EVANSTON I have made fun of the Temporary Lakeside Stadium as a desperate gambit after Northwestern failed to find anywhere else in the Chicago area to play and were forced to hastily pile up some bleachers on a soccer field in an attempt to have home games and not wander the country like they were barnstorming against 1920s religious cults focused on beard growth. But all it takes is a perfect late summer night with the golden hour sunshine fading over campus and the Chicago skyline shimmering in the background to realize that it is truly something. I was wrong. The stadium (which I have nicknamed “The Lake”) is an incredible setting for college football.
Views from The Lake
I remain sentimental about Ryan Field, which had stood for more than 100 years at the same spot and was a very easy and convenient place to watch football, but after drinking a beer sitting on a rock on the shore of Lake Michigan before a game, it is hard to understand why Northwestern insists on playing football in a residential neighborhood that is made up entirely of professional Noise Lawyers. Sure, the tiny lakeside stadium lacks the intense wall of noise atmosphere associated with college football, but it’s not like anyone had anyone described Ryan Field as “rocking” unless it was Northwestern going on a silent count at home because opposing fans were complaining about uncalled holding penalties in a game they were winning by 32 points. I can also imagine that a game in cold, windy, rainy weather could feel like being on the deck of a nineteenth century whaling ship.
And yet while The Lake might be a unique and picturesque place to watch a bunch of teenagers run into each other's torsos, the stadium is also kind of a silly place to watch a football game. The endzone bleachers, which contain the largest blocks of seating, feature views blocked by a series of gigantic poles, perhaps in tribute to the Wildcats' secondary alternative home at Wrigley Field. The endzone seats also have no speakers, making it virtually impossible to hear what is going on, the referee warbles incoherently like a Peanuts adult, and I can't remember if I heard them play the annoying Wildcat yowl on an endless loop which is a vital part of Northwestern football's psychological operations. I assume the experience is better in the sideline seats, although the end zone seats are already far more expensive than any Northwestern ticket I've ever bought; I am pretty sure that most people sitting through an Eastern Illinois-Northwestern game in years past were actually sentenced to be there by a Cook County judge.
As big of a sign that you are in the Chicagoland area than the skyline
Putting a bunch of rickety bleachers on a practice field sitting on a wad of garbage hauled into Lake Michigan in 1960s was a weird and desperate move, but it's impossible to deny that it workd. The temporary lakeside stadium rules. The natural beauty of the lakeshore does a lot of heavy lifting here and there's nothing else like it in major college sports. Perhaps this is appropriate for a sport that seems to be fueled by short-term thinking and last-second gambits and silly accidents that turn into traditions-- there's no better example than some drunken college students stealing a pig or driving a tractor into each other and then making it a rivalry trophy passed down for generations-- so Northwestern can go from trying to not play football on the streets of Sheridan Road to creating a stadium fans will remember long after they put up the new stadium with its Luxury Cabanas and Imagine Dragons concerts and lake of asphalt parking lots.
EASTERN ILLINOIS DOES A JUMP SCARE
Northwestern's heralded switch at quarterback looked like the wrong one. The first half was winding down to its final minutes, and it appeared that Eastern was about to go up 10-7. Northwestern had just had a kick blocked and Eastern had managed to nudge the ball downfield to field goal range.The Wildcats had to that point late in the half a total of 16 passing yards, many of which had bounced off the ground as if they had just invented a new variant of Australian rules football. But then Eastern missed the kick, Lausch found a rhythm, and the Cats got another touchdown. Then they absolutely torched the Panthers in the second half. Lausch went 11 for 11 for more than 200 yards in the second half alone and unleashed A.J. Henning who was flying around the field. The defense remained almost impenetrable on the ground and reduced the Eastern playbook to short passes because their run game was stopped and Northwestern rushers were dragging their quarterback around the field. It is one of the most beguiling performances we've seen against an FCS team where they didn't lose.
Northwestern shoots off celebratory fireworks after the game that make it look like Arnold has just blown up the bad guy on the roof and then said "you-ah going oudt widda bang"
The Eastern game represented a relatively comfortable introduction for a new quarterback, but the Wildcats will get thrown into the fire for their first West Coast road trip in the new Enormous Ten. Washington, their first conference opponent, represents a rude welcome. The Huskies are coming off an appearance in the national championship game. They've lost a large number of key players including star quarterback Michael Penix to the NFL and their coach to Alabama. They're also coming off a tough home loss to bitter rivals Washington State, a team they abandoned to a dead conference that is currently clinging to the Mountain West before bursting forth from its chest to devour it next season. The 2024 Washington Huskies do not currently appear to be the terrifying national championship contenders they were last season, but that does not mean that they are still not good enough to throttle Northwestern as the oddsmakers predict.
I suspect there will be a prolonged feeling out process between the new West Coast Big Ten members and the existing members of the conference. I have no idea what to make of Washington Football other than enjoying watching Penix huck balls up to Rome Odunze last year and hoping they'd beat Michigan. Washington fans, all of whom I assume have already assumed that this is a win, have not really had the experience of having their superior football team dragged down the Wildcat Toilet as the 'Cats attempt win or lose to subject opposing fans to the shittiest football game they've ever experienced. This is a very exciting year as the vestigial stink of the Big Ten West still hovers over all of its proud former members who have an opportunity to really make these new teams question their decision to fly into the middle of the country and get rudely punted at for hours at a time.
History favors the Huskies. Northwestern has never beaten them, although all three of their previous games took place in the Wildcats' early 1980s nadir where they started every football game by digging a giant pit in the middle of the field and refusing to leave until time had expired. Washington quarterback Will Rogers is one of the most prolific passers in football and will test what has so far looked like a formidable Wildcats defense. The Northwestern passing game is even more of an enigma than usual. The Wildcats have also not yet played in a stadium that has a larger attendance than a Monster Jam event at Allstate Arena.
It is very difficult at this point in the season to be able to figure out if a team is any good. Washington is as good of a test as any. Even if the 'Cats can't get their first win in this series, I'll be watching to see how competitive they can be against a good conference opponent, how Lausch fares in his second game, and, most importantly, how badly the Wildcats can manage to annoy Washington fans in their Big Ten baptism.
HUSKY STADIUM, SEATTLE WASHINGTON
This season for Northwestern has been all about stadiums, so this season's fiction section is an informative look at the history of opponents' stadiums that I have exhaustively researched by making all of it up.
Husky Stadium holds more than 70,000 screaming Washington football fans every week, but has its origins in a bitter dispute over football. It was, according to my meticulous research, never meant for the sport at all. Husky Stadium was built to support "Husky" Zeb Middyons's bear-fighting promotion. Middyons, who claimed to be a mentalist who could control bears with his mind, barnstormed across the Pacific Northwest throughout the the early 1900s. He set up a stable of bears calmed by salmon doused in vats of laudanum and, along with his accomplice Mars McMaster,* advertised the bear fighting as a demonstration of what he called "Brains-Combat."
*According to H.U.J. Holman's "Woods Men: The Pacific Northwest's Greatest Hucksters, Gamblers, and Shamanic Grafters 1880-1925, McMcaster was also known as "El Picador" and claimed to be from Spain, but was actually born Stan Oldlocz in Lodz. He spent years using the name Bradley Morton that he stole from an army buddy who was killed in what official Army records described as a "moose taunting incident." McMcaster was also known to use the names Brode Hohny, Horus Mangaarten, The Rev. Red Rogers, Stan Van Stan, and Hohnus Gravy, which he assumed while selling a canned gravy with "restorative properties for the man's Vigorous Area."
By 1918, Middyons, who had also profited from a wartime black market zinc operation, had enough money to being construction on what he named Husky Stadium, which he had sold as the "Paradise of Brains-Combat." But, in the middle of construction, disaster struck. Middyons was in a small town where he had a planned performance but the day before, a group of locals caught a wild grizzly that was rampaging through town and locked it in the courthouse. The mayor and other town dignitaries begged Middyons to use his mental powers to convince the bear to leave. For three hours, Middyons stood outside the courthouse touching his head and squinting (this is my interpretation. Other accounts, such as from Tred Millcox in Bear Court, suggest that he was also mumbling and possibly crying. I have some serious concerns with Millcox's methodology and I want to just state on the record that his last article on bear attacks was held up in peer review because he kept insisting that the Port McNeil Maniac Grizzly had somehow fashioned what he kept referring as a "salmon nunchuk.") When some angry residents began to question whether Middyons had the ability to manipulate bears with his own mind, Middyons told them that he the shape of the roof created a "mental curtain" that prevented him from achieving full control of the "ursine cortex."
That is when "Two Strap" