Review Command Center where this year television broadcasts are playing the conversations between the officials on the field and in the center as part of the impossible task of trying to find a way to stop fans from being mad. The Big Ten replay review center is in the Big Ten's Rosemont headquarters, infamously next to a Brazilian meat restaurant chain, and I think they should get a sponsorship deal where an official immediately flips over a meat delivery card and gets untold amounts of beef delivered to the workstation station when announcing after a twenty minute deliberation over a catch that it "stands as called."
It has not been a particularly great couple of weeks for Pennsylvania sports. It started with mummified quarterback Case Keenum being unwrapped for the first time in centuries in order to wreak havoc on the Eagles’ secondary in a Monday night horror show. Then, Penn State got dismantled partly at the hands of former Eagles coach Chip Kelly, who many Eagles fans still seem to be mad at for some reason. The Phillies were eliminated from the playoffs on the same night that Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers lost to the debaculous Cleveland Browns while Rodgers screamed at his coaches and stewed on the sidelines like someone had turned off his youtube video about Medicinal Dirts right when they were getting to the good part about how the Medical Establishment is once again suppressing Dirts Research. Then on Sunday, the Eagles blew a lead to the Rams that climaxed with fans throwing things at the Rams’ coaching box and then going on their beloved local newscast and cutting professional wrestling promos about how mad they are about the Eagles, which seems to be such an innate part of Philadelphia civic identity I assume that all Philadelphia students have a special unit in sixth grade about saying to a reporter “I’d like to throw this coach in a snow blower.”
I would hope to hear someone with a Philadelphia Yelling At The News Accent say "oh no, it's Caleb Komolafe"
Northwestern has consistently had a good defense under David Braun, but the emergence of an actual offense has them looking like a serious team in the Big Ten. This is partly because the Big Ten is in a state of early season turmoil. While heavyweights Ohio State, Indiana, and Oregon (after an embarrassing non-conference stumble) look steady, expected contenders Penn State and Michigan, in their first year with new coaches, look wobbly and inert. Illinois, steady under Bret Bielema, has fallen to Purdue at home, allowing the Boilermarkers their first Big Ten win and their first road win of any kind in three years, a stat I could not believe when I saw it. The last time Purdue fans saw their team win a Big Ten game, they had not yet been defeated for the first time by Boo Buie. Bielema spent the entire fourth quarter looking like he had just been removed from a hot dog roller. Northwestern is right in the roiling middle with jabroni-killing Nebraska, blood-smeared Minnesota, resurgent Wisconsin, and Bob Chesny’s robust UCLA.
Northwestern has looked credible on three consecutive national TV broadcasts, they are getting the attention of the types of national football writers who would never deign to mention them unless something horrible has happened, they have attracted some very minimal and premature potential outsider Playoff hype; I don't want to get too excited here, but Northwestern is Also Receiving Votes.
On Saturday, Northwestern welcomes Ball State to the new stadium for homecoming. Northwestern appears to be a pretty good Big Ten team; Ball State looks like one of the worst teams in the MAC. The Cardinals have not come within 13 points of an FBS opponent this season, although one of those games was them taking a large sum of money to get whaled on by Ohio State. I am not going to pretend to know anything about Ball State football this season, so I am passing on this in-depth scouting video of them:
Northwestern should win this game unless something goes horribly wrong. That can happen. We’ve seen a Northwestern team that went to the Big Ten Championship Game lose a very stupid game to a historically crappy Akron team. We’ve seen a team that went to a bowl game fail to score a touchdown at home to Illinois State. But this also looks like it could be the best Northwestern team we’ve seen in awhile, and I wouldn’t mind if they just ran over Ball State. I don’t expect a legion of Ball State fans at this game, and I think Northwestern will manage to have an actual home game on homecoming.
It is the fifth game for Northwestern, and the first they are playing during the day. For some reason the game is at the unholy time of 11:30am. We’ll see what the stadium looks like in sunshine without the blaring purple lights. We’ll also see if the Nite ‘Cats have somehow developed schedule-derived vampirism that makes them unable to tackle in direct sunlight (I apologize for this but I can't help myself: Bloody Clocks). It is possible that Ball State could be a classic trap game, but that would only make sense if the next game on the schedule was an emotional maelstrom that would make everyone involved with it on both sides completely psychotic.
STADIUM ARCANIUM
While Northwesten’s offensive line was busy burying Penn State’s defense in the new Ryan Field turf, the broadcast became an infomercial for the new stadium. We saw glamor shots of the field from drones, the sideline reporter was dispatched to rove around the stadium pointing out various places where you can buy the same crappy nachos that you’ve always been able to buy at Northwestern games– despite touting the Great Chicago Food Festival as a Premium Food Experience, it was gratifying to see excitable meme announcer Robert Griffin III leap out of the booth so he could consume a classic desiccated Ryan Field hot dog-- and the sundry features of the new facility. There was plenty of footage of the Ryan family, including the swaggering and curiously Pat McAfee-hued Pat Jr. swaggering around the $875 million dollar Football Stadium Experience.
As baffled as I am by the need for Northwestern to attempt to be on the forefront of college football stadium technology, I have to admit the thing looked cool on television. The student section is as close as it is possible to the field without the Big Ten disallowing the use of that endzone. This effect, I think, will be similar to the Welsh-Ryan renovation where a relatively small number of students hover over the court closely enough to be a legitimate menace to opposing teams. The partial canopy over the stands and the practice of encouraging the students to kick the bleachers behind them like they are minor league baseball player Izzy Alcantara ensuring that the catcher would not prevent him from charging the mound seems like it will lead to a loud, raucous atmosphere beyond what you could find in a fucking library. The game certainly looked and sounded like a genuine Northwestern home game on TV. The question is what happens when Wisconsin or Iowa show up and all of that noise is blasted directly at the Wildcats’ offense.
After all of the fooforaw about the marching band’s pregame, the broadcast showed what Ryan Field Entertainment thought was better– it was a student dressed in a t-shirt with the new scary cat eyes motif t-shirt wailing on an electric guitar while playing along with a recording of Thunderstruck. This was funny to me both because I spent a small portion of last week’s post writing about the program’s AC/DC addiction (they also play “TNT” after turnovers and encourage the crowd to Oi along with the track with a jumbotron Oi graphic) but also because it reminded me of a podcast where the comedian Todd Glass spends like a half hour evangelizing about his insane practice of hiring a live drummer to play along with a DJ and sort of crashing a wedding where the bride and groom took his suggestion and then arguing with a wedding planner to ensure the drummer was in the proper place.
Northwestern is fortunate that the stadium opening seems to coincide with the most exciting team in years. They are hoping that curiosity about the stadium and excitement around the program is enough to get people to buy tickets that are by Northwestern standards extremely expensive. But if the stadium is an $875 million dollar bet that they can make anyone care about Northwestern football, they've got their work cut out for them. I hope it works, but everything I know about this program tells me it is more likely that they built a Premium Visiting Fans Experience.
FICTION SECTION
This year in college football, the theme is everyone suing each other all of the time. Today's short story called Typing The MAC.
The sound of vacuum jolted him awake as it rolled past his office door. It was 2:30 in the morning, and he had dozed off with a file folder spread open on his ample belly. Gene Blimp had been up all night waiting for final approval on this case after months of work. He just needed to get the call to press “send” on the email, but someone was dawdling. Blimp looked at his watch, sighed, and reached for the bottom desk drawer where he had a bottle of something to help pass the time until someone would let him make Sacramento State officially part of the MAC.
There is a certain delicacy in these types of operations. Blimp was nineteen years in acquisitions before getting in the football business. The men in big pinstripe suits who get on calls where they yell things like “we will merge and acquire your ass” or “guess what’s getting hostile take-overed: your ass” or “your ass is grass and I’m the cure”-- that was his old boss Geraldo Fourmillion– got the attention, but it took lawyers like Gene Blimp hours behind the scenes maneuvering between the words and knowing how to stay just below the radar of the SEC so that the suit men could get in their ass-centered bloviations.
Now Blimp was in the world of college football. Conferences were doing acquisitions and raids. There was a different SEC to worry about. He enjoyed it. This was a world almost without rules, and his ruthless pen could slice a school into a different football universe. Hell, he could turn on the TV and see it every week. He was not a sports fan, but he liked turning his TV on at 12:30 at night to one of the weird sports channels hidden in the cracks of his cable package and seeing some volleyball team bizarrely transported across the entire country because of work he did disentangling a program from one conference and ensnaring them in another just by moving around some clauses and determining who had to send a check. One athletic director even had the team sign a ball for him after he got them into the Mountain West. Where was that ball? Maybe he’d toss it around to himself. He stood up to go root through a cabinet that had papers falling off of it and sprouting like vines into piles on the floor, but he was a little wobbly on the feet. Maybe a little too much passing the time, Blimp thought.
He started to tunelessly sing the Moving To The MAC song that had been secretly written specifically for this occasion.
He heard a key enter his door lock. “Don’t worry about it, Tripe,” Blump said. Tripe was the night janitor. But the person who came through the door was not Tripe. It was a tall, thin man in an old fashioned flannel suit. He was carrying a dripping overcoat; the rain must have started up again. The man closed the door behind him. He stood ramrod straight, and his face was drawn so taught that Blimp could see his cheek muscles undulating as the man clenched and unclenched his jaw. The man’s hair plateaued into a perfect flattop except the middle which stuck straight up and formed a smaller flattop like a mesa rising in the middle of the desert. “Blimp,” the man said.
“Can I help you?” Blimp said. He tried to suppress a shudder. The suit man exuded a faint air of menace. Blimp was calmly searching his office for some sort of weapon, seeing how quickly he could lunge for a stapler while knowing he had zero chance of pulling it off.
“Yes, I believe you can,” the man said. “I’m R. Frank Gastromancy. I’m here from Football. I know you’re sitting here waiting for approval to send an email putting Sacramento State in the MAC. Well I’m here to tell you you’re not going to get that approval. You’re not going to send that email.”
Blimp was not easy to rattle. He had spent decades with Geraldo Fourmillion and the various Geraldos Fourmillion he dealth with bursting into his office berating him, screaming at him, and uttering all manner of unmentionable ass-related threats, but something about this Gastromancy character unnerved him. Perhaps it was that he didn’t seem to blink. “Where did you say you were from? The NCAA?” Blimp said.
“No, I’m not from the NCAA,” Gastromancy said. “I’m not here to find out if you bought a kid a hamburger. I told you where I’m from. I’m from Football. Let me ask you a question. Who runs college football?”
Blimp nervously buttoned and unbuttoned the middle button on his shirt. “Well, it’s hard to say. I’d say you’ve got the schools, especially the big ones. You’ve got the conferences of course, mostly the two big conferences pushing everyone around. And you’ve got the TV networks.”
“Interesting. So let me ask you this,” Gastromancy said. “Do you think this loose conglomeration of schools, conferences, and TV networks all with similar though distinct interests, are running college football? That his billion dollar enterprise is just floating around being poked by different people on the shore with long poles? Impossible. Stupid and unwieldy. Liable to lead to all sorts of bizarre changes. Like Sacramento going to the MAC.”
“I already told you where I’m from, Blimp. I’m from Football. Within the sport, there are gears moving that you can’t see. Organizations within organizations. We’re hidden in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and we’re in plain sight. We have one member who is a vice-provost but because of us is far more powerful than the provost herself.
Look around you. The whole sport seems like it’s in chaos. We need someone to reel everything in. They’ve got kids getting paid left and right. People like you trying to move teams around. It disgusts me. This is college football. This isn’t for the longhairs and the freaks. They’ve got their own sport. The one with the frisbee. They call it ultimate because of the Whammo corporation. And they’ve got the other one where they throw the frisbees like golf. Let them have that, all that frisbee stuff. This is football, Blimp. This is Coca-Cola. This is Chevy Truck month. Of course there’s someone taking charge.
You know, I admire your work. You’re discreet. Quiet. It’s not easy to move an entire athletic department to another conference. These people love to talk. No one gossips more than football people. But they have no idea who you are, do they? They don’t know some industrious snake in his little snakehole office is sending their teams out to Delaware because some athletic director thinks it’ll make ‘em a buck. That they’ll suddenly on FUBO Regional Action Plus and somehow that means they’ll be Ohio State.
Well, this time it’s not happening. Sacramento State is not going to the MAC. We’ll let them have football. Sure. Make those guys get on a plane and go get buffeted around Toledo for a few hours if they want to do that. But you’re not moving that whole conference to the Mid America. What else have they got there? Water Polo? That’s not Mid American to me. All that treading water. That’s European decadence. You can keep that in California. I don’t even know if the MAC even has water polo. That’s none of my business.
So I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. I know it’s late, but you’re going to sit here and you’re going to rewrite those documents, every clause, and you’re going to get everything but football out of the Mid America conference and then you’re going to send in that contract signed, done, and dusted. You understand me? Blimp?"
Blimp took a breath. “I can't just do that. I have people I report..."
“You don’t seem to understand, Blimp,” Gastromancy said. I’m the boss here. You answer to me now. You answer to Football.” He put his hands on the desk and leaned over until his face was even with Blimp. He still was not blinking. Waves rippled across his cheeks. “Start typing, Blimp,” he said.
Blimp started typing as Gastromancy stood over him gargoyleically. The phone rang. “Don’t you dare pick that up. Keep typing,” he said. The phone rang and rang and rang.
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