Week 11: Extraneous Football

They were weeping in Madison on Saturday, fans hugging their older relatives and long-time supporters gathering outside Camp Randall Stadium as their Badgers finally managed to knock off the Northwestern Wildcats in Evanston for the first time since 1999, a streak that spans over four entire football games.  

The streets of Madison are red in celebration of the long-awaited twenty-
first-century win at Ryan Field

The Badgers dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball; their running backs galloped across the field and kept their rotating carousel of quarterbacks relatively unscathed, and their defense held Justin Jackson in check.  Still, Northwestern remained within striking distance largely because of Austin Carr's remarkable transformation into an unstoppable receiving force who was still hauling in balls long after it became apparent that he was the Wildcats' only option and the Badgers were draping defenders on him and hastily trying to build medieval fortifications around him and then hustle the guys with shovels and mortar and the field engineers with parchment blueprints off the field before suffering from an illegal substitution penalty.

Wisconsin's playbook shows its halftime adjustments for defending 
Austin Carr, who finished with 12 receptions for 132 yards, a touchdown, 
and a claim to the County of Rapperswil

After facing two top-ten teams in a row, Northwestern settles down to the task at hand: winning at least two of the three remaining games to qualify for a bowl game sponsored by a company that will be defunct within three years and, far more importantly, retaining the Hat from rookie head coach Lovie Smith, who has never coached in a game with higher stakes or more national attention.  This is after the Illini reportedly retreated from holding its home hat games at Soldier Field, terrified of playing Chicago's Big Ten Team in Chicago in front of last year's showing of dozens of fans.  The move also alleviates a concern that Smith would go into a Soldier Field-induced trance where he would continually attempt to send Rex Grossman into the game until an Illini quarterback would have to stuff his cheeks, throw on a number eight jersey, and huck the ball up into triple coverage enough times to prevent Smith from seeing a Brian Urlacher hair billboard and suffering a complete psychological collapse.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

This week, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany announced that the Big Ten will move a selected slate of games to Friday evenings. The move is controversial; Fridays remain associated with high school football, as demonstrated by the television show where catalog models stare at each other, lips quivering, declaring “I ‘preciate that.”

The Big Ten will move to Friday nights as an imitation of the NFL’s strategy of putting football games on at bizarre, unnatural times and then being shocked that no one is watching a Rutgers/Purdue game that they would know was on only if Jim Delany pulled up the Big Ten’s official hot rod to their door and personally implored them to watch it. Northwestern will play in all of these games.

The August Michigan Wolverines will not play on Friday nights because they would never stand for that; you would have a mitchum-scented mob seizing Ann Arbor printing presses to flood the city with strongly-worded open letters and pamphlets entitled “It’s Simply Not Done.” No, Friday night is for the Wildcats and the unwanted East Coast Big Ten arrivistes and will be played only for desperate, grasping attempts to qualify for the Ornamental Truck Testicle Bowl played at the immediate conclusion of the participants’ final game to get it over with as quickly as possible.

The solution, then, is to lean into the change and declare the Northwestern Nightmen the official team of Friday football.  The Wildcats, traveling to away games in a purple hearse with blackout windows to keep out the 11:00 AM sun, bursting forth from coffins during pregame introductions by Chicago  horror movie personality Svengoolie, all to an endless soundtrack of Dio and haunting monster mashes, will hijack the trucks that contain the stadium lights that the school will now need for all of its games and involve it in arcane Night Rituals.  Delany can announce this to Pat Fitzgerald personally, assuming he can locate him in the attic of the disused gothic church where he now lives.

The Vincent Priceman prepare for Friday Night Football

THE MOST IMPORTANT GAME OF THE YEAR 

The Northwestern-Purdue game is always a favorite to preview because it’s close to the platonic ideal of a shitty, 11:00 Big Ten game broadcast onto television reluctantly like a terrible sitcom on air only because of the CBC’s Canadian content laws. This game has no meaning, will attract no attention outside of these small fanbases, and by 2:30 pm it might as well not have existed. You could send a fake box score from West Lafayette to any national media outlet in the country and they would print it without scrutiny, even if it said that the Northwestern Wildebeests were led by Claybon Thrognoggin and scored most of their points via incantation. This game rules.

