You Had Better Have a Coach If You Want to Beat Northwestern At The Lake

The titanic Showdown On The Lake between two Big Ten bottomfeeders scraping for a rare conference win turned out to be a tense, exciting game that came down to the final seconds where Northwestern triumphed as the Kings of the Rot Pile, and I was miserable and fuming.

UCLA came out looking every bit as lousy as advertised. The ‘Cats ran the ball on them at will with Caleb Komolafe steamrolling through their defensive line like it was made out of papier mache and Joseph Himon flying around the outside. They let Griffin Wilde run free in the secondary. Northwestern, a generous donor of the ball early this season, did not turn it over. The UCLA offense, led by heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava, moved the ball a little but continually stalled out. At halftime, the ‘Cats were up 17-3 and on their way to what looked like an easy romp against a profoundly crappy team and one of the most convincing wins against a Big Ten opponent in years.

But in the second half, the game took a turn against the ‘Cats. UCLA got another field goal. Northwestern went on a long, punishing, run-heavy drive that took up a large chunk of the third quarter and into the fourth that got them all the way down to a first and goal at the three, but the ‘Cats couldn’t punch it in, and the field goal was blocked. Somehow, Iamaleava took an offense that was doing little other than getting hit in the solar plexus by Robert Fitzgerald and led a quick drive down the field. All the Bruins needed was a field goal to send the game into overtime. The game went from a casual Wildcat romp to the ‘Cats desperately holding onto the lead with the tips of their fingernails.

Calmly watching the second half of the UCLA game 

The ‘Cats could not get the drive they needed to finally put away UCLA and the Bruins got the ball with 86 seconds left to get into field goal range. I was watching this at like 11:00 at night and had spent the entire afternoon in a hermetically sealed internet bubble to avoid knowing what happened and I was quietly losing my mind and pacing around, anxiously fast forwarding from snap to snap. But there was nothing to worry about. UCLA mounted no real threat to score and the clock ran out on them with the Wildcats triumphing and remaining in a strong position to not be the worst team in the Big Ten this season. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be their biggest win.

When you root for Northwestern, you can’t really get mad at a win. You can watch them flail around against a crummy team or win because of a very stupid mental error by another team or because of what a scientific analysis of other teams’ message boards after losing to Northwestern has determined to be an extremely unfair amount of uncalled holding penalties, very nasty holding penalties, it’s a disgrace with the holding penalties and we’re looking into it very strongly. So I am not going to go on the internet and complain that Northwestern did not win a Big Ten game enough in a period of time where they are averaging like one big ten win a year. We got ‘em. The Bruins came into The Lake with their interim coaches and their fucked up Body Clocks, they didn’t come back, and you can go ahead and chisel that W on the Wildcats’ schedule.

 

Welcoming the west coast teams to Chicago's Big Ten Time Zone, uh file not found for the Oregon game

Maybe it will mean something. Maybe Northwestern can somehow manage to get another couple of wins from more combobulated Big Ten teams and get in prime position in case ESPN runs out of bowl teams. Maybe it will just mean that they won a Big Ten game on The Lake before they fold it up and put the stadium into storage like a crooked circus.

A HOME-STYLE HOMECOMING

As far as I can tell, schools try to schedule their homecoming games against a team they think they can beat, which is why Northwestern plays what seems like at least three road homecoming games every season. Last year, because Northwestern was desperately trying to assemble the lakeside stadium out of scrap metal and lincoln logs, they scheduled one of the funniest homecoming games possible: a late November Wrigley Field game against future national champion Ohio State in a venue that was at least 90% Ohio State fans. I wrote about this last year, but watching all of the stadium attractions programmed to Northwestern Mode in front of probably the most overwhelmingly away-team heavy crowd I have ever seen at an ostensible Northwestern home game was surreal. These people, I thought incredulously, don’t even know who Corey Wootton is.

You think that's Steve Schnur 

This year, Northwestern has taken the opposite tactic. They’re playing on campus at The Lake against a Sun Belt team from Northern Louisiana. I don’t know about the traveling predilections of ULM football fans, but it seems likely that Northwestern’s homecoming will actually feel like a home game, as much as it can feel like a home game in a stadium so small that the crowd noise on the television broadcast sounds like a golf tournament, and not even one of the rowdy golf tournaments like the Waste Management Open where Scottsdale hospitals spend the day full of cases like “fell into pool of own vomit, cactus” and “the warning from the Cialis commercial.”

I would never lie to the readers of this blog unless for some reason I thought it was funny, so I will admit that I know nothing about ULM football. I am not sure I have ever watched a ULM football game, not even the 2012 AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl. Northwestern has never played the Warhawks; even if a ULM team from the earliest days of its program in the 1930s wanted to get on a steamer and head up the Mississippi looking for midwestern football teams to tussle with, they would have to go through far too many squads and take far too many violent 1930s style tackles from Normal Schools and dental colleges especially tough air force reserve programs before they even got to the Quad Cities.

ULM comes into the game 3-1, with wins against FCS Saint Francis, a UTEP team team winless against the FBS, and conference foe Arkansas State. Their only loss was to Alabama, who wiped them out 73-0 in what was probably an expression of the complete derangement of everyone around that program who have reacted the program merely being “pretty good” by a descent into total madness. Northwestern is heavily favored, but the ‘Cats are also a big target. Any team that comes to Northwestern for a paycheck game sees the Wildcats as a rare opportunity to pin a Power Four pelt on their wall.

It’s hard to measure these things, but ULM is possibly a tougher matchup than UCLA. Sure, they don’t have a million-dollar five star transfer quarterback, but their run defense does not appear to graciously usher tailbacks to the first down marker with linemen spreading garlands of flowers before they ineffectually fall down. It’s clear that this year’s Northwestern team wants to just run the ball at ball people as much as possible with their large offensive line, sit on the clock, and happily punt. For six quarters against Western Illinois and in the first half against UCLA, Northwestern looked dominant doing that. If they have to start trying to move the ball beyond just letting Komolafe run over guys and Himon run around them, things may get precarious.

If Northwestern manages a win, they will be 3-2 heading into a gauntlet of a schedule that includes three ranked teams and a Friday night game in Los Angeles against a dangerous USC team. Northwestern does have some games against fellow Big Ten West Slop Alumni, but I have absolutely no idea how competitive the ‘Cats can be against the likes of Nebraska, Minnesota and Even Purdue this year. Whoever took a reeling, Fickell-addled Wisconsin team off the Northwestern schedule this year must be found and held accountable. I don’t have high expectations for this season, but any shred of hope would die with a loss on Saturday. But I do believe that this year’s homecoming has to be better, if only because I assume ULM doesn’t have some weird self-proclaimed mascot guy running around the stadium in body paint.

INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES I

Tony Petitti does not necessarily believe Marco Polo when he describes the various cities of the Big Ten. In the life of any Conference Commissioner, there is a pride in conquering vast swathes of new territory and a melancholy and relief of knowing he should give up any thought of knowing or understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes in the evening, with the smells of unlimited Brazilian meats waft into his Rosemont headquarters and the traffic from the Jane Addams intensifies into a steady roar of passing cars rather than the grind of stalled traffic, and the din from the Chicago Dogs baseball stadium has died down. Only through the tales from the Venetian explorer could Commissioner Petitti grasp the subtle patterns.

Cities and transportation infrastructure 1: Angelina

Angelina is a great city of roads. The roads form a great circuit around the city and the residents travel through them all day every day to unknowable ends. The city is divided into those who can still remember the purpose for which they set off on the road and those who have forgotten and only travel upon the roads for lack of understanding of what else to do. 

Travelers are constantly broadcasting their complicated routes to other travelers and describing the parts of the city they have heard about– the beaches, the gardens, the tar pits, the elevated street taco place that’s still authentic– they are all constantly explaining these plans and meticulously broadcasting them to other travelers who are making and explaining their own plans. The travelers all take to the airwaves to talk about their routes and then appear on other travelers’ broadcasts to have the same conversation.

Somewhere nestled in the mountains through ribbons of road there is a large, flat, bowl. The sun sparkles on it before setting into a picturesque scene, like a softboiled egg nestled in a purple broth. And yet, the bowl is empty. Travelers discuss games that take place there, they relay explanations of complex plays and detailed descriptions of violent tackles, but no one can verify them since they are not there. They have played an infinite number of games, each one altered by a traveler who has not seen it but has heard of it, the games warp in the retelling and become another game. In some accounts these games turn into perverse spectacle and others turn into farcical comedy, impossible comebacks, the endless, recursive return of onside kicks into touchdowns.

No one has seen the games because no one is there. The travelers of Angelina are circling the stadium in loops simultaneously arriving and departing until it is impossible to determine which is which. It all blurs into the same road.

Cities and waterfowl 1: Eugenia

The citizens of Eugenia complain of neck pain because they are always looking up. Their necks stick that way. Older residents are no longer able to see their own shoes and need to have them placed on by children with more pliant, flexible necks. Toddlers crawl and call out obstacles on the ground to older relatives, an imperfect system since they do not have a keen eye to discern obstacles, but they have been deputized for this important job by being lowest to the ground.

The residents of Eugenia must keep their heads up at all times because the city has a duck. Every day, the man-sized duck flies across the city on a nest of zip lines. The tallest buildings have been repurposed into zip line towers, and this duck zooms around, low to the ground, its webbed feet constantly clattering into unaware heads as distracted citizens are knocked into creeks and merchant stalls filled with fresh fish. Before the Eugenians adopted their signature pose, the duck was knocking scores of people to the ground every day as it zips around toward a purpose that no one has discovered.

Every day, the Eugenia go about their business to the din of the zipline and enter their low-ceilinged buildings where they read and write on their own ceilings and hang their belongings so they do not trip on them. Doctors say it takes five years for outsiders to be able to look up vigilantly enough to avoid the duck and unaware visitors expect to get kicked or belly bumped by a ziplining duck at least three times each day, depending on the duck’s activities.

The people of Eugenia like their duck and are horrified at any suggestion that the duck should be harmed or stopped from maniacally ziplining into the populace. You should get out of its way, they say to anyone who protests. This is simply what the duck does in this city. You should not carry large bundles of eggs or panes of glass. 

The duck is whimsical. Every small joy of looking forward or bending over to smell flowers or even to avoid stepping into a pothole or pile of animal waste is subsumed to the enjoyable spectacle of a duck flying around, hopping from line to line, expertly lining up in front of a baker carrying an enormous layer cake unaware of the duck’s whereabouts. 

No one needs to bicker or spread gossip. The only acceptable topic of conversation in Eugenia is what the duck is up to or speculation about where the duck might be going next or even talking to each other as if they were the duck him or herself even though the duck’s own thoughts are entirely inscrutable. People come to Eugenia with hopes and dreams and fears but they happily subsume them to hopes and dreams and fears about the duck in an annihilating relief.

The duck also has a motorcycle.

The Winning A Big Ten Game In 2025 Bowl

From the final score, it looked close enough. I saw that Northwestern lost to mighty Oregon by only 20 points at The Lake while I was out of town and away from a television, and I was actually pretty excited because what looked going into the game like an inevitable, apocalyptic asskicking that occurs when the Big Ten schedulemakers lob national title contenders at the ‘Cats like Donkeys Kong hucking deadly barrels may have actually featured a portion of the game that was competitive.  But as a service to the readers of this blog, I went out of my way to do some extraordinary research on this and actually watched a large portion of this football game and it turns out that Northwestern just sort of squatted on the ball and scored some garbage time touchdowns when already down 34-0 against whatever Eugene-area toughs could be put into Oregon jerseys for the fourth quarter. And my analysis is: that's a bummer.

Northwestern freshman Dashun Reeder zooms for 79 yards in a thrilling moment for anyone degenerate enough to bet on Northwestern football

Still, there were some positives to take from this game.  Without Cam Porter, the ‘Cats were still able to string together a respectable running game with a steady diet Caleb Komolafe and Joseph Himon.  In fact, there were portions of the first drive, perhaps while the Ducks were still under thrall of the treacherous Central Time Zone and its attendant black magicks affecting West Coast Teams, when the Northwestern offensive line was actually sort of shoving around Oregon.  But that was about it.  The Northwestern offense went dormant, the defense couldn’t keep Oregon and its Heisman candidate quarterback Dante Moore bottled up, and the result was pretty much what everyone had expected.  

But the Oregon game doesn’t matter because Northwestern has much more important things on its plate: the UCLA Bruins are coming to the Lake on Saturday and so far they have looked extremely crappy.  In their last game, they got blown out by New Mexico and fired their coach, classic early 2000s Fantasy Football Guy DaShaun Foster.  This is a big game; for both programs it represents potentially the only Big Ten win on their schedule.

The firing of DeShaun Foster is a blow to the Early 2000s Fantasy Football Guys Community and I'm sure there was a somber group text among Priest Homes and Az-Zahir Hakim, and Michael Turner

The Big Ten seemed to sense the importance of this game.  Both UCLA and Northwestern had byes last week, and they have both been revving up like friction motor cars to smash into each other.  The Big Ten or TV people or whoever sets the schedule even gave UCLA a Body Clock-friendly 2:30 kickoff.  It’s a classic contest of Disarray versus Ennui.

At first when I saw what happened to UCLA and was only aware of the score of the Oregon game, I was extremely confident.  A coachless team would come into the Lake, and Northwestern, by virtue of being a coherent football program, would beat them decisively and claim the crown as the sixteenth or seventeenth best Big Ten team as we had been promised.  Having viewed the carnage of the Oregon game now, and knowing that the Bruins have had an extra week to jell under interim coach Tim Skipper, I’m more worried.

Firing a coach after three games usually mires a team in misery as everyone involved begins making plans, especially in the time of the transfer portal where UCLA’s players can find lifelines to a better program. On the other hand, as we saw with Northwestern two years ago albeit under very different and more sordid circumstances, an interim coach can galvanize a team.  While UCLA has been awful, Northwestern has not been competitive against either FBS team on its schedule.  The stakes could not be higher: a loss on Saturday would make it very difficult to believe the ‘Cats will have a shot against another Big Ten team, even Purdue. 

You know you are writing about Northwestern football when you have to start sentences with the ominous phrase "Even Purdue" 

In its brief sojourn from Ryan Field, the Wildcats have yet to win a conference game at The Lake.  They have also not yet won a game at Wrigley Field since they started playing there in 2010 and in the subsequent games when they were allowed to have more than one end zone.  Northwestern perhaps needs the dingy, miserablist atmosphere of rusted bleachers and loose hot dogs served in a pop cup because they ran out of buns in order to intimidate and demoralize Big Ten opponents.  Or you could say they just keep facing good teams at home and at Wrigley during a couple of relatively down years, but I’m going to forget about that and assume they need the constant yawping of the Wildcat Noise in order to function at the highest level, qualifying for the Gronk Goin The World's First Rob Gronkowski-Based Crypto Currency Bowl.

The stakes could not be higher for either team, and this is clearly a “must win” for both programs if they want to avoid complete collapse.  A bowl game already seems unreachable for both teams but it is impossible to imagine either team doing anything remotely good this season without a win on Saturday.  This game is a desperate fight for merely a lousy season instead of a complete disaster.  College football doesn’t get any better than this.

UCLA'S JOE BRUIN PRESENTS: THE REMAINS OF THE SEASON 

It appears that my trip to the Mid West is more likely to happen.  I spoke to Interim Coach Skipper and he told me I did not need to remain with the team while they performed their calisthenics and tackling rituals and that I should take a golf cart that says “Bruins Football” and is used to cart around players with broken femurs and drive up to the Evanston area.

The football facility has been more empty than it was in the days of Coach Foster.  In those days, it was full of visiting dignitaries: Bill Walton, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, even Stephen Davis.  The best of the Professional Sports landscape convened here, and I was very busy fist-pumping at them and carrying various flags, and occasionally doing complicated hand-slapping rituals with their children. Coach Skipper has favored a more austere environment, wanting the players to focus on the fundamentals and not as he said “taking selfies doing butt bumps with the mascot.”  These are not the ideal conditions for mascotry, but I also believe that the professional is able to work within whatever restrictions the Coach sets.

