Northwestern Finally Conquers Pizza City

As a football expert, if you were to ask me what the turning point of the 2025 Game Above Sports Bowl was, I would point out that it was when Central Michigan turned the ball over on three consecutive plays on their own 30 yardline and allowed Northwestern to score on all of them, going up 21 points in a matter of like 4 minutes of game time. As someone who watches a lot of football, I can tell you that instantly losing 21-0 is something that most teams try to avoid.  That is just my learned opinion.

 

This one's for all the Games Above Sports 

But that run didn't happen until late in the second quarter.  Until then, both teams were playing to a hideous draw.  Northwestern was unable to get its gameplan going, which was to have its offensive line sit on the Chippewa defenders so Caleb Komolafe could run through them, and Central Michigan, which features a similar run-heavy game, kept stalling out as well, treating the crowd unwatchable garbage football.  But once Central Michigan completed its turnover bonanza, which included an incredible one-handed diving interception from Braden Turner on of the Chips' running quarterback (one of the three quarterbacks they deployed in this game), a strip sack on Central's passing quarterback, and a fumbled handoff on their next offensive snap.  Turner also scored on a fumble recovery in the second half.  

With Central Michigan running the all Oh No Disaster What A Bad Idea offense, the Wildcat offense was put in an easy position to score.  Preston Stone once again locked on his top target Griffin Wilde, but even though Central Michigan knew where the ball was going, they could not cover him on the way to 98 receiving yards, two touchdowns, and a game MVP trophy.

Northwestern was heavily favored in this game and delivered. They have now won six bowl games in a row. For a team that spend more than sixty years just trying to win a bowl game, it is a remarkable achievement, even if it is only in the last 25 years or so that bowl games have expanded to the point that they can reasonably expect to be in one.   

The Game Above Sports Bowl does not enjoy the gimmicks from other teams because its sponsor is a vague and, in my opinion, suspect investing operation shrouded in mystery; David Braun did not get a giant jug of investment opportunities dumped on him at the end of the game.* It is a shame that this is allowed to happen. Bowl games, led by the deranged cannibal rites from the Pop Tarts bowl and the Duke's Mayo Bowls promise to cover the winning coach with a viscous goo, have been leaning more into goofy gimmicks. Even the Pinstripe Bowl connected to the stentorian New York Yankees, the least fun organization in the history of professional sports that only last year allowed players to have beards subject to team review, ended with a barrel of grass clippings thrown over the winning coach at the behest of sponsor Bad Bow Mowers. It is time to put the Detroit bowl game back in the rightful hands of Little Caesar's and allow the Little Caesar Guy to announce any replay challenge reviews by displaying a dramatic thumbs down or say "overturned! overturned!" in the Pizza Pizza voice.  If the greater college football world is trying to tell us that these games don't matter in the shadow of the expanding playoff, they should be as silly as possible.

Imagine if David Braun got hit by a barrel of lukewarm pepperoni, that's what we're fighting for 

*Looking through the Daily Northwestern's photo archive from this game, it also appears that Northwestern players were handed fake newspapers printed on like large sheets of printer paper from the "Ford Field News" whose headlines tout them as Game Above Sports Champions, which is one of the funniest bowl game things I've ever seen. 

Northwestern finishes with a winning record surviving a tough schedule in the new Big Ten. They will abandon The Lake to play at their new gazillion dollar stadium. The 'Cats showed that, for now, their unwatchable defense-forward football can keep them afloat in the Enormous Ten.  David Braun is not going anywhere. And now they're going to try something they hadn't tried since the early 2000s and do offense, or at least try to do it with the most famous guy they could get.

THE MOST PROMINENT CHIP OR BOBBY AVAILABLE

On December 30th, news broke that Northwestern was hiring offensive mastermind Chip Kelly.  It came out of nowhere. ESPN's Big Ten reporter Adam Rittenberg wrote that Northwestern was looking for an "offensive reset" after the bowl game, which in cryptic football newsbreaker argot hinted that they were planning to move on from Zach Lujan, but moving on so quickly with one of the most well-known coaches in football was a shock. 

Chip Kelly first came on my radar in 2006 when he was offensive coordinator of FCS New Hampshire, which came into Ryan Field and absolutely embarrassed the 'Cats 34-17.  The next year, he became the offensive coordinator at Oregon and ushered in the Ducks' lightning-fast attack as the program ascended into a national championship contender and standard bearer for Nike's Garish Uniforms Department where I assume a group of 14 year-olds were given unlimited supplies of Surge and a selection of neon highlighters.  Kelly took over Oregon and then parlayed his success into a disastrous run with the Philadelphia Eagles, whose deranged fans are still mad at him; I imagine any Northwestern fans who are also psychotic Eagles fans had mixed feelings about the hiring. Kelly then floated west to UCLA to middling UCLA-style results, then inexplicably quit his job as head coach to move to offensive coordinator at Ohio State where he helped win a national championship. He then moved to a partial season with the Las Vegas Raiders, where he was fired eleven games into the season.

On the one hand, Kelly's work has not been spectacular the last few years.  How you feel about this depends on how much weight you give to his schemes at Ohio State, which boasts an overwhelming talent advantage over almost every opponent it faces, and his disastrous time in Vegas, which can be dismissed as an omni-dysfunctional mess where Pete Carroll was running a Belichikian Sons-Based Coaching Staff that is not the type of thing you want to see-- there are few more ominous signs for a football team than the activation of multiple sons (that may have shaped Kelly's move to Evanston-- according to reports, Kelly interviewed with North Carolina before Belichick decided to hire fellow geriatric sex guy Bobby Petrino).  As a Northwestern fan, I also can't shake the Groucho Marx-style feeling that any big name person who wants to be associated with the program is only coming here because he is so tarnished and bereft of opportunities to play at a school where you don't have to use a silent count at home games. Maybe Chip Kelly is simply not good at coordinating offenses anymore.

 

Chip Kelly's wikipedia photo looks like the photo on the classic "Whaler Sandwich 'Not Sitting Too Good' With Area Man" Onion article 

On the other hand, have you watched Northwestern football for the past 15 years?  This has consistently been one of the worst, most unwatchable offenses in the sport. Under Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern leaned into Iowa-style toilet football, with an emphasis on punting and doing neck-roll linebacking to opponents on the way try to win games 17-13. Chip Kelly does not have to be an Oregon-style offensive mastermind to be successful at Northwestern; even just getting this offense to be like in the top 75 would be a triumph. It would be something Mick McCall, Mike Bajakian (who will join Pat Fitzgerald at Michigan State as quarterback coach despite being in charge of one of the worst offenses in FBS at UMass as a reward for standing tall against the Northwestern administration in support of his pro-Fitzgerald wardrobe) and Zach Lujan were unable to do.

