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.