I have, with other professionals, discussed the essential traits of a good mascot. I believe that the essence of good mascotting comes from the principle of buffoonery. The mascot must be a silly, jovial oaf whose antics entertain the crowd without ever becoming a sad or macabre spectacle. One’s thoughts naturally turn to stories of the infamous inflatable velociraptor who attempted to rollerskate down stars, slipped, and went flying as its mouth flopped open in a disgusting, leering spectacle, its tail deflating in silence as it was swarmed by medical personnel. The crowd was not guffawing but terrified that the fool had broken his limbs. My colleague, the duck from Oregon with whom I had passed many hours discussing the finer points of our profession, also pointed to the time the Denver Nuggets mountain lion passed out while being lowered from the arena ceiling before landing on the floor in a lifeless heap in a demonstration that looked like a warning sent from a rival mascot crime family.

The professional mascot should charm and delight, unlike, for example, the dreadful Stanford “tree.” I had endured its disgraceful antics for several years every time it visited, many times suspiciously wavering and tottering in an amateurish stomach-turning parody of the types of wholesome capering about one should expect from a trained mascot.

It is difficult to describe what I mean by professionalism in buffoonery, but I often heard this anecdote from my father, also named Joe Bruin. He told me that he heard of a mascot who had gone over to a section filled with rowdy children who had spent hours at a tailgate ingesting the type of candy where one licks a sugary stick and then swirls it around in pure sugar, and he had een warned that these children had already been chided for roughhousing. Nevertheless, the mascot walked over there, greeted the children and the largest and most aggressive went in for what appeared to be a hug before kicking the mascot in the most sensitive of regions. He wandered off into the tunnel to shake off the pain before returning to the section and another child then repeated the motion. Once again he returned to the tunnel before going out again, knowing the fate that awaited his most delicate parts, and once again another child delivered. A cheerleader organizing t-shirts to be thrown to the crowd said you cannot keep going out there, please find another section, but the intrepid mascot, without flinching, took another five kicks and one punch without showing pain, discomfort, or disgust, and managed to high five and take photos with more than a dozen children in the section. The mascot completed the game before retreating to his quarters with a package of frozen peas, a job honorably and professionally done.

Many mascots become briefly fashionable as the ideal of the profession.  For a time, I suppose it was Gritty, a hockey mascot with maniacal eyes and a morbid, terrifying grin.  I suppose those in the profession valued a mascot who appears to be performing his duties with the unhinged enthusiasm of an escaped maniac, but I suspect it will not be long until the pendulum swings in the other direction and the professional standard defaults to those of us who have perfected the more subtle mascotry arts instead of flashy, fashionable antics such as breakdancing or leaping from a trampoline and dunking flaming basketballs before getting immediately sprayed by a team with fire extinguishers.

I motored up the scenic environs of Interstate 90 from the airport, bludgeoned by the ubiquity of Brian Urlacher hair replacement billboards.  Urlacher is himself one of the most famous Lobos from New Mexico, a program that contributed to an incident that led to the ouster of Coach Foster.  I do not care for the slanderous insinuations about Coach Foster.  In my experience, Coach Foster was a good, honorable coach who acted from the most noble instincts of his way of life. I do not believe that it was a defect of character that led to the team deploying their linebackers ineffectively against the relentless New Mexico rushing attack, nor do I think it was his intention to put heralded transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava in a position where his statistics are well below where they had been at the University of Tennessee even though he had deployed a large section of the program’s resources to bring him over to our facility.  
It is not the job of the mascot to question the Coach on the direction of the program but only to stir up the fans in support, to do pushups after scoring touchdowns, and to never hang one’s head or be caught by cameras in the “surrender cobra” position after an ill-advised turnover or defensive breakdown. These things are simply not done by the professional mascot.

As I motored up the twisting byways of Evanston, I could not help but think of how things had been in the heady early days of Coach Foster’s leadership.  In those days, we had a larger staff of mascots, particularly with my colleague Josephine Bruin. From time to time, she would try to show me videos of other mascots such as the time Tommy Lasorda tried to assault the Philadelphia Phanatic after it made a series of provocative belly shakes in his direction and the old Coach was offended enough to try to steal the Phanatic’s personal ATV and to knock down the mascot and beat him with the Phanatic’s own crude effigy of himself, a video that I admit I had watched alone in my parlor during off-hours several times and found very amusing despite the Phanatic's actions that went beyond what I feel is appropriate mascot behavior.

Of course, I had explained that I was far too busy attending to my duties: checking “Let’s Go Bruins” cards to make sure that no one had slipped in a card with obscenities, combing the costume fur, cleaning and oiling every part of the hot dog gun to make sure that it fired consistently and regularly but would not cause an injury to a spectator's face. I suggested if she has time to watch Phanatic videos, she surely had time to take comical photos with Jonathan Ogden where he looks enormous compared to even the largest mascot heads, as I had been alerted that he had just arrived on campus.

I arrived at the Lake and saw another mascot just sitting there, saying perhaps to no one in particular how much he enjoyed the smell of dying fish in the air on a crisp autumn day.  He turned to me and noticed that I too was a mascot.  He asked where I had come from and I told him I was the Bruin after working for the interim Coach. I am not sure why I did not mention working for Coach Foster. 

The Wildcat told me he was slightly embarrassed discussing important matters of mascotry with me, a mascot who worked in the Rose Bowl while he was at home in a stadium that fits fewer people than our basketball arena.  But we both, I suppose, were working at difficult times.  “I have heard that previous mascots here were locked in a cage until Northwestern scored, which rarely happened, back in the ‘80s,” the Wildcat said.  I resolved that no matter what happened that afternoon I would learn some of the more restrained antics that Coach Skipper preferred, perhaps a Jose Canseco-style forearm bump.

Duck Off

Northwestern looked so lousy in the opening game of the season against Tulane that it seemed that the ‘Cats could struggle against FCS jobber Western Illinois in the home opener on The Lake. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that they could even lose, although you would like to think that even the lowest tier of Big Ten team could easily handle Western Illinois in front of a home crowd of several dozen Northwestern fans and the occasional windsurfer jauntily passing by the stadium. And they did. Northwestern bulldozed their less north and further western neighbors to a 42-7 drubbing and while I am skeptical that this tells us anything other than the difference in the type of athlete that even Northwestern can recruit over their FCS counterparts, I am also making the extremely brave and controversial assertion that it still fun to see them get a buttkicking win before getting fed into the Big Ten woodchipper.

Quarterback Preston Stone recovered from his tough first outing with a much better game with no turnovers and three touchdowns as he and receiver Griffin Wilde (pronounced more like Wildebeest than Wild) torched the Western secondary. Stone needed a little luck to avoid some turnovers– his first pass clipped through a defender’s hands like he was a character in a CD ROM football game before settling into Wilde’s mitts, and he also had a fumble bounce directly back into his hands with the practiced precision of an Australian football player– but he looked closer to the player that we saw in highlight reels from his first three years at SMU.

The highlight of the game for me was in the fourth quarter with the ‘Cats already up 35-0 when backup quarterback Ryan Boe ran the ball and stiff-armed a defender into orbit around Pluto en route to a glorious 58-yard touchdown run in garbage time. In a year that certainly looks like tough sledding for the Wildcats, I will take any play that results in a defensive player all but holding up a Wile E. Coyote sign before getting stiff-armed into oblivion.

Boe makes someone yell "B'oh!"

Unfortunately, the game had one disastrous outcome for Northwestern. Cam Porter, the steady sixth-year captain, injured his knee and will miss the rest of the season. Porter already recovered from a devastating knee injury once and has been a reliable presence in the backfield and on the sidelines since he first entered the program in 2020. With all of his accrued seasons, it is possible that Porter is the most Northwestern player, having played an unfathomable amount of Northwestern football. He’s also been a player that every teammate and coach has raved about, and it is crushing that the injury will likely end his tenure-track career in Evanston unless he is able to successfully apply for a medical redshirt and return for a seventh year by convincing the NCAA that it would be “a great bit.” 

I'm glad Northwestern got to wipe out an opponent in the home opener because the schedule makers have decided to make Northwestern go from blowing out an FCS team to having to face a rabid brontosaurus. Number four Oregon shows up as a profoundly unwanted guest this week.

DUCK SEASON 

Oregon comes to The Lake on Saturday after vaporizing both teams on its schedule. Last week they clobbered Oklahoma State and its coach, the physical manifestation of the Wilson volleyball from Castaway, 69-3. No one expects this to be a competitive game even after the Wildcats diced up the Western Illinois Leathernecks. Like every game Northwestern has to play against one of the terrifying title contenders in the conference, the goal here is not necessarily to win but to annoy and disgust the opponent with a display of what can best be described as Northwestern-style football. The 'Cats, for example, held national champion Ohio State to a 7-0 deficit for a decent part of the first half last season and though the game very quickly turned in the way that you would expect it to go, we at least got to luxuriate in 40,000 sour-faced Ohio State fans glowering and looking to comfort from the guy who puts on silver body paint as they furiously turned to their phones to see if it was legal for Northwestern to repeatedly throw complete passes for nearly an entire half hour.  David Braun, the Maestro of Embarrassing Field Goals, is likely itching to send out his kicking unit down 30 points in the fourth quarter.

The thing to me that is most interesting about this game is what the atmosphere will be like. This is the first time one of the new west coast teams will travel to Evanston and I believe that Oregon is one of the only Big Ten teams where there are fewer alumni and fans of a team living in the Chicago area than people affiliated with Northwestern. Because of the novelty of the setting, because Oregon is really good, and because I suspect some season ticket holders are more eager to turn a tidy profit than watch the team picked up and carried back and forth across the field for four hours, I suspect Oregon fans will still have an overwhelming presence at the game, but there will probably be more of them that had to get on an airplane to get here instead of a Metra train.

This is also Fox’s Big Noon Game that will be nationally televised for some reason and involve Fox and its studio crew of noxious, yelping morons posting up at the lakeside stadium.  Gus Johnson is on the call and I presume that he has covered himself in Memento-style tattoos that say “Northwestern is not Wisconsin” after his embarrassing gaffe in the 2018 Big Ten Championship Game that I constantly bring up because it is one of the rare times Northwestern football was nationally prominent for something other than Allegations, Lawsuits, or Uniform Disrespect.  As I am writing this, Urban Meyer is loose and unaccounted for in the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area, and it is possible he has deactivated his tracking device and Fox Sports personnel have been urgently dispatched to the area's most depressing suburban steak houses. 

I still can't get over the scandal that Urban Meyer allegedly kicked the Jaguars' kicker like he is doling out an evil ironic punishment like a direct-to-video horror movie villain.

Oregon apparently has an enormous floating duck that it occasionally deploys, and there have been calls for it to appear on the lake during this game. I think it is a reasonable response that Northwestern fans immediately form into a Waterworld-style jetski gang to take that thing down as a warning to other teams with inflatables and also to P.J. Fleck.

 

September 2025, Oregon is now master of the Big Ten. Only the Northwestern Armada fleet stands before them- Lakes are now battlefields.

College football is goofy and unpredictable, but defeating this Oregon team seems like a nearly impossible task-- a win against Oregon would be the largest upset in the modern history of the program or at least second to the Wildcats' win over Any Football Team in 1982. The Ducks will be competing for the national championship while Northwestern looks like their goal will be winning a Big Ten game. 

Oregon has not been in the Big Ten long enough to annoy me. In fact, Oregon has never beaten Northwestern as the 'Cats hold a 1-0 record over them from a 14-10 road victory in 1974.  While I am sure that I will eventually grow disgusted with the Ducks after being exposed to them long enough, I would rather have them win over any other traditional Big Ten power whose harrumphing, gloating fans have infected Ryan Field since I have been going to games.

If somehow Northwestern by some minor miracle manages to win this game, I will write and release a single called “Body Clocks” on the most appropriate label.

THE CHICAGO BULLS DROP THE GIDDEY BOMB

Tuesday was a rough day for Chicago sports fans who had waited all offseason to watch their supposed offensive genius head coach and highly-touted second year quarterback only to instantly be reminded that they root for the Chicago Bears and will have to endure what looks like another season of grim Bears-style football.  That was the day that, with the sports radio lines clogged with men choking on the wettest beefs legally available while furiously calling for Tyson Bagent, the Chicago Bulls announced to an already deflated and miserable fanbase that they will have to put up with Josh Giddey for four years.

Giddey, a 22 year-old Australian who is already entering his 4th year in the NBA, had been in a standoff with the Bulls all summer.  The Bulls traded for him by sending beloved superstar role player Alex Caruso, a brilliant defensive menace, to the Okalahoma City Thunder straight up without even getting a token draft pick.  Caruso instantly became a key part of the Thunder's championship team while the Bulls were once again 86'd from the play-in tournament the Miami Heat as is their custom, this time by a profoundly crappy and injured Heat team that had not beaten the Bulls all season.  

Giddey reportedly demanded starting point guard money but as a restricted free agent in a league where no one had cap space and also have access to numbers that say that he is not particularly good that apparently elude the Bulls' analytics department that I think is just one guy playing spider solitaire who occasionally sends the front office one of those fake spread sheets generated by the Boss Button on the NCAA tournament streaming website, so he had little leverage. The result was the exact deal that everyone expected the Bulls to give him for months but arrived at only after his team and the Bulls exchanged vaguely hostile emails for three months.

Giddey is a weird player.  He is very big for a point guard at 6'8" and he is an excellent rebounder and passer who routinely flirts with triple doubles and puts up combinations of stats that allow the Bulls broadcast to put up graphics that say things like "the only people who have ever scored 14 points, 11 rebounds, and 16 assists twice in a calendar month under the age of 22 are Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and  Josh Giddey" even if he put up those numbers in a depressing loss to the Charlotte Hornets. He largely steers a fun, uptempo style of play installed by Billy Donovan after the Bulls ran out of NBA-caliber defensive players last season and is responsible for one of the greatest Stacey King calls since Andres Nocioni dunked on a backup center and he started screaming "GET OUT OF THE WAY FAMILY GUY" because of the center's oblong-shaped head reminded him of the baby character.

On the other hand, Giddey despite his size is an abominable defender, a lackluster shooter, and an oafish dribbler who is constantly giving the ball to the opponents. He is also not particularly athletic for an NBA player; he moves like he is a recently-enchanted broom from the movie Fantasia.  His game is pretty much the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art NBA star in 2025, and it's possible that what he can't do is much worse for a team than his box score stuffing contributions.  You can read from actual Basketball Knowers about Giddey rather than taking my word for it; I couldn't even watch Giddey's disastrous first half of the season because the Bulls played on a channel that I needed to buy an antenna to watch and now shows nothing but low-rent MMA events that look like montages in one of the several dozen Jean-Claude Van Damme movies where he enters an underground fighting tournament.

The Bulls had a star for years with obvious shortcomings in his game that fans and the general NBA world fixated on in Zach LaVine, but LaVine was better at the much more important skill of scoring than Giddey is at anything, and the Bulls were barely able to give him away because of his crummy defense and mediocre playmaking.  I don't expect that the Bulls will do much better with Giddey as the focal point.

There are a couple of troublesome aspects of the Giddey contract in the broader strategic sense.  One of them comes from the annoying metagame involving the Bulls salary cap.  Giddey, whose four-year $100 million deal is fairly modest for a starting point guard, is still making a few million dollars more per year than the Bulls could have perhaps gotten away with if they had really pressured him.  I don't want to care about how much money players make nor root for front offices to squeeze them, but in a salary cap league where individual payments are apparently so important that there are very popular and influential podcasts where guys just list off how much money everyone makes for hours every day like a bizarre numbers station, it is true that any dollar Giddey makes theoretically takes away the Bulls' flexibility to bring in better players to put around him-- this is of course assuming that bringing in good players was the goal of the Bulls instead of Arturas Karnisovas doing a weird avant-garde art project with a basketball roster to prove a point that eludes me.

I am also very sorry to bring up Giddey's effect on the the profoundly depressing metagame of tanking.  Giddey and the style the Bulls play with him is probably good enough for them to win enough regular season games to take them out of the running for what analysts say is a draft laden with potential stars near the top.  That doesn't mean they will have no shot at drafting a Rowdy Boozer Son-- assuming the Bulls have another season hovering around the desolate environs of the Eastern Conference play-in tournament race, they could still jump up in the draft order.  The Bulls were apparently a coin flip with the Mavericks away from landing prized Duke freshman Cooper Flagg; the state of the Chicago Bulls is such that they are even getting their asses kicked by coin flips.  I personally hate tanking and find the idea of wasting everyone's time trying to intentionally lose a disgusting pursuit, but it pains me to admit that it is also the most viable way to land a superstar unless you are the fucking Los Angeles Lakers.

The fact that Giddey is merely a flawed basketball player who won't make the Bulls better than mediocre is not something that really bothers me since that is basically every basketball player the Bulls roster. Even as the Bulls have been a largely crummy and enervating to watch the last few years, the players on the team seemed to be good guys who liked each other and had fun playing uninspiring basketball. Giddey, who came to the Bulls under a cloud of gross allegations, is not someone I particularly want to root for, and it's a bummer to have my favorite team chained to him for four years.  Fortunately, the Bulls are going to vanish from my TV unless I pay an exorbitant amount of money to watch Jerry Reinsdorf's horrible sports teams, so perhaps the Josh Giddey Bulls will no longer be my problem.

WELCOME TO THE ENORMOUS TEN

There is usually a process to conference expansion that starts with rumors, innuendo, denials, and eventually leaked negotiations but instead, moving with a speed and coordination unheard of at universities unless it is to quash a graduate student union, the Big Ten suddenly includes UCLA and USC.  A conference so midwestern that its initial network programming was sponsored entirely by extra large men's pants and a can of vegetables to throw in liquid cheese now bestrides both coasts for some reason and is reborn as the Enormous Ten.

There was a time when a move like this would seem like a titanic upheaval but titanic upheaval is now the only register in which big money college sports operates.  The Big Ten's move to gobble up the two California schools echoes the SEC's devouring of Texas and Oklahoma last year, and part of what seems to be an inevitable move towards Superconferences that will continue to pick the bones of the Big 12 and Pac 12 in the interest of consolidating television money.  As we speak, unconfirmed twitter rumors show the SEC is poised over the ACC like a Habsburg squinting at a map of the Ottoman Empire. 

That's it, the Big Ten just got two teams bigger, believe me. Just got two teams bigger. We're gonna make the Big Ten so much bigger, they say already it's too big that we can't make the Big Ten bigger, but we're gonna make the Big Ten so big, so many teams in the Big Ten, you're not going to believe how big this ten is

Over the past several years, the people in charge of college sports, who have been selling the entire enterprise with the concept of tradition, of rituals and rivalries handed down from time immemorial filled with nineteenth-century pomp and stories of fans vomiting on each other for generations, have acted with the subtle grace of Humphrey Bogart in the last third of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.  They have completely abandoned every single one of their decades-old talking points as soon as they glimpsed their first few dimes of television money.  The leagues and universities have acted so greedily and hastily to fill their pockets that they instantly negated college sports' most important commodity which is access to unlimited unpaid labor and quickly (it is almost impossible to believe how quickly this has happened) professionalized the sports through NIL deals although the schools do not seem to be that concerned beyond the usual huffing and puffing about the corrupting influence of sponsorship money because they have managed to offload the expense of paying players to the various oil barons, car dealership emperors, and prominent local Yosemites Sam who have been playing the players surreptitiously since college sports were invented.

The move will have seismic impact on the people actually playing the sports. On the one hand, it is extraordinarily funny to imagine teams that play in gorgeous, mountainous sunsets forced to confront the grim reality of an 11AM November kickoff at Ryan Field in front of 8,000 people while the players are forced to fend of an onslaught of wind-blown hot dog wrappers.  The effect on their Precious Body Clocks, a previous hobgoblin of Pac 12 teams that had dared to venture into the Central Time Zone, can only be imagined.  On the other hand, I suspect that students having to fly across the entire country to play a volleyball game in Piscataway on a Tuesday night might find this all less amusing.

The college football bigwigs at least used to give us a song and dance and a whole story as the various league commissioners and NCAA officials, and athletic directors, in their suits hooking their thumbs through their suspenders would tell us of the extraordinary educational benefits wrought on the Student Athletes, and how it is a little tough on them when it comes to sometimes going to class or eating enough food, but you can't possibly understand what would happen if schools had to pay the players, after all have you seen the skyrocketing cost of pipettes and protractors these days, why you'd be putting the whole thing at terrible risk they would say while standing in front of the $3.8 billion Gertwig "Cud" Broodbatter IV Athletic Performance Center, but now their pitch for college athletics is give us your money, excuse me, give us your fucking money.

The thing that is most shocking about heretofore unthinkable addition of UCLA and USC to the Big Ten is how not shocking it was.  These precision raids by conferences on their rivals' big money programs have become a regular part of the landscape, no matter how strange, incongruous, or pointless they seem.  Rutgers and Maryland fans seem completely miserable in the conference that only wanted the money from regional cable audiences; Nebraska's entry into the Big Ten has been an unmitigated catastrophe for that football program although the fact that its annual game against Northwestern has become such a hideous and preposterous nightmare that it has been banned from taking place in the United States is incredibly funny.  The Big Ten's transition into the Enormous Ten and the accompanying moves no doubt on the way are less shocking for the moves themselves for naked disregard for anything this sport pretends to be.     

College sports seem to fit in a larger trend, and I hate to be too bleak or dark on a blog as stupid as this, but there really does seem to be a shared sense of being at the end of something, and big businesses and industries seem to have jettisoned any obligation to even try to bullshit us as they nakedly grab at everything in a desperate game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, even if it is just to hold everything for a few moments longer than everyone else.

NORTHWESTERN IN THE ENORMOUS TEN

The biggest question on everyone's mind as soon as they announced the Enormous Ten expansion is simple: how will this affect Northwestern?  Last year just before the season, I wrote about the SEC grabbing Texas and Oklahoma, the formation of Superconferences, and where Northwestern fits in it.  The fact of the matter is that while the college football world's recent desire to rip off its fig leaves about amateurism and tradition and strut around nude and open for business is not really something I care about and in fact has been good for getting at least some money to players, it seems likely to me that this bodes ill for Northwestern's time in a big time football conference.

Northwestern has nothing to rely on to keep it in the Big Ten other than residual tradition.  The school's revenue sports programs offer no revenue to the conference.  Northwestern has been unsuccessfully waging an information war on Chicago-area highways to try to convince an indifferent populace to root for the team since the existence of this blog, which I support because it makes people really angry for some reason; it offers mostly a cold bench once a year to Chicago-area alumni of other schools.  To the extent it has a national brand, it is either the team that sucked a lot in the 1970s and 80s or a factory that produces annoying television sports personalities.

The fact that the football team has been good, or at least good enough to win the Big Ten West twice in the last four years is, I believe, irrelevant.  What Northwestern football represents is a pain in the ass: a win that means nothing to fans of big teams that believe that they should always beat Northwestern no matter how good they are because of the program's legacy of futility and because Pat Fitzgerald has been spending the past decade analyzing football rules to figure out how he can possibly win games one to nothing or 4.3 to 4 or they could lose in the shittiest football game anyone has ever seen and that will immediately drop them 15 points in the rankings and get their dozen most deranged message board posters in a thread called "Uncalled Holding Penalties" put on a watch list.  The times when Northwestern finds itself in Indianapolis or even in a particularly prominent bowl game, opposing fans are either casuals who are confused by the existence of the team or they are someone who has watched Northwestern play this decade and know that they're about to watch four hours of armpit football.

As a Northwestern fan, the prospect of irritating other teams and having one of the program's most prominent fans be a tarp is the best part of college football, but it is hard for me to see how that fits in the sport's new paradigm.  Having a team like Northwestern around when college football was still pretending to be an amateur sport was useful for the Big Ten; I am not sure it makes sense in a professional league for a team that cannot fill its own tiny stadium, has no television audience, and has a name that is even more flagrantly mendacious in a conference that could literally include the northwest.  As long as college football clung to its notions of tradition, Northwestern could slop around with the big boys through organizational inertia.  Now that conferences are being torn up and consolidated and college sports has finally arrived at their fuck you pay me apotheosis, I struggle to see what Northwestern offers.

On the other hand, I am an idiot and don't know anything.  Maybe there's more money in amassing as many teams in a conference as possible.  Maybe college football is such a bulletproof television product that it is more lucrative for the Big Ten to keep broadcasting Northwestern games much like how ESPN pays an unfathomable amount of money to broadcast the Head On Apply Directly To Forehead Bowl to families having low, hissing fights at airport gates even if it takes an amount of precision research with maps rolled out on tables to find a bar that is actually showing a Northwestern game in the very city it is the Big Ten Team of.  Maybe the Northwestern psychology department has put a subliminal signal in every Big Ten broadcast so that every time a Big Ten executive tries to float the concept of kicking the school's ass out of the conference he or she instead makes the Wildcat First Down Noise and immediately pivots to a powerpoint presentation comparing advertising rates for competing gout treatments.  Maybe Northwestern and USC can develop a famous rivalry.   

The situation in college sports is collapsing and exploding day by day.  For the time being, Northwestern plays in the Enormous Ten, one that could be growing more enormous.  Fans are tracking conference realignment the only way they can, by citing anonymous message board sources and analyzing flight logs.  The past week imagining flop-sweated conference commissioners in frantic calls with panicking athletic directors while boosters do donuts in the parking lot in 1970s cadillacs whose horns bleat out the school fight song and while the coaches try to wrangle recruits with NIL promises from the Suspenders King of Mant County is delightful, a Hieronymus Bosch triptych of football decadence unfolding in all corners of the college football universe.  

At least we can be sure of one thing and that is Northwestern's return to the Rose Bowl is now guaranteed.

College Football's Impossible Task

As college football kicks off in all of its maniacal indecency, an enormous number of fans, pundits, and college students hopped up on memes are going to attempt to do one of the funniest things that anyone does in American sports and try to explain which college football teams are better than other ones.

This futile task consumes sophisticated numbers nerds with homebrew formulas and men on television with necktie knots so large that they affect the positioning of their cohosts’ neckties, all of whom can be shaken awake in the middle of the night during a natural disaster and still manage to sternly turn to anyone in the vicinity and say “I gotta say, I like that defense but they’re not gonna win if they don’t hold onta that ball;” the burden also falls on people who are drunkenly yelling at each other in parking lots.

College football’s innovators have come up with several key methods to examine whether a team is better than another one such as having them play games against each other. This method, though, remains fraught with uncertainty. The vagaries of a single game resolve little. After all, football analytics specialists tell us that games decided by seven points or fewer are basically random tossups. And even more decisive victories can be explained away by other issues—in 2015, for example, Stanford lost to Northwestern in the opening game and spent the rest of the season claiming that it should not count because the effect of flying to Evanston for an 11:00AM kickoff had so disrupted their Body Clocks that only an uncaring philistine ignorant in the basics of human physiology would expect them to have been able to win. Other hazards of games include poorly-timed injuries and athletics scandals, and, most importantly, uncalled holding penalties, a particular malady that aggrieves internet message board commenters.

But far thornier is the problem of the teams that do not play each other, which is the vast majority of football games. In order to deal with this issue, anyone attempting to rate football teams must take into account conferences, opponents, how badly they trounced other teams or found themselves the victims of Body Clocks, etc. In a normal sport, there would be a manageable number of teams to allow them to all play each other. But the college football universe is vast and unfathomable, and at some point the only way to divine true football ratings is to imagine an entire architecture of hypothetical football outcomes through computer models or by taking a vision quest aided by psychotropic drugs. 

Every year, this issue culminates in the controversy over the Playoff and the Championship.  College football has no idea how to handle this and keeps handing the job over to various cabals of bureaucrats and groups of people who attempt to persuade them by flying airplanes with banners over stadiums or by cutting wrestling promos on Paul Finebaum who has become the Mean Gene Okerlund of college football.  The whole enterprise continually reeks of conspiracy theories about preferential conference treatment and baroque Pynchonesque societies of mascot syndicates going back to the middle ages.  College football is the only sport where it is routine for teams to claim national championships like they are pretenders to a throne, their armies of fans surrounding NCAA headquarters under the banner of an AAC False Dmitry.

The forces of the University of Central Florida besieging a castle under the false flag of the Colley Matrix
Despite this grumbling, the playoff picture presents the most sane way of judging college football teams.  Those are where the very few colossus teams play-- the Clemsons and Alabamas, and handful of other teams steamrolling their way across hapless opponents in a grotesque spectacle.  Those teams are unmistakably good by any metric whether it is by S&P+ or press rankings or the trail of limbs and helmets strewn over the field by any team unfortunate enough to line up against them and spend the next several hours exploring the chemical composition of their soil or field turf from millimeters away.  There are also the unmistakably shitty teams too-- UCONN and whatever sorry squad has emanated from Lovie Smith's beard in any given season who spend most of their time advancing on ball carriers as effectively as a group of henchmen menacing Jason Statham.

But in college football's Roiling Middle, there is no way to weigh the performance of teams.  They play with an oblong ball in conditions raging from feverish swamp to blizzard, they are made up of teenagers, and everyone in charge is a red-faced maniac named "Chip" or "Bobby" who manages to ascend to histrionic heights not experienced by normal human beings-- imagine the angriest you have ever been in your life, so livid that no circumstance whether being in public or running short on time to evacuate before a volcano erupts can stop you from hollering as loud as you can at the target of your wrath and doing it for four hours at a time and that is how the persons in charge of football comport themselves on a normal Saturday.  An analyst can devise the most sophisticated model in the world that takes into consideration wind conditions and how players did on their midterm examinations or whether or not the coach is wearing shorts and still somehow a team will absolutely annihilate a good team standing in their way and then go out the next week and lose to Rutgers.

The combination of certainty and chaos makes college football so compelling.  In the macro sense, college football is dull-- the same cluster of teams get the best players, build the most ludicrous Harold J. "Zip" Clobbsmann Football Performance Centers With Waterslides, and ultimately win the trophy; most teams enter the season knowing they do not and will never have a chance for a championship short of simply claiming one.  But week to week, some team with a number in front of their name will get obliterated, embarrassed, field-charged and forced out of the playoff picture or even knocked down in the Great Hierarchy of Bowl Prestige and even the staunchest green-visored number zealots will rejoice while fans of the losing team get performatively angry online and demand that the offensive coordinator be fired.

NORTHWESTERN PREVIEW

We're not sure how, but the Northwestern Wildcats will play football again, even after scathing reviews.  The 'Cats lost every single out of conference game including one to Akron, a team that hadn't beaten a Big Ten team ever in more than 100 years of trying. They also won the Big Ten West and played in the Conference Championship Game then won a bowl game after going down 28-3.  They played hideous football, had no functioning running game for large chunks of the season, rotated quarterbacks with the capricious whims of a Football Caligula, and still won the Big Ten West with three weeks to spare.  They played 14 games, more than any other Northwestern team in history, inflicting themselves on the entire country.  It was one of the most confounding, silly, and greatest seasons in school history.

Pat Fitzgerald has put together his program, and that involves grinding the clock down to nothing and waiting for a Northwestern player to perform a miracle or for an opponent to do something transcendently, operatically stupid at the worst possible time and it's happened more often than not.  Fitzgerald is the only coach who watches Friday Night Lights for the gameplans.  But whatever it is that is happening, it is working, and Fitzgerald has grown more prominent in the coaching ranks, getting more resplendently red and coming up with increasingly weird grumpy takes.  So far, Fitzgerald has inveighed against communism and cell phones; this season, expect him to take aim at reckless Auto-Mobilesmanship and the designs of the Kaiser in the Ottoman Balkans.

The big story for Northwestern is a changing of guard at quarterback.  Clayton Thorson has graduated and gone to the NFL where Philadelphia's fans have greeted him with shoulder-mounted bazookas.  Fitzgerald has been coy about his replacement.  It will be either Hunter Johnson, the heralded transfer from Clemson or stalwart T.J. Green.  Most expect Johnson to play, but football coaches love not saying who the quarterback is because they enjoy pretending they are stentorian generals controlling Sensitive Classified (Eyes Only) information, and they will not compromise the integrity of the mission.

The 'Cats will face off against Stanford in a sequel to the 2015 contest.  That game was a stunning upset and, as always mentioned, a catalyst for the hundreds of Body Clock jokes I have made for the last four years.  Say "The Big Game" to most people in the context of Stanford football and they will conjure images of John Elway and players wending their way through the marching band before arriving in the endzone and obliterating a hapless trombone player who was riveted to the spot like a Godzilla victim, but for me it was the time that Stanford lost a game and then mentioned Body Clocks and then me never shutting up about it.  False start? Oh, that's a body clock. Incomplete pass? Better check on your precious bodily fluids.  Honestly, there's fairly compelling evidence that West Coast teams having to play early games further east are badly affected by this, but latching onto incredibly dumb shit is a time-honored and essential element of college football discourse and I will never stop.  I probably won't even know what the score to this game is other than body clock to non-body clock.
Precious Bodily Clocks

If it is, as I have argued, nearly impossible to tell what football teams will do this season, it is completely impossible to predict what will happen in a Northwestern football season.  They will beat teams they should not, they will probably lose inexplicably to a bad team, they will attempt to send every game into overtime whether they are winning or losing, and they will confound anyone insane enough to get into the football predictions business.  No analyst can pin them down, no formula can constrain them.  They are strange and infuriating and they are defending the Big Ten West crown.       

Week 14: Who Cares About the Playoff, They Got the Hat

High noon eastern time and the whole country is simultaneously tuned to Big Ten Country for the nation's greatest rivalry spectacle in college sports.  It has been impossible to find anyone with the remotest interest in college football who does not have an opinion on the titanic showdown between the Illinois Fighting Illini and their arch-nemesis Northwestern Wildcats with every snap watched by the selection committees for the Foster Farms, Pinstripe, and possibly Heart of Dallas bowls.

The bowl panels meet to decide the fate of Northwestern

I can't imagine a football game with more at stake: for Northwestern, a chance to secure bowl eligibility for real although they probably would be able to sneak in as a 5-7 team because there are now so many bowl games that teams will be forced to play themselves in brutal scrimmages while executives from Zaxby's bray for blood by waving chicken pieces at the players gang tackling their roommates.  For Illinois, all they had was the opportunity to diminish Northwestern's bowl chances and cackle as the Hat blotted out the sun and winds blew in from the Lake and shrouded Evanston in a year of hatless darkness.

In the end, the Wildcats triumphed.  Illinois, feeble against the run all season, had no answer for Justin Jackson and John Moten IV, who scored his first two touchdowns by flying past Illinois defenders.  The game was much closer than it appeared.  The Illini rallied from 21 down to within a touchdown thanks mainly to Wes Lunt's best game.  Lunt took advantage of Northwestern's soft coverage on the edges to complete the same eight-yard out route approximately 35 times.  The Illini also got a heroic performance from an injured Malik Turner who would come into the game, make some insane diving catch, roll around in agony, and then come back in to make another great play.

Illinois outplayed Northwestern for several stretches in the second and third quarters.  But every time they threatened, something went haywire.  The Illini fumbled the ball away three times, including one on the Northwestern eight yardline with a chance to tie and once on a punt return down only seven.  The most egregiously awful reversal of fortune involved an interception deep in Northwestern territory early in the game negated by a twelve men on the field penalty, an event whose cruelty was mollified only by the fact that it was extremely funny.

Bells rang out in celebration, ceremonial Hats were put onto every statue, and people poured into the streets to celebrate this incredible sporting event.  Lovie Smith and Pat Fitzgerald, old friends as Chicago Sports Icons, embraced on the fifty yard line while Smith waited. He'd have the opportunity to prise the Hat from the collective head of Wildcats next year in Champaign-Urbana, where he would now return and use the ceremonial key to the Illini's Hat Loss Brooding room with a full year to plan his revenge.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WEARABILITY OF THE HAT TROPHY

If there is one thing you can take away from your visit to this web log, I hope it is the insane and arbitrary decision to mount the Hat trophy on a base instead of allowing it to be worn by victorious players in triumph.  A recent tweet by Northwestern's athletic department caused some confusion on this position:

It's a #HAT. Of course you're supposed to wear it. #B1GCats pic.twitter.com/XzbWBI9vex

— #B1GCats Football🎩 (@NUFBFamily) November 27, 2016

How is this possible?  Has there been some sort of trap door allowing the base to be crudely worn in hat-like fashion?  Was I succumbing to Hat madness?

For hours, I poured over BYCTOM's detailed Hat Archive for any sort of schematics.  I interviewed top statuary haberdashers and scoured the most recent academic journals of hat science, including "(Base) Jumping to Conclusions" in Brims: The Journal of Hat Trophies and Hamburger Restaurant Advertisements and "That's All Pretty Convenient" in The Journal of Implausible Hat Conspiracies, but could not make any headway.

Eventually, with the help of digital photography from years of Hat Trophy photos, including several obscene ones involving Tim Beckman, I began to slowly chip away at the greatest Hat trophy mystery of our time.  You can see the shocking conclusion below:

Proprietary BYCTOM schematic

It appears the hat can, in a fashion, be worn by a player as long as his head is not so grotesquely bulbous that it envelops the entire hollow base area.  But that only raises a larger question and that is this: why?  Why create a trophy of a hat that requires some diabolical secret head chamber in order to fit on a standard-sized head so the only way it can be worn is approximately?  Was the base in mind initially to prevent players from corroding the trophy with their sweat-drenched noggins only to be foiled by the statue's only weakness, a base soaked in the head sweat of dozens of Illinois-based Big Ten football players?  Is there a heretofore unknown Lincoln habit of wearing a stovepipe hat attached to an unwieldy base, his spindly neck straining to keep the whole apparatus on his head while Stephen Douglas made rhetorical mincemeat of him?  I demand answers from government officials immediately on this matter.

Lincoln discovered in a rare photo wearing a gigantic wooden recessed box underneath his 
trademark stovepipe hat while guys with standard non-base hats look on sullenly, reaching 
into their pockets for a notebook so they can write down reminders to buy bulky wooden hat bases

COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IS A LUDICROUS CIRCUS

While Illinois and Northwestern waged their titanic struggle in front of dozens of tarps at Ryan Field, a minor Big Ten squabble took place in Columbus.  There, Ohio State managed to prevail in an overtime game filled with controversy, the best possible result that throws the playoff rankings into chaos and has prompted a Million Michigan Man march on the Capitol where they will read their manifesto entitled "This Manifesto Uses The Phrase Dereliction of Officiating Duties" from You Sir, the News Letter of Michigan Football Harrumphsmanship.  

The playoff picture remains in disarray.  The Committee will have to figure out how to justify including an Ohio State team that did not even qualify for the Big Ten Championship Game over a Penn State team that has a chance to win the conference and already beat the Buckeyes head-to-head; an undefeated MAC team; and potentially a Big 12 champion with a loss that hinged completely on an erroneous referee decision and a minor miracle.

The task of naming a college football national champion remains the most delightfully arbitrary and absurd ritual in sports.  They have tried to do so through polls run by disparate media organizations which means that a large amount of college football history involves a process of claiming championships and defending them through postmodern deconstructionism.  They have tried to do so with computers, which is a sound attack on the narrative-driven insanity of college football.  And now, they try to fit exactly four teams into a playoff, but do so with an unaccountable committee that meets with the solemnity of a papal conclave.  

White smoke by the Playoff Committee signals a triumphant De-emphasis 

of Conference Championships

All this week, people have been attempting to make logical arguments to fill the three non-Alabama playoff spots.  Conference championship upsets this weekend can occlude the picture even further. But logical arguments and opponent defeat flowcharts have no place in this process.  The Playoff is set by the Committee that has its own gonzo decision-making processes that have previously involved things like Body Clocks.  There is no way to know what they value or what sorts of formulae they use.  They could, for all we know, pick teams by throwing knives at walls or basing their selections entirely on the result of human hungry hippos while they hurl goblets of wine and hoot things like "you call that gobbling, you inadequate artiodactyl."

This twisted spectacle is how your college football playoff field is chosen, probably

College football sells itself as a mythological journey where teams rise up and meet challenges by upsetting high-ranked rivals or winning conference championships or even going undefeated in a minor conference and hope that their deeds prove them worthy of inclusion in the Playoff.  Instead, the only mythological elements are a class of powerful, capricious individuals with their own conflicts and agendas that can wipe all that out at a single stroke.  If you are lucky enough to follow a team good enough to aspire to playoff contention, all the college football season does it add increasing opportunities for you to get mad.  And, as fans of college football fans melting down on the internet, we could not have asked for a better system.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

Northwestern finds itself at the mercy of unaccountable committees when they meet to decide which bowl game they will be inflicted upon.  The two main possibilities are the San Francisco bowl, which has has turned over sponsors as often as a postwar Italian government and is now played at the Niners stadium located 2,000 miles outside San Francisco and the Yankee Stadium Hey I'm Playin' Football Here Bowl, which offers Northwestern fans the opportunity to see football played in a baseball stadium with more than one operational endzone.  

The game and the opponent do not matter.  The Wildcats clawed back from the portents of a miserable year to enter the postseason.  They boast the Big Ten leader in rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks.  Austin Carr will have one more opportunity to bamboozle defensive backs. Northwestern has a chance to end the season with a winning record.  This will all be clearer when the bowl fatcats have emerged from their estates with their scrolls.  Until then, we can all luxuriate in the retention of the Hat in all of its mysterious, semi-wearable glory.

WEEK 6: The Vandals of Homecoming

Last season, Iowa and Northwestern had tremendous seasons.  Then, they both got utterly demolished in bowl games-- Northwestern by a budding Tennessee power and Iowa by a Stanford team drawing on weeks of uninterrupted access to the source of its strength, Pacific Standard Time.  Both of their 2016 seasons have been disappointing and involved gruesome home losses to FCS teams.  Still, Iowa fans felt confident about their Homecoming showdown against the Northwestern after winning three in a row, the last two in hideous blowouts.

Northwestern plays so many Homecoming road games that they have started traveling to 
opponents in a parade float

Instead, Northwestern held on for a demoralizing 38-31 win over the Hawkeyes.  Ifeadi Odenigbo beat C.J. Beathard hard, sacking the Iowa quarterback four times, occasionally using a helpless lineman as a battering ram to more effectively knock him over.  Justin Jackson ran for 171 yards, including a 58-yard breakaway.  And Clayton Thorson had a tremendous game, running for one touchdown and finding emerging star receiver Austin Carr for three through the air.

Thorson downloads football data into his brain, not only preparing for Iowa but also for a 
lucrative career as a futuristic data courier able to match wits with the Yakuza Cyber Dolphin

This year's version of Iowa has played like a shadow of last year's undefeated Rose Bowl juggernaut.  At the same time, Northwestern managed to win its first road game, deploy a functioning offense, and sow uncertainty and disappointment in an Iowa fanbase inaugurating a new contract for Kirk Ferentz that will last until the end of his life and then allow him to remain on the Kinnick sidelines stuffed like a Jeremy Bentham autoicon for generations.

THE PLAY IS THE THING

Last week's post explored the possibility of an upset triggering cries of uncalled holding penalties that would resonate throughout Johnson County, and the game became weighted with referee controversy. The crowd became so angry at ludicrous refereeing decisions at one point that they hurled a chorus of abuse at the officials. A few miscreants pelted the field with refuse.  This situation is not new.  Last year, a series of sound decisions from learned referees that kept erasing Wisconsin touchdowns led to some rowdy Badgers to hastily assemble snowballs in a gruesome reenactment of the Godfather tollbooth scene against their own cheerleaders.

Their complaint stemmed from a sequence where Odenigbo appeared to grab Beathard's facemask on a sack and drew no penalty.  The Hawkeyes punted and, on the ensuing drive, an Iowa player got flagged for a facemask against Justin Jackson and then got an additional fifteen yards for reciting Rule 9 Article 8 of the Official NCAA Football Rules of the Game at the referee.  Ferentz was left with no recourse except to stage a play for the referees featuring egregious missed facemask penalties and hope that the ensuing guilt drives them to madness, allowing him to unmask their villainy to the world and maybe get a break on a pass interference penalty sometime.

PLAYER KING: Out, out, thou zebra, Fortune! All you refs,
In general synod 'take away his flags;
Break all the spokes and fellies from the facemask,
And bowl the round ball down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends!'
LORD DELANY: This is too long

I have no idea why Northwestern has benefited from postmodern touchdown catch rules or facemask indifference, but we can all assume it is part of a vast Big Ten conspiracy to promote Northwestern football at the expense of its larger and more well-known opponents because that possibility is incredibly funny to me.

THE CHICAGO CUBS ARE MY DOOMSDAY CULT

Well, it’s finally here. The Chicago Cubs lived up to their threat of dominating 162 games of regular season baseball, becoming the best Cubs team any of us will likely see in our lives, and entering the playoffs as World Series favorites. May whatever god you believe in have mercy on us all.

The baseball playoffs constrict the game's leisurely pace into a maddening, stressful crucible.  They are coin flips-- thrilling, exciting, unpredictable, incredible for a team that unexpectedly blunders into them, and seemingly designed to drive to madness the fans of the game's best team whose chance to end a century-straddling championship drought are roughly the same as ending up on the wrong side of Russian roulette.

Baseball, like all sports and entertainments, remains entirely ancillary to our life, but for me the times when the Chicago Cubs manage to scrape their way into the playoff grinder become stressful because they are the only sports team whose every success is shrouded in the morbid certainty of death.

The Cubs cannot make the playoffs without that grim reaper Joe Buck appearing on our televisions with his phalanx of satanic goat heads, reminding us that the Cubs have seen generations of fans stretching back to times before widespread motorcars back through two world wars and peak mustache ubiquity to their graves and they are coming for you.  This is not a surprise since Buck himself revealed that his own obsession with youth and aging led him to nearly losing his voice from repeated visits to the Monkey's Paw Hair Plug Clinic.

Autumn, when Joe Buck appears to remind you that you will die

I have often said after 2008, when another loaded Cubs team failed to win a single playoff game, that I had accepted that I will never see the Cubs win a World Series in my lifetime. But I clearly don't believe that fully, because if I did, I would not have spent this entire season dreading the playoffs which have a very good chance of once again dashing whatever faint hope I pretend not to have.  This is not a normal person sports relationship.  My relationship to the Cubs is less like sports fandom than fealty to a doomsday cult, whose certainty in the end of everything only reinforces the desire to see it happen. 

Maddon promises that, after the baseball demons come and reveal that playing the right way 
actually means that they devour continents and send them to their digestive systems, which 
are portals to far-away galaxies, the believers will travel the galaxies in this interstellar vehicle 
that only looks like a crappy airbrushed van right now, in these pre-demon times

None of us have any idea whether the Cubs can live up to the expectations they've stoked this season. Not even the irritating numerologists in San Francisco, whose faith in even-numbered years forms a bizarre counter to Cubs fan fatalism, can tell us the outcome. And the outcome is meaningless-- the only real-life difference between a Cubs win and loss this playoff season is probably a few million dollars of Wrigleyville property damage. The Cubs will play baseball whether I ignore them or spend the next several days in a flinch, waiting for whatever Mendoza-line castoff the Giants find on the scrapheap to hit multiple game-winning home runs.

It doesn't matter whether the Cubs win.  There is, as far as I know, no theology that promises some sort of afterlife reward for those of us who had talked ourselves into Ryan Theriot or own Rod Beck merchandise. The Cubs' championship drought has nothing to do with mysticism or curses or the incredible bad luck of a shell-shocked headphone guy who got to listen to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo do play-by-play of an insane, bloodthirsty mob that threaten to thrash him over baseball, but with the team's decades of incompetence. The sun rose on October 15, 1908 and it continued to rise after the Cubs' few and spectacular baseball-related fuckups throughout the ensuing century.  The season's ending in elation, despair, or relief from victimized baseball fans tired of hearing about the Cubs will quickly fade.      

But, if you were to ask me personally, I think it would be cool, if they won.