 

Mike Bajakian looking exactly like he is a vampire that is reclining in a coffin only able to wake up when it's time to run the absolute shittiest screen pass you've ever seen that's called Right 27 Bleh Bleh Bleh 

If anything, Chip Kelly adds a new wrinkle to Northwestern football: a Known Football Guy. Chip Kelly has been around forever, he has been riding the coaching carousel like a 1930s hobo traveling the rails, and he is a person that football fans have an opinion about. It is fun to have that kind of guy around and makes Northwestern feel like a part of the teeming universe of college football, which is rich in larger-than-life personalities. Northwestern has not participated in the bizarre intrigue and and rosters of itinerant goatee guys who travel the country screaming at different groups of young people that comes with hiring a head coach in the twenty-first century; the last coach hired through a normal process was Randy Walker in 1999 when you couldn't even track flights on the internet. Granted, you usually don't want to be in business with one of these Famous Football People because they are hucksters, maniacs, weirdos, and unpleasant dipshits, but it certainly expands the horizons of what is possible here if they are hiring Chip Kelly even if he is at the nadir of his career.

The Kelly hiring also signals that Northwestern seems to at least realize that if it wants to stay a part of big-time college football it can't rely on the fact that it happened to be in the right conference in the late nineteenth century. College football right now is ruthless and immune to its own history in a relentless pursuit of every last dollar possible. Northwestern is in one of the two most powerful conferences by dint of historical accident, and to me it does not feel like the Big Ten will necessarily want to be in the Northwestern football business as it consolidates its power with the SEC and continues to hunt the big game of power programs. The Big Ten just destroyed the Pac Ten without hesitation. Northwestern is at least acting like they need to start throwing around some money and not just at buildings if they want to keep sucking on that TV money teat.  Whether this will be successful or is even a plausible or worthwhile goal for a program that, no matter how many Motor City Bowls it dominates, remains virtually irrelevant to the college football landscape, is a question for another day.

Kelly will ultimately be successful if Northwestern is able to attract and retain good players. The 'Cats have had mixed results with portal quarterbacks and have not had a consistent year-to-year starter since Clayton Thorson.  Otherwise all of the Chips Kelly you can throw at the program won't be enough.

QUICK MEN'S BASKETBALL NOTES

Northwestern basketball is in a period of transition right now. Boo Buie is gone. Brooks Barnhizer is in the literal National Basketball Association. Matthew Nicholson is throwing elbows in the British Superleague, a league where teams have names like the "London Lions," and "Caledonia Gladiators," but he plays for a team called simply "Manchester Basketball." That's what you're getting. Manchester basketball, that.

Would it surprise you to learn that the logo for Manchester Basketball is in fact a basketball? Incidentally, I went to a British basketball game in London many years ago when it was called the British Basketball League during a period listed in its Wikipedia Page under the heading "Tougher Times 2002-2012" when the venue was a high school gym. The London Lions (not sure if it was the same team I saw) now play in an actual arena built for the Olympics, so hopefully things are looking up

The team still revolves around Nick Martinelli's herky-jerky throwback game. Martinelli seems to be leaning into this, styling himself like a guy who has installed a flux capacitor in a trans-am and arrived at Welsh-Ryan arena ready to terrify players with an array of scoop shots, jump hooks, and post moves that none of his peers can prepare for except for getting hushed warnings from their grandparents. He remains one of the top scorers in the Big Ten.

If you see Martinelli doing this, it's already too late 

Outside of Martinelli, though, this is a new group. There are so many new and young players especially at the guard position that it seems like Chris Collins has trouble keeping track of all of them. There's transfers Jalen Reid, the Wildcats' smallest player since the days of buzzer-beating hero Michael Jenkins, and Arrinten Page, a well-traveled center who is the most dynamic big man I can remember the 'Cats putting on the floor. And then there's a constellation of others including a tik tok star, a highly-rated freshman forward with a deadly baseline game, and a guy I watched in a blowout against Cleveland State just started taking the most preposterous three point shots I've ever seen and run to go high five the student section in the middle of the game before pulling up his shirt and yelling. 

This team does not seem particularly good right now. While it is fun to watch Martinelli ply his dark arts around the basket and Reid throw it up to Page for dunks, the team is really struggling to rebound and play defense. They miss Nicholson's imperious size (this is a very small group outside of Page) and Barnhizer throwing himself around with reckless abandon and never leaving the court unless he needed to get opened up by his cut man on the bench.  The Big Ten remains a remorseless meat grinder of a conference. 

But I've been enjoying watching Collins try to piece together rotations that fit and see if they can frustrate some Big Ten teams.  Eventually, I think this group can grow into the shove-based basketball Northwestern specializes in, and I'm enjoying trying to pinpoint which of the new players will eventually bloom into someone who will really annoy Big Ten opponents. If anything, it is fun to watch Nick Martinelli put players into the blender under the basket before he is selected in the 1977 ABA draft.

What I Told You There Was A Game... Above Sports?

Well, they didn’t win the Hat. They played in a the middle of a snowstorm that required the grounds crew to replow the field at halftime like they were zamboniying an ice rink and they had to do the thing where they plow the yardlines into the field and Illinois was only able to clear off half the stands which were not the side where the cameras were pointing so the announcers had to reassure the television audience that there actually people in the stadium, which to be honest is something Northwestern fans are used to hearing.

 

A furious blizzard and hazardous stands conditions results in Memorial Stadium hosting a Normal Northwestern Home Game Crowd 

You would think that playing in a miserable snowy maelstrom would be optimal for Northwestern’s offense, which is designed to inch the ball across the field of play while the offensive line whales on people. Unfortunately, the Give The Ball To Caleb Komolafe Offense does not work as well without Caleb Komolafe, who was out with an injury. Speedy backup Joseph Himon went down clutching at his foot two plays into the game, and DaShun Reeder was unavailable. The offense turned to freshman converted tight end/battering ram Robbie Preckel who filled in admirably with 82 yards of executing the advanced football technique “running into guys.” 

The game was, as expected, a low-scoring slugfest. The ‘Cats had an opportunity to win this, but could not score a touchdown after a fumble recovery on the Illinois four yardline. They also couldn’t take advantage of a very funny failed Illinois challenge that also added like 90 seconds to the game clock late in the fourth quarter, which was triggered after Bret Bielema used his typewriter chest holster to compose a strongly-worded letter to the referees about certain Illegalities in the Officiating and got a reversal of fortune that will have him studying the ancient texts of the NCAA rulebook by candlelight for the entire offseason. Preston Stone had his worst day turnover-wise since the disastrous opener at Tulane that scuppered the chances for a Northwestern comeback, and Illinois got to parade the Hat through the snow.

This was a rare opportunity for a Hat Game between Illinois and Northwestern when they are both simultaneously competent. At least one of these teams is usually scraping the bottom of the barrel every season, and the Hat Game is either a one-sided whomping from the team that is going to a bowl game or a sad scrap at the ass end of the Big Ten West. As far as I can tell, this is the first game between Illinois and Northwestern teams that were both bowl eligible since 2011. That was a weird year though; for some reason, they played the Hat game as an Illinois homecoming game in early October, so at that point no one knew both teams would be bowl eligible. The Illini went on to victory against UCLA in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the ‘Cats sadly lost to a Texas A&M team with an interim coach in the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Houston that if I remember correctly was played in a dense fog. 