Exciting football action from last year's game  

This year, Purdue actually has intrigue. Darrell Hazell was fired for leading his Boilermarkers into an abyss of football futility, and now the Purdue athletic department looks for its next coach by waiting for a clack to echo through the night, for a track that appears through town that no one knew was there, and for a solitary steam engine to pull up with its new savior who arrives with a spread offense and a blond mustache so resplendent that it cascades down from his mouth and turns into an all-weather Purdue parka.

Purdue should just hire Kyle Orton and let him live on a houseboat on the 
Wabash River

For most people, even the most degenerate college football fans, this game, as it exists at all, takes place as two numbers at the very bottom of a scroll through a college football scores app.  Maybe Minnesota and Illinois fans take a glance and recalibrate their own chances against Northwestern. But this game will take place.  With uniforms and everything.  As we talk, coaching staffs are gathered in their elaborate cargo shorts conclaves and watching film on the flesh and blood humans who are about to play football at Ross Ade stadium.  And I'll be watching to see if Justin Jackson can rebound and continue his climb up Northwestern's all-time rushing list, if Austin Carr can continue to blight defensive backs, and if the Wildcats' secondary can contain Big Ten yardage leader and Purdue Institute of Scrappy Quarterbacking graduate David Blough.  

For Northwestern, a win in the first Big Ten game in which they are favored will set them up to potentially qualify for a bowl with another win or potentially by taking advantage of unchecked bowl proliferation to sneak in as a 5-7 team, which is something so Northwestern that I can't believe it has not already happened.  For Purdue, a win alleviates somewhat the general atmosphere of football malaise hanging around the program, which has not seen more than three wins in a season during the Hazell era.  These are the stakes for a Northwestern-Purdue game, which is less played than inflicted upon people to the point that the teams should play for a trophy called the Big Ten Network Contractual Obligation Oh Wait It's The Big Ten, This Is Now William Henry Harrison's Snuff Box.

The outcomes of sporting events remain profoundly trivial.  But even in our insane world where sporting operations suck in unfathomable gobs of money and attention, where taxpayers subsidize massive arenas for billionaire owners and universities have somehow become bolted onto sports leagues that protect the athletes' links to the schools by enforcing ludicrously elaborate text message codes and assign grim-faced investigators to allegations of selling game-worn pants and where the Cubs can win a baseball game and send people sprawled teary-eyed into the arms of their relatives and to consecrate graveyards with officially-licensed World Series merchandise, it is hard to explain why anyone should care about the upcoming Northwestern-Purdue game.  It has no bearing on The Title Picture or the Playoff Rankings or the Big Ten West or take place at a Stadium With People In It.  It is extraneous football.  And I'll be watching every minute. 

14 Philosophically Midwestern Universities Attempt to Play Football. You Won't Believe What Happens Next!

Oh it is coming.  August is the first ripple in the water glass, next is the coaches goldblumically cackling their way through press conferences, then a goat is dismembered, a lawyer flees to a toilet, and college football season comes stomping out of its paddock, bellowing its blood-curdling roar.

Across the country, college football teams are baking in the sun, running into blocking sleds, and getting screamed at by crew-cut wearing millionaires.  The Northwestern Wildcats are in Kenosha, trying to figure out who will be the quarterback.  Defending national champions Ohio State (good grief) are turning their training camp into a reality show called "Scarlet and Gray Days," which, stunningly, is not a turgid nineteenth century Southern Gothic epic.

Last season, a bunch of morons had declared the Big Ten dead and buried, including the least-informed football blogger in the world.  Bowl season, however, eased those doubts, with the conference scoring several close wins over highly-ranked teams.  Statistically, a close win in a single game depends so heavily on chance that no thinking person can possibly assume it means anything; these games have naturally has fueled the discourse on college football since time immemorial.  Ohio State returns as the consensus favorite amongst the football yellerati after downing Alabama and Oregon with a third-string quarterback.  Michigan seems poised for a return to prominence under Jim Harbaugh.  The Big Ten refuses to be anyone's punching bag until the first significant out-of-conference loss, in which case the Big Ten will return to its perception as a conference of ignorant fullbacks and linebackers squinting quizzically at the flickering shadow of a forward pass on a cave wall.

BYCTOM BIG TEN PREVIEW

Fortunately, the Wildcats will be avoiding the Buckeyes this season.  Another East powerhouse, Michigan State, will mercifully remain off the schedule as well.  Rutgers and Maryland as yet exist on the "here be dragons" portion of the Big Ten map.  Instead, let us turn to an exhaustively-researched and comprehensive preview of the Big Ten West and East Division Interlopers as they appear on Northwestern's schedule while pretending they won't be effortlessly clobbered by the invincible Wildcat football team.

Minnesota Golden Gophers
Minnesota, led by crimson walrus Jerry Kill, appears to be a program on the rise.  They took an 8-4 record to the Citrus Bowl.  Minnesota had been a Big Ten cellar-dweller and reliable Wildcat victim; from 2007-2012, the 'Cats won five out of six.  More importantly, Northwestern had some spectacular Metrodome mojo, with two of the most absurd endings to a football game I've seen within the arena's glorious roof-pouch.  Minnesota had been a welcome sight on the schedule, a cobblestone on the yellow brick road to Pizza City.  Now, they are a much improved team that has irritatingly beaten Northwestern the last two years-- once with an assistant coach at the helm filling in for an ailing Kill, the other time with a 100-yard fourth-quarter kick return.  The 'Cats may regain the advantage this year by playing at Ryan Field in front of a river of maroon that has seeped down Interstate 94.  As with most Big Ten opponents, Northwestern will be relying on the home field advantage of hoping that the visiting team tenses up and gets nervous in front of an overwhelming deluge of their friends, family, and supporters and the dozens of purple-clad handclaws occasionally voicing their disapproval.

Michigan Wolverines
The Michigan Wolverines suffered the apparently unbearable burden of being kind of bad for more than one season.  The team devolved into a rudderless mess with a mediocre coach, regarded by Michigan fans as a catastrophe on par with a situation where the President of the United States has dissolved the court system and replaced all jurisprudence with trial by monster truck rally.  Michigan fans would only accept one man for the job.  And, because it is not feasible to have a team coached by an animatronic Bo Schembechler standing on the sidelines spitting out dot matrix printouts of what Bo Schembechler would do in any given situation, they decided to hire an unhinged football monomaniac.

I can't wait to hate Jim Harbaugh.  He comports himself like a nineteenth-century military officer just returned from some colonial posting no longer able to function in the West where he has to answer to a doddering hierarchy of muttonchopped generals.  Even by the insane standards of football coaches, whose lives revolve around yelling and watching film and taking fanboats to the east end of nowhere to convince a 300-pound 16-year-old to allow himself to be yelled at by them for the next four years, Harbaugh is intense.  He seems to strive to exist in a world of wide-eyed zeal, where humans only communicate in elaborate football play argots, where discourse is limited to talking about how determined you are, and where the punishments for variation in pants style are unspeakably draconian.  He is also a very good football coach and that is intolerable.

Harbaugh politely disagrees with a holding call

Northwestern had their window.  Michigan had never been so vulnerable.  And, with this final shot at crushing the Wolverines in front of a group of demoralized Michigan fans for once coming into Ryan Field with the slightest tinge of doubt in their inevitable victory, the 'Cats could not pull it off.  Instead, the teams engaged in an embarrassing display of quasi-football, immortalized now as the M00N game.  Neither team could score, hold onto the ball, or attempt any sort of coordinated movement that did not result in a Buster Keaton calamity.  Fitzgerald decided to go for two and Siemian fell onto his buttocks and now Northwestern may never beat the Wolverines again.

But what if something goes horribly awry?  What if, for some unfathomable reason, Harbaugh's tin-pot dictatory doesn't work in Ann Arbor?  What if all of the shouting and baiting officials and making dumb turning into Ghostrider faces can't turn Michigan around and the program continues to list like once-stately liner careening into an iceberg?  What if Harbaugh gets run out on a rail, with angry Michigan alumni braying about him being tainted by the NFL and the Michigan Men condemn him for not living up to their hilariously lofty Michigan coach should be on the list of possible emergency presidential successors in the face of numerous simultaneous calamities standards and bray on the internet about things being UNACCEPTABLE?

That turn of events would somehow justify the existence of college football.

Iowa
The Werther's Originals of football teams takes to the field again under Kirk Ferentz.  Ferentz's team has fallen from its mid-decade heights challenging for Big Ten titles and some Iowa fans have begun to lose their patience.  He remains dedicated to the platonic, plodding ideal of Big Ten football, churning out endless highlight reels of guards running into people.  There's nothing flashy, exciting, or particularly irksome about Iowa football except somewhere along the way they have become blood-rivals with Northwestern and should probably be crushed, with all Iowa merchandise loaded onto a boat armada and burned in the middle of Lake Michigan witnessed only by a single contemptuous man.  

For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Iowa and Northwestern traded off foiling each others' hopes of contention and losing quarterbacks.  The stakes, however, have vanished.  Now, with the Hawkeyes stagnating at Insight Bowl levels and the Wildcats bereft of bowls entirely, the rivalry seems brief and fleeting.

Ferentz reignites Northwestern/Iowa enmity by cruelly accusing him of inadequate fist pumping 
and taking it more than one play at a time out there

Whatever lingering antipathy has declined at the same time as the Rise of Beck Man.  There is nothing the University of Iowa can possibly do that can match his ludicrous Northwestern bashing.  Iowa fans no longer care about this quasi-rivalry since Northwestern has ceased to be a thorn in their side.  That is why it is imperative that the Hawkeyes get hot and win all of their games before rolling into Ryan Field and losing on a preposterous series of laterals so Northwestern fans have another fanbase that might hate them before Beckman volunteers for interplanetary travel to start a pointless rivalry with theoretical Martian bacteria. 

Nebraska
When Nebraska entered the Big Ten, Northwestern fans immediately demanded to know: who is the true NU?  Here's a quick rundown of the case: Northwestern fans claim NU since the school is literally "Northwestern University." Nebraska fans counter by having had no idea that Northwestern had a football team with uniforms and everything. Since then, there has been a tense but civil NU détente between the fans because the controversy is inane even by college football standards, a sport where people get incensed by a victorious team scoring too many points.  

Last year, the Huskers defeated Northwestern and turned our Homecoming into a pitiless sea of red.  Now, the 'Cats have to face thousands of Nebraska fans in Lincoln without the benefit of Dracula jerseys.  The Huskers have a new coach this season, Mike Riley from Oregon State.  Jug-eared cave person Bo Pelini has returned home to Youngstown State because he has figured out that there are entire generations of Youngstonians who have not been screamed at within two inches of their face.  The best way to beat Nebraska is to reclaim the crowd advantage so if you're some wealthy teeth-clenching monocle enthusiast planning to name a building on Northwestern's campus, why not endow a Chair of Showing Them What It's Like instead, buy every goddamn ticket in their stadium, and flood it with Northwestern fans or, in a pinch, Kansas State fans with holdover anti-Nebraska animus?

Penn State
 
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, FRANKLIN, WHEN YOU DUCK NORTHWESTERN IN THE PAST

Purdue
Ten years ago, Purdue was riding high in the Big Ten, with a conveyor belt of quarterback champions.  Kyle Orton played there, and I can think of no greater aspiration for a football fan than rooting for Kyle Orton.  Now, the post-Tillman Boilermakers are a living museum of football indignity.  The high-flying offenses are probably a thing of the past because who the hell knows what kind of offense Purdue runs. The coaching staff probably puts in a tape and then says the hell with it and watches a bunch of Magnum PI reruns before passing out in their Strategy Caboose.  Everything about Purdue football is misery.  Even Northwestern, at its depths of ineptitude, managed to lose operatically, setting records and throwing things into lakes.  It would take a herculean effort to throw anything larger than a shoulder pad into the Wabash River. 

The Wabash river is further east on this map, but look at what's going on near the stadium. 
Beck Man would never stand for that.  He would have that street name changed immediately 
to That Road Up North, Chief Boulevard, or Fill In Field Here Before Submitting Form

Purdue muddles through, eclipsed even by its slightly-less-moribund state rival Indiana, bucketless and heartbroken.  Northwestern-Purdue will kick off at 8:30 AM, reluctantly televised with commentary recycled from an old copy of NCAA '05.

Wisconsin

There was uncharacteristic intrigue in Madison this off-season as head coach Gary Andersen decamped to Oregon State.  He filled the vacancy left by Mike Riley, who left for Nebraska. The Badgers failed to close the circular coaching loop by hiring Bo Pelini.  Instead, they brought in long-time assistant coach Paul Chryst from Pitt.  Once again, Barry Alvarez descended from the his lofty perch in the athletic department to lead the Badgers to an Outback Bowl victory.  This is the closest thing to a statue coming to life to coach a football team until the technology is perfected by Penn State scientists.

Wisconsin football is not about gracefully lofting passes over a defense.  It is about running around them, over them, and preferably through them by using Wisconsin's hulking offensive linemen and the parts of defenders that are still stuck to them from the week before.  Last year, the Badgers had one of the most comically lopsided offenses in college football, with Melvin Gordon wreaking havoc behind a typical wall of beef while the passing game approximated the replacement of a football with a regulation anvil.  Then, Wisconsin came into Evanston and decided to air it out.

And pass they did.  Badger fans stood there, stunned, as their quarterbacks heaved up 29 miserable passes into the field, off of helmets, and into the waiting hands of Godwin Igwebuike.  Time and time again, Melvin Gordon ran the ball close to the endzone and then watched helplessly as an inexplicable series of passes flew anywhere but.  Andersen and his coaches became textbook victims of what I call Vizzini's Law: never try to do the unexpected when the unexpected is unexpected because it is self-evidently dumb.

"The wide receivers will be wide open," Wisconsin offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig 
cackled while calling for another Joel Stave rollout

BYCTOM PREVIEW NUGGET: Wisconsin will probably run the ball a lot this year.

Illinois

Beck Man finally did it.  After years of clumsy rival-mongering and quizzically squinting at something in the middle distance, Ham Fistman managed to beat the 'Cats at home in a loser doesn't get to go to a crappy bowl game match.  And, given an entire off-season to luxuriate in his possession of the Hat, perhaps Beckman will grow from his glories.  Perhaps he'll make the Hat an assistant coach (Coach Hat says you're only giving me 105 percent out there), change his name to Beck Hatman, or walk around Champaign in a home-made hat-cape-- these are all things that most of us would do if we won as prestigious a trophy as the Lincoln Hat.  The Wildcats won't get a chance to wrest the Hat from Beckman in Champaign.  Instead, the contest moves to Soldier Field, Chicago's Big Ten Neutral Site, in order to seize the attention of Chicagoans interested in a Northwestern/Illinois game only if the halftime show consists of 25 guys simultaneously screaming about Jay Cutler.

Tim Beckman is the greatest thing to happen to this football blog.  He has single-handedly taken a rivalry that was at best ironic and elevated it into something approaching an actual rivalry.  He then backed up his talk steering his team into an abysmal record while bumbling around the sidelines and getting bowled over by the occasional referee.  He comported himself at all times like he was flummoxed by an unfamiliar frozen yogurt ordering procedure.  And, in a satisfying narrative twist, he somehow beat Northwestern, not only winning the Hat, but winning a golden ticket to lose a Conference USA team in a bowl game, which is the platonic ideal of stakes for an Illinois-Northwestern football game.  Beckman may not last past this season if the Illini are crappy again, but he has already accomplished everything there is to accomplish in the game of football.

It is football season.  It is Hat Season.