I am not counting what I would consider the most important Northwestern-Illinois game of the twenty-first century in 2014 when both teams had five wins and needed one more for bowl eligibility that was played with zero starting quarterbacks and two coaches that would eventually be fired in disgrace. Illinois won that game and then Tim Beckman immediately disintegrated into what contemporary newspaper reports describe as a type of “viscous goo.”

There are currently two coordinators up for jobs named Tim Beck and I would like to think that Beckman is watching the news getting excited whenever one of those guys gets hired his ears perk up a little but they never say the "man" part. They just don't say the "man."

It is disappointing to lose The Hat again and something that the ‘Cats need to figure out, but it’s not a crushing loss. I don’t think there are many people who thought Northwestern would be here at the end of the season; I have not deleted any posts, so you can go back to anything I wrote in the early season and see that I thought they might win three or four games this season tops and battle with UCLA for the worst record in the Big Ten. Instead, they beat Penn State on the road, fired James Franklin out of an airlock, shut out Purdue, and finally won at Wrigley to qualify for a bowl game. The season ended on a down note, but for the first time in a long time it feels like Northwestern is building something– by playing the exact same annoying, unwatchable, pain-in-the-ass football that kept them in bowls and in the Big Ten West race for years.

IN WORLD WITH A GAME… ABOVE SPORTS

The loss to Illinois took away the Hat and also knocked the ‘Cats down a level or two in the Great Hierarchy of Nebulous Bowl Prestige. Instead of going back to Las Vegas or New York or even to the ballpark in Phoenix in what is now known as the Rate Bowl, which is a combination of two words that was designed by the CIA to induce insanity, the Wildcats are making their return to Detroit. 

Last time they played there in 2003, it was called the Motor City Bowl. The sponsor eventually changed over to Little Caesar's who rechristened it the Pizza Bowl; the most deranged Northwestern fans might remember Pat Fitzgerald using the phrase “Pizza City” as a damning epithet (Northwestern did not play in any more Detroit bowl games during his tenure). Then, the bowl game was dissolved. A coup in Pizza City. Tanks rolling down the street. Official proclamations. Little Caesar setting up a government in exile! exile! across the bridge in Windsor where for decades he follows the Moscow Rules in his communications with his sad little fake cabinet that no one is interested in stealing. 

The Lions introduced a new bowl game played in the same venue and at the exact same time that became the Quick Lane Bowl, opening an existential question about what was new about this bowl game other than the variety of shady movers and shakers operating in the bowl game gutters who were grifting money off the enterprise of getting a MAC team and a broadly disappointed Big Ten team to grimly play a bowl game that otherwise exists only on televisions at auto repair waiting rooms. 

Now, the game is called the grammatically brain-melting Game Above Sports Bowl. There are three people who know to correctly parse this collection of words: a bowl executive, who is dead, a Big Ten athletic director who has gone mad, and me, who has forgotten it. The way I have been choosing to think about it is hearing the voice of the late movie trailer guy Don LaFontaine sonorously baritoning “in a world... with a game… above sports.”

It turns out that the bowl is sponsored by Game Above, which appears to be a company that, after parsing their website, I believe is in the business of Possibly Finance Things. It is almost impossible to determine what Game Above is up to other than vaguely investing in sports facilities and nebulous entertainment concerns. The company does not have a wikipedia page. It seems like the type of venture that is threatening to “pivot” to “AI- powered investment solutions” (I imagine this is literal, and every time the CEO gets gets a bad earnings report, they bellow out “so help me I will pivot this company into AI investment solutions so fast it will make your head spin”). I think anyone wanting an understanding for what Game Above is will be best served by waiting for the inevitable congressional hearing.

Northwestern is looking for vengeance against the Mid American Conference after the 2003 Motor City Bowl, where Northwestern lost to Bowling Green despite Jason Wright’s heroic 237-yard rushing effort and also wearing the early 2000s uniforms that looked like they used the Comic Sans font. Central Michigan is looking to settle the score after a 2010 loss, the only game these programs have played

Jason Wright in the 2003 Motor City Bowl wearing uniforms that look like a strongly-worded letter to LeBron James

I am not going to pretend to anyone reading this that I have spent a single second of my life this season thinking about Central Michigan football. I have no idea if they are any good or the way they play football or anything other than trying to remember if they are the Michigan team that plays in Waldo or Kelly Shorts Stadium. 

The key to the Northwestern victory is the hope that the Wildcats’ offensive line is simply larger than the Central Michigan guys and will lean on them enough for the running game to let them have ten minute drives that end in a field goal after failing to punch it in from the five yard line. They will also need to hope Central Michigan’s offense does not figure out how to throw the ball to a wide open guy at the sidelines with a Northwestern defender invariably told to play ten yards off of him. That depends on who is available; bowl season now overlaps with the transfer portal, and NFL hopefuls increasingly sit out. I haven’t seen anything yet from Northwestern about who may or may not be available, but I would expect to see a pretty full roster; there is no scoffing at Pizza City this year.

Northwestern also has a bowl win streak on the line. They’ve won their last five in a row; many of these were pretty memorable including a crazy comeback victory against Utah during a San Diego downpour, the Justin Jackson game against Pittsburgh in Yankee Stadium, and the absolutely bananas 2017 Music City Bowl featuring a questionable ejection of Kentucky’s best player, longtime backup stalwart Matt Alviti coming off the bench after a gruesome Clayton Thorson knee injury, and Mark Stoops putting it all on the line for a two point conversion at the end of the game. Northwestern’s bowl games have rarely been boring and rarely been blowouts.

But while I and the vanishingly small group of Northwestern and Central Michigan fans are looking forward to watching some Friday afternoon postseason football, the discourse around low-level bowl games this season is increasingly dire. These bowl games, long dismissed as pointless for as long as I have been watching bowl games, are under increasing pressure from the ever-expanding Playoff and the pressure of the transfer portal. Nine teams have opted out of bowl games this year. At some point, there may no longer be enough teams to fill them. 

IN DEFENSE OF SHITTY BOWL GAMES

The main issue with bowl game participation is that bowl season coincides with the transfer portal and the type of wholesale program turnover that comes when teams change coaches. Coaches have become more expendable as the playoff has made the traditional power programs even more insane and profligate with buyouts. The incredible carousel this year, where it seemed like every week several prominent coaches were fired by the coterie of school administrators and ridiculous rich people who apparently do nothing other than hang out insane group chats where they type “timme,,,, to frire…...his ASS” to each other every time an opponent gains more than five yards, sets off a chain reaction of movement where coaches and coordinators are plucked from other programs after paying a rich ransom. 

Coach buyout clauses are the funniest thing in the sport right now– it is incredible that programs have to collect enormous sums of money before they can fire a guy. This practice culminated in LSU’s dismissal of human dog penis Brian Kelly in a process where they tried to fire him for cause by claiming they never fired him in the first place, then tried to negotiate a buyout, then essentially fired him again. This whole series of events happened because Louisiana’s governor, an extra from the Adam Sandler film The Waterboy, gave an angry speech about how they wouldn’t pay a buyout; that didn’t work because Kelly’s legal team was able to shrewdly point out at that Brian Kelly actually had a contract to coach football at LSU. On the other hand, perhaps LSU can take satisfaction that for the reported $50 million or so they paid Kelly plus untold billable hours to lawyers they got to fire Kelly more than once.

 

Fired coaches could make millions of dollars by starting a Cameo-style video service called SCRAMEO where for a few hundred dollars enraged football fans can pretend to fire them over a video call

But in 2025, firing a coach does not just mean that a new goatee guy comes in to yell at the team. It can invite a mass exodus of players who either want to get out of a bad situation or have been essentially fired by a new coach who wants to bring in his own guys. It’s a total change in regime. So, it is understandable that some programs have dozens of players in flux and are unable or unwilling to test themselves in the AI Powered Chat Blowl Grame. 

It is no longer even controversial for players with NFL ambitions to skip non-playoff bowl games, and now players exploring more lucrative transfer opportunities are less inclined to play. If these non-playoff bowl games want to continue to have players in them is for them to pay the athletes enough to make it worth their while. In an increasingly professionalized sport, these bowl games and ESPN, which owns many of them, can’t simply expect players to pad their programming for free.

But the funniest opt-out this season did not come from a program that is in disarray or rotted out by transfers, it came because Notre Dame missed the playoff and had a week-long tantrum about it. I am not going to recap what happened because as a Northwestern fan, I have no interest in or understanding of anything the Playoff Committee does. All I know is that if this is what the Playoff is, as a mechanism for getting Notre Dame publicly upset, it has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua called a press conference announcing major news and then said here’s the news: I’m mad. He started a feud with the ACC, which Notre Dame sort of floats in and out of at their convenience. “They [the ACC] have done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame,” Bevacqua said like he is dissolving a strategic alliance among principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. The idea of a program declaring war on the ACC right now is pretty funny since the conference that just desperately added Cal and Stanford and is constantly either being sued or about to be sued by Florida State is essentially flashing red like a depleted video game boss; the ACC barely had enough clout to even sneak a single team into the playoff. 

The other part of the Notre Dame story is that the program huffily refused to lower itself to participating in a non-playoff bowl game. The bowl game they would have gone to is the Pop Tarts Bowl, a game that is distinguished by an increasingly deranged pageantry in which a series of pop tarts mascots offer themselves up to be consumed by the winning team by dancing on top of a giant prop toaster and flinging themselves into the slot and then a gigantic sheet of pop tart with googly eyes comes out of the bottom and the victorious team grabs hunks of it with their bare hands spraying goopy pop tart viscera all over the field. It is a valid question for me whether this insane ritual is still amusing or has crossed the barrier to being annoying, but regardless of how I feel, Pop Tarts has managed to capitalize on Americans’ latent appetite to see a mascot torn to pieces and devoured on basic cable television; the Pop Tarts Bowl is pretty much the only non-playoff game that gets any traction with casual fans.

I don’t know what will happen with these non-playoff bowl games, even the ones that don’t involve mascot consumption. But I am baffled by the discourse around these games as stupid and pointless. I agree that they are, in that the entire enterprise of college football is generally stupid and pointless, but I think they still have meaning within the sport. 

It is very clear that the direction that the FBS is moving is towards a superleague revolving around the Big Ten and SEC and an expanded playoff. As someone who roots for a team that seems much closer to being politely redacted from the Big Ten than ever making the playoff unless it expands to impossibly unwieldy levels, this is maddening. The conferences and TV networks are trying to convince us that the playoff and hunt for the championship are the only things that matter. But the college football national championship is completely alien to any experience I have with college football; at no point does anyone involved with Northwestern football who isn’t David Braun look at the ‘Cats before the seasons and say The Quest For The National Championship Starts Now. 

If you want a variant of football where there are 32 teams and nearly half of them make the playoffs to play for a championship, that already exists. It is called the NFL. I like the NFL and even the cursed Chicago Bears who are enjoying one of the most ridiculously charmed seasons where they keep winning games after their opponent somehow loses the keys to the lockers where they keep all of the footballs with two minutes left and when the ref asks them where is their football they sheepishly say they can't get to it and the game is declared over and the Bears have won and then Ben Johnson goes in the locker room and he gets those Rob Liefeld neck veins and starts screaming THAT'S HOW YOU WIN A FUCKIN' GAME IN THIS LEAGUE.

Last Saturday, the Bears beat their arch-rival Packers in a meaningful game for the first time in decades after getting absolutely dominated by the Packers for my entire adult life because the Packers have always had a Hall-of-Fame quarterback and the Bears have always had a training camp battle between the two most incompetent oafs you've ever seen, and watching the Bears win this game felt like the football equivalent of tearing down a statue of a dictator 

But college football is not the NFL. There’s 136 teams, most of whom know they will never compete for a championship. The obsession with the playoff and Crowning a Champion through a series of playoffs even though we had a perfectly good system (yelling at newspaper reporters) means that the establishment of college football that currently rests with the conferences and the television networks telling the vast majority of college football fans that what they’re doing on Saturday morning is pointless. Fans of teams outside the few dozen elite programs are, in the eyes of the college football establishment, a vast undercard for the playoff. This attitude represents a complete misunderstanding of the sport. College football is not about crowning a champion; it is about annoying people at the school four hours away. 

The fate of non-playoff bowl games, or what would be styled in the nineteenth century as The Bowl Games Question, is I believe part of the desire by this loose conglomeration of college football decision-makers to obliterate everything about the sport that is not about the playoff chase. Bowl games do not decide anything. Many of them are low-attended, barely-viewed games between programs no one thinks about, even in power conferences. They have no stakes or consequences; the only ones people care about are those drifting on some vague tradition that were not yet prestigious enough to be swallowed by the playoff apparatus or those that are attempting to becoming memes by dumping mayonnaise on coaches or promising that the entire game will be played with a simmering cauldron of beans on the sideline in an attempt to win over the 1930s hobo demographic. 

At the same time, qualifying for bowl games means something to a lot of teams. Yes, Notre Dame will refuse to eat the pop tart because it does not fit the dignity of their program which is represented by an angry leprechaun squaring up to fight a person using nineteenth century boxing techniques. But for Northwestern and many other programs, qualifying for a bowl game even if it is a “low-tier” bowl that is sponsored by an inscrutable money laundering scheme represents a successful season. 

There is an unhinged combination of money and desperation surrounding the playoff. The playoff is twelve teams, and there are about 25-30 who think they should be in every year. Boosters who see their power programs miss the playoff are melting down and spending entire municipal budgets on firing coaches and demanding more playoff slots and getting angry at deserving G5 teams and then huffily refusing to play in bowl games because in two years the playoff has completely changed the understanding of an acceptable season. Teams used to be happy to go to the dang Outback Bowl. Now, unless your good but not great team is in the playoff and has the opportunity to suffer a traumatic loss in your own stadium, the whole season is worthless, and your university must debase itself by attempting to hire Lane Kiffin. This entire attitude is diseased.

As long as these crappy bowl games are here in all of their embarrassing pageantry and unsold television inventory glory, I will want Northwestern to go to one. For me, the possibility of lowering David Braun into a pot of lukewarm beans while the team chants “Beans! Beans! Beans!” in triumph is something worth playing for.

SOMEHOW PAT FITZGERALD HAS RETURNED

Few things in college football were as flabbergasting as getting the news that Pat Fitzgerald is not only returning to coaching, but making his comeback in the Big Ten at Michigan State. I was not sure what would happen to Fitz after he finagled a settlement where Northwestern had to admit that he Officially Did Not Know about that hazing going on in the program. It seemed likely to me that he would catch on somewhere in one of those bullshit no-show “analyst” jobs for rehabilitation, maybe with his old buddy Kirk Ferentz, before testing the waters at a smaller program. But instead, there he was at a press conference holding up a green jersey and his own bulbous, crimson head.

I am unable to confirm whether Michigan State made attendees put their phones in one of those lockup bags they use for concerts in order to stop him from going on an enraged rampage 

From a pure football perspective, the move seems insane. Pat Fitzgerald went 1-11 in his last season before getting fired. He failed to win a game on the continent of North America. He only won three the year before, and the 2019 season was another three-win disaster; the fact that it took a grotesque scandal reported out by student journalists after the administration tried to cover it up to dislodge the architect of that much losing football is the story of Northwestern’s historical ineptitude and fear of firing a legendary figure who had managed a long run of sustained success at a place where it is very difficult to do so.

By the early 2020s, the Fitz era seemed to be running on fumes. His offense, feeble even by Big Ten West standards, was doomed by an inability to find a stable quarterback after Clayton Thorson. The defense, which kept Northwestern in bowl games, fell apart under new defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil. And Fitzgerald seemed completely unwilling to adapt to the massive changes coming in college football’s burgeoning NIL system, where his entire position was to stand athwart history yelling “our young men.”

At the same time, you can squint and see Michigan State’s reasoning. The pro-Fitzgerald case is the “look what he did with those puds” argument that if he got Northwestern players to win eight games in the Big Ten, imagine what he can do without arbitrary restrictions on his pool of players. You can look at his relative down period and blame it on a bad coordinator; it is possible to see the 2023 team, which was a pure Fitzgerald Team except with a functioning defensive coordinator and veteran portal quarterback and believe the results would have been the same with Fitz. If Michigan State has a management system in place to run the NIL operation and he doesn’t hire absolute dud coordinators and they somehow run a functioning offense for the first time in his career, it is possible that he could succeed.

This case, however, completely ignores the hazing. It is true that in his lawsuit Northwestern apparently did not come up with compelling evidence that he knew what was going on by getting emails or texts saying “re: re: RE: re: re: Hazing Plan.final.absolutelylastversion.doc.” But even taking the settlement at face value means that Michigan State is hiring someone who was either blind to what was going on in his program that he likened to a family or that athletes getting hazed did not feel comfortable going to him. I suppose that is better than finding clear evidence that Pat Fitzgerald was ordering the Code Shreks himself, but I would not be comfortable putting him back in charge of anything. 

Days after the college football world reacted with befuddlement at Michigan State hiring another scandal-plagued coach, Northwestern decided to leap back into the mud, paying a $75 million extortion premium to the administration to unfreeze federal funding by caving to demands to end diversity efforts and signal a willingness to collaborate with a government declaring war on colleges and universities. Instead of fighting, Northwestern decided to just pay off a federal government that had spent the two months before the settlement sending masked terror squads into Evanston to kidnap and brutalize people while farting tear gas all over Chicagoland, and even though these things are not directly related, the contrast between how ordinary people fought and organized against this risking getting gassed and beaten up and arrested and how a wealthy university instantly surrendered are pretty stark and embarrassing. 

If you were hoping to avoid the weird feelings of dealing with Pat Fitzgerald in the Big Ten, I have bad news: the ‘Cats go on the road to Michigan State next year. Both teams will play for a new trophy, the Golden Subpoena.

INVISIBLE CITIES

The Great Big Ten Commissioner has an atlas of all of the cities in his empire. “Sometimes,” the Commissioner says to Marco Polo, “it seems that it is easier for you to describe cities from this atlas than the ones you have actually been to.”

“For these cities, I just need a glimpse,” Marco Polo says. “I just need to see how the light looks when the sun sets over their jumbotron. To smell a single bratwurst wafting from a tailgate. To know how close I am to a Culvers. From there I will put together the perfect Big Ten city, one made from fragments, from the combination of space and time, from the collision between memory and plans for the future, from the people who have dwelled in a city from time immemorial and the people who will arrive and make it their home, buildings reassembled from ruins only to be razed again and cultures rising and collapsing the same way.

In this way, I can see infinite Big Ten cities. These elements already exist in some city in the world and they will be put into infinite combinations in cities that have existed or will exist somewhere on earth or within your Conference. Once you see their forms, you only need to be able to put them together in different ways to see cities that do not yet exist but yet already exist somewhere. The landscape of cities is flattened across time all being built, existing, and being destroyed simultaneously within the Big Ten into bigger tens, tens not even yet in your empire.”

The Great Commissioner paused and took a puff off his pipe. “How many of these infinite cities do you think we can get into the Playoff?” he said.

NOBODY BEATS THE NORTHWESTERN WILDCATS IN A BASEBALL STADIUM 8 TIMES IN A ROW

My understanding is that the standard for a Big Ten West-style game is that it is an unwatchable slog with teams whose competence passing the ball is so low that it seems intentional or almost spiteful, and the game outcome depends largely on punting mistakes. But I think it is also possible to have a high scoring and exciting Big Ten West game that hews closely to the spirit of the division by being increasingly preposterous.  Perhaps this is the only way that Northwestern could finally win at Wrigley Field, secure a bowl berth, and move towards the close of a season that lapped my expectations.

Jubilant fans celebrate the end of one of  longest losing streaks in American sports after Northwestern wins a game at Wrigley Field 

Since Northwestern began playing at Wrigley in 2010 as a one-off, one-endzone novelty and then began playing games there more regularly first as an annual gimmick game and then as an emergency stadium replacement, I'm assuming that Northwestern had plans on what to do if they won a game. They'd fly the W flag.  They'd put 'Cats Win on the marquee. Maybe they would even play a version of "Go Cubs Go" that had  a voice sloppily dubbing "'Cats" over Cubs.  It was impossible to know because every time they played there they lost and usually lost badly.  

It didn't look like that would happen at first. The 'Cats dominated the first quarter and raced out to a 10-0 lead off a long Caleb Komolafe touchdown run. But between some ugly special teams gaffes, an inability to score touchdowns in the red zone despite desperately working Ryan Boe into doomed option packages, and Minnesota quarterback Drake Lindsay finding a rhythm, Minnesota got up 21-13 at the half. By the beginning of the third quarter, it was 28-13. A black cat crossed in front of the Wildcat dugout. A goat was ejected from the stadium. A fan in doofy old-fashioned headphones interfered with a football in play. The Wrigley demons were unleashed and roaring. 

NOOOOOO!!!!!!! 

But Preston Stone had no interest in losing this game. The senior quarterback who has been increasingly tasked with simply handing the ball off as Northwestern has slid more comfortably into its ground-based trench football, turned into the star passer they needed. He took advantage of a reeling Minnesota pass defense that functions like a machine that turns even the most plodding Big Ten West quarterbacks into Drew Brees. Stone had time in the pocket and Griffin Wilde made the Gopher defensive backs look like henchmen trying to capture Jackie Chan in the world's largest ladder warehouse. Stone finished with 305 yards and two touchdowns. He didn't throw a single incompletion in the second half. No Northwestern quarterback has thrown for 300 yards since Ben Bryant did it in 2023 while also leading a comeback against Minnesota. Every other Big Ten team experiences a Northwestern game as tank warfare; to Minnesota they're the Blue Angels.

And yet, Northwestern still needed some magic of their own. After another touchdown drive stalled and the 'Cats had to settle for a go-ahead field goal, they left two minutes on the clock.  That was plenty for Lindsay, who had Minnesota on the other side of the field what seemed like instantaneously. With only a few seconds remaining after a lengthy review when the Gophers had nearly blown the game by taking too long to launch a desperation endzone pass and running out of time, they brought out their field goal unit for what looked like a routine 40-yarder to tie it. No good. If the end of last game had allowed sports commentators to indulge their worst impulses and call Michigan's last-second field goal at Wrigley a "walkoff" then the tortured baseball metaphor for what happened to Minnesota is that they had their cleanup hitter up with the bases loaded and he immediately struck out then fell down and vomited. It wasn't pretty, but they finally won at Wrigley. Hopefully they won't be back for awhile.

David Braun, who last week gave an emotional "look we're actually trying to win games here" speech after the Michigan loss, which is not the type of thing that other Big Ten coaches actually have to say, was emotional and choking up on the field. Northwestern, left for dead at the bottom of the Big Ten after a miserable season last year, was going to a bowl game. 

The first recorded instance of a Northwestern coach smiling after a game at Wrigley Field 

If the people in charge of college football had a sense of humor they'd send them to the Pinstripe Bowl.

I'M NOT PLAYING AROUND ANYMORE GIVE ME THE HAT

But the season didn't end at Wrigley. The 'Cats have unfinished business remaining in Champaign. For most of the 2010s, the season ended with the Hat safely in Evanston, as the 'Cats lorded over the Illini in the standings by being decent while Illinois set records in ineptitude. But the tide has turned since Bret Bielema arrived at Illinois.  With the exception of the 2023 season, we've seen him strutting around with the Hat like he owns it.   

One thing I appreciate about Bret Bielema is that he looks like a real life Far Side cartoon  

Illinois came into the year with real expectations. They  ranked 12th in the preseason AP Poll and dominated their first three opponents on the way to a #9 ranking and a showdown with rising Big Ten power Indiana. It had been a very long time since we've seen a consequential game between these two historically lousy teams; only Indiana's meteoric ascent under Curt Cignetti has allowed it to finally no longer have the record for most losses in college football history and leave that indignity to some shitty program that someone would have to be an idiot to follow, imagine of being a fan of and perhaps even writing long overwrought blog posts about such a team. The Illinois-Indiana game was not an instant classic. Indiana crushed and humiliated Illinois. The Illini were like the buzzing of flies to them. 

With the exception of a classic Body Clocks ambush against USC, Illinois has beaten the crummy teams on the schedule and lost to better teams. That was until last week, when a Wisconsin team that had spent most of the season in a state of offensive ineptitude that would even embarrass Kirk Ferentz took them down. Wisconsin's defense beat the absolute crap out of the Illinois offensive line. Quarterback Luke Altmyer was running for his life. The Illinois punter even had a rough time in one of the funniest plays of last week when a bad snap bounced off his hands and he saw a tidal wave of mean red linemen charging at him with the demonic intensity of special teams players who have realized they have a an opportunity to legally run over a reedy little kicking specialist who leans on The Rules for impunity from the violent parts of football that don't involve kicking. 

Illinois is still a formidable team. Northwestern, with its attrition on defense, has been looking increasingly vulnerable to the pass in ways that I think a veteran like Altmyer who has seemingly been playing since the Obama administration will be able to exploit. Northwestern will keep trying to run the ball and ideally have one possession take up an entire quarter, but it will be interesting to see if Stone can continue his strong play or if it was a product of Minnesota's defense seemingly learning about the legality of the forward pass fifteen minutes before kickoff.

It would be nice for this game to have juice beyond guys nicknamed "juice." Northwestern and Illinois have almost never been good at the same time. This season, though Illinois came on strong and carried a ranking into last week and Northwestern has been predicted to lose every game since Purdue, they are on a collision course to the middle. If Northwestern wins, both teams will finish with identical 7-5 records. 

The Hat Game is less fun nowadays because Illinois under Bielema is consistently good and favored to win most years and also because their coach is not a maniac who is producing his own anti-Northwestern graphics. Bielema is a fun character as an adversary, a weird mix of presenting himself as a blustery oaf who is also an irritating rules-monger who goes through the regulations with a jeweler's loupe and will find and exploit loopholes not just to win games but for the sheer joy of figuring out weird rules exploits. This is some Model UN-ass football. For me, the enduring image of Bielema's tenure at Illinois was when he nearly got into a fistfight with South Carolina coach Frank Beamer at the Cheez-It Bowl over obscure touchback gestures.

This looks almost identical to that meme of the lady yelling at a cat 

Look can be deceiving in college football.  It is Northwestern that wants to play the most oafish smash-you-up football that is legally allowed while falling for the ol' punter/quarterback switcheroo because they didn't do enough homework, and it is the team with a coach who looks like he spends a lot of time smashing through walls to serve Kool Aid who wants to stop the game to well actually the referees.

But regardless of how the Illini are playing or what variety of maniac they have coaching, it doesn't matter because they currently control the most coveted rivalry trophy in sports: the Hat. They have the Hat and all that matters is getting it back no matter the circumstances, and if David Braun and his staff have to scour the rule books to make sure they don't get had and, if they lose, only lose because of normal football. Northwestern has had a much better season than I could have ever imagined. I never thought they'd make a bowl game. Why not finish it off by prying the Hat off the most bulbous head in the conference.

THE CHICAGO BEARS ARE GETTING AWAY WITH IT

 

The Bears don't look like a particularly good team. The defense stinks, the offense runs hot and cold, and they keep needing miraculous comebacks to beat bad teams. They are also 8-3, in first place in the NFC North, and have somehow completely reversed last season where they were losing games too preposterously for a team to even do that intentionally.

Every game there are 30 seconds left and a wind gust somehow upends the opponents' kicking net that snares several key players and a referee has to go into the bowels of the stadium and get a special pair of scissors and then flags them for "excessive entanglement" and then Ben Johnson goes into the locker room and screams "MEN, THAT IS HOW YOU WIN FUCKIN' FOOTBALL GAME, IN THIS LEAGUE." 

They wouldn't be able to make these crazy comebacks without Caleb Williams, who has gone from a quarterback whose obvious gifts and flaws seemed like they were designed in a lab to somehow make quarterback-deranged Bears fans even crazier. But while Williams still looks like a work in progress, he is helming one of the few functional Bears offenses I have ever seen in my life. He is almost impossible to sack; he has this move he does 35 times a game where it looks like a pocket is collapsing on him like that house falling on Buster Keaton and he does a little spin move and is darting to the sideline to either pick up a few rushing yards or try to throw an insane pass that he sometimes completes.  

At least right now, it looks like the Bears have finally hired an Offensive Mastermind Coach who knows what he's doing. Johnson is a fascinating figure to me, a madman who looks like an anthropomorphic clenched jaw and at all times looks his tendons are going to explode from his body in an expression of football intensity.  It would be a ridiculous way to be as a coach and human being if the team was playing traditional Bears football and getting their asses handed to them week after week, but right now the team seems to be having the time of its life winning games like they are playing chicken with a freight train.

This guy looks like he is opening a packet of gravel and shoving it in his mouth like Big League Chew 

Things will be getting tougher.  The Bears' wins have mostly been against a motley crew of bottom-feeders and backup quarterbacks. Starting Friday, they will have to face the terrifying Eagles, last year's super bowl champions who, despite having an identical record to the Bears and coming off a literal championship, they apparently are not winning hard enough for Philadelphia's perpetually aggrieved fans who are miserable and want to have the coach fired and possibly assassinated.  The Bears also have the hated Packers on the schedule twice, plus a Lions team that destroyed them earlier and a bunch of other playoff teams.  Their crappy defense is already decimated with injury, although it looks like at least some of their depleted secondary could be slated for return.

After years of the Bears not only losing but looking like one of those joke franchises that never does anything right, I'm enjoying this little run without believing anything about it. The battle is already over. Ben Johnson is a competent coach. Caleb Williams is at the very least a viable quarterback. They didn't completely blow it. And if the Bears are playing like the early 2000s spread offense Northwestern teams that couldn't stop anyone, it's at least something different. At least they're not playing like the Chicago Bears.   

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.

Punter Perfidy

Northwestern was hanging in there on the road against USC in the Coliseum. The offense was leaning on the Trojans and gradually spilling across the field like a gravy stain spreading over a paper tablecloth. They were matching them point for point. And then the USC quarterback fumbled a ball right to a gigantic Wildcat defensive tackle who was plowing straight ahead towards the end zone for a devastating go-ahead touchdown, and apparently that's when USC had the ‘Cats right where they wanted them.

Inches before Najee Story triumphantly gallumphed into the endzone on a picture perfect big man touchdown, USC quarterback Jayden Maiava streaked across the field, lowered his helmet, and smacked it into Story’s hands, jarring the football loose, and turning a momentum-swinging touchdown into a deflating touchback. The fumble out of the endzone rule is one of the most punitive in sports. It’s hard to think of equivalents– perhaps a batter getting blasted in the kneecap by a fastball only for the New York Review Center to determine that several molecules of his bat hit the ball and instead of being at first, he foul tipped and struck out and also needs a new knee. It would be like if the penalty for missing a free throw is that a referee performs a flying knee strike to the player’s ball sack. Few things are more dismaying.

But something even more disturbing happened before this play. The infamous trickster and charlatan Lincoln Riley once again got away with a fiendish and illegal scheme so disgusting and contrary to the principles of Fair Play and Sports Man-ship that he should not only be fired for his actions but possibly imprisoned in an oubliette in the hopes that his crimes against the game of football can perhaps one day be forgotten by a shocked and stricken nation.

On November 7, 2025, the USC Trojans impersonated their own punter. This man had all the makings of a punter: a punter’s stance, a punter’s helmet, and even the punter’s jersey number. But the person who came in was not a punter but a backup quarterback in disguise who, using the well-honed form and swashbuckling élan of a passer and instead of a punter’s ungainly lunge, easily threw to a wide open receiver. The USC coaching staff had secretly and, I assume, after many sinister meetings held in torchlit antechambers sealed off from the prying eyes of decency, changed quarterback Sam Huard’s number to 80, the same as their punter. They had to do this because otherwise the Wildcats would have easily been able to tell that Huard was going to throw the ball, not only from his quarterback number, but because he presumably had the Mark of the Huard that instantly identifies him and all members of his family as backup quarterbacks, a trade which they have practiced in all corners of the globe since antiquity

  

My sources say the death penalty, for punt shenanigans, being considered for USC. I am pro-special teams and take no pleasure in reporting this.

Technically, USC switched the punter number in the official gameday program that was freely available to Northwestern, who did not effectively scour the roster for any suspicious late jersey movement among backup quarterbacks. But, according to Rodger Sherman, who I trust more than anyone living on knowing the rules surrounding elaborate fake punts, the Trojans got away with using their real punter for subsequent punts. You can’t use two guys with the same number; USC should have been flagged for Illegal Number Duplication every time he appeared on the field and also the referee should have tackled him for a citizen's arrest. The Big Ten agreed and released a statement from its Rosemont headquarters/Brazilian Meats Restaurant saying the Trojans should have been penalized for “Unfair Tactics.” The conference continues to review the incident, which I hope will mean that USC will be forced to surrender the win, disband its football team, and send the coaches who contemplated such a scheme in exile to the University of Iowa where they respect punting and punters. Any attempt by these mountebanks to design an avant-garde punting trick there would be received by Kirk Ferentz contemptuously squinting at them while biting into a raw onion.

 

If USC wants to use a quarterback as a punter by giving them the same number, he should also be required to undergo experimental Face/Off surgery and completely take over his life, slowly going insane while realizing he is going to have to kick a ball if the opponent is going to take him seriously

Shame on Lincoln Riley for his dastardly plans. Is this the type of thing that he wants associated with a university, which is a place for education? What is he teaching his players, that it is ok to violate the trust of their opponents like he is performing some sort of cheap three card monte-style chicanery with his punting? Can we not expect basic integrity when it comes to special teams? Also shame on him for figuring out in the second half that Northwestern couldn’t really cover Makai Lemon and repeatedly throwing to him as they easily pulled away in the second half without having to resort to trap doors or infiltrating the Northwestern sidelines, or coming out in ghillie suits and hiding in the grass only to pop up and score touchdowns.

The clock is ticking for the ‘Cats, who now only have three more chances to earn a bowl berth the honorable way. Fortunately they are playing Michigan, a university that would never resort to trickery, skulduggery or disguises to gain an advantage on the football field.

OH GODDAMMIT THEY HAVE TO PLAY MICHIGAN WHERE?

I can’t think of a more catastrophically annoying idea than the concept of “playing Michigan at Wrigley Field.” Home games against the Wolverines are bad enough when Ryan Field was turned into the world’s largest outdoor Harrumphing Concert; add in the novelty of Wrigley Field and the chorus of maize and gold-clad people complaining about holding penalties will be louder at Wrigley than the time I saw Nelson Velazquez hit a grand slam to bring the Cubs all the way back in a game they were losing 7-0 by second inning.

This is the top google search for The Most Annoying Wrigley Field-Related Baseball Image that doesn't involve Jeff Garlin 

Michigan is in a second consecutive “underwhelming” season off of their triumphant 2023 where the program both won a national championship and also completed what football experts are calling the most irritating sports season in human history. The Wolverines spent the year enmeshed in one of the stupidest football scandals I’ve ever seen when some low-level maniac created an oafish spying program to decipher opponents’ signals that also involved him sneaking around the sidelines at Central Michigan like he was codenamed Gaseous Snake. The Michigan Spying Episode fed us sillier revelations each week until it ended with the NCAA leveling a bunch of pointless penalties and Michigan fans, every single one of whom is a lawyer, all simultaneously suing.

 

Michigan is still dealing with the consequences. Sherrone Moore was suspended two games this year and will miss the first game of next year’s season against powerhouse Western Michigan. The game had been scheduled to be played in Frankfurt, but Michigan moved it back to Ann Arbor. I’m not sure if the suspension has anything to do with it, but it would have been very funny playing a game in Germany while explaining that the head coach could not be there for espionage-related reasons. 

But a “down year” for Michigan is still an excellent year for the vast majority of college football teams, and they will be heavily favored against Northwestern even in tough "road game." The Wolverines have looked a little sluggish in recent games against the bottom of the Big Ten; for example, they allowed Purdue to score points, which is pretty embarrassing. 

Northwestern, at the same time, is leaning more and more into its possession-based oozing football. Every week they become more dependent on using Caleb Komolafe as a battering ram to the exclusion of almost any other offensive play. I am not complaining about this; I love seeing them become more and more leather-helmeted and hope they can have a drive that takes 25 minutes even if they don’t score a single point. If Michigan lets the ‘Cats turn this game into a clock-running slopfest without taking an overwhelming lead into the fourth quarter, they may regret it.

Another variable is that they are playing at a baseball stadium that in nearly all of its games has had a miserable surface. I don’t know if they got things under control; at least last year there did not seem to be the field issues that have plagued the games there in the past such as giant sink holes opening up in the grass and swallowing players who have had to be retrieved with a giant hook. I will never forget the image of ply stopping for several minutes near the goalline in the Iowa game a few years ago so the grounds crew could ineffectually stomp dirt into ankle-devouring divots nor the time a Purdue kicker somehow slid during his kicking motion.  Northwestern has famously never won a game here, and the novelty has worn off; I don't know how other fans feel, but I'm getting a little tired of having to go from having games at a Ryan Field that is 60% visiting fans to 90% visiting fans at Wrigley. Football games only belong in baseball stadiums in one situation and that is horrible bowl games in cold weather cities that no one wants to go to.

Northwestern’s last two losses have sort of taken the wind out of my sails. It is frustrating to remain stuck on five wins week after week against tough teams. It is not likely and I wouldn’t bet on it, but if Northwestern manages to break the Wrigley curse, beat Michigan, and get bowl eligible on the same day I will end up spending the rest of the day on the ceiling.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES

The Great Commissioner has an atlas that shows all of the cities in his conference’s empire. He shows it to Marco Polo who sees them unfold from coast to coast, popping up features. The explorer remembers the freeways of Angelina unfolding before him in a shimmering, endless ribbon whose haze formed a curtain between the real and the possible. He remembers the great and terrible grotesques of Lafeya, their hammers poised above his head. And he remembers Piscataway, where he once had a nice sandwich.

"When you return to Italy, will you tell the people about the cities that you see?" the Commissioner asks.

“Each person is only able to receive the stories they can understand. When I talk about a city where memories are at war with the living, the gondolier or stevedore hearing it can only understand from the context of their own memories, their own ghosts. That city will be entirely different than the same city I tell you about, Commissioner. The cities all exist simultaneously to buttress and destroy each other.”

“What’s the cable TV market like for football where you’re from?” the commissioner asks.

It is an unwise traveler to Anna who arrives without legal representation. The city of Anna is a city of formal complaints, lawsuits, and hearings. To walk down the street is to invite a summons or be deposed as a witness to a dispute happening several feet away. 

The citizens of Anna are busy appearing in courts, writing letters, and demanding evidence. They move furtively through alleys and sewers to avoid further complaints and denunciations and subpoenas. Or they sneak about themselves, trying to track down the targets of their lawsuits. The largest growing industry in Anna are people who will disguise themselves to deliver notices. They pop out of garbage receptacles and paint themselves like tree bark; they hoist themselves onto ceilings and dangle themselves from light fixtures. The most diabolical of them disguise themselves as someone their target is serving papers to only to whirl around serve their target before anyone has time to activate a smoke bomb and melt into the streets.

The city is filled with discarded paper from letters and transcripts. They blow into alleys and onto people’s faces. There is so much official paper flying from windows and open doors and briefcases accidentally jarred and flying open while a dimayed Annan sinks to his knees that the sheets stick together and congeal into hardened bricks. These paper bricks form into large structures that are the only things built in Anna. It is legally impossible to do any sort of construction, and people cram into wobbling paper buildings to hide from each other or to spring through the walls unexpectedly.

The people of Anna send their disputes to courts, committees, and government bodies. But these organizations are beset by infighting and formal complaints as well. All day, matters are referred to responsible bodies whose members are off filing motions each other or disguising themselves as statuary in order to serve papers to rival members. They all form networks of complex alliances and constantly betray each other. They ambush each other with trick complaints that actually turn out, when read aloud, to be a complaint against the person reading it. No dispute has ever been successfully settled.

The citizens of Anna have heard about this section of my writings and dispute it. I have already had fifteen pointed legal documents delivered by a boat navigating around the most treacherous capes to get here and demand my appearance in Literature Court before getting another note that Literature Court had been dissolved and placed under the aegis of Literary Court and then another telling me to disregard the previous letter, Literature Court had in fact never gone anywhere and is in fact suing the members of Literary Court for Court Infringement before getting another letter telling me that Literature Court is actually dissolving and I was hearing from the true Committee on the Activities of Literature Court and not a series of belligerent imposters, who had sent the previous letters and are themselves the target of multiple lawsuits. I also received a letter that was just a drawing of a hand making an obscene gesture.

Under the advice of counsel, I should like to tell the Great Commissioner that Anna is an ordinary city with no unusual features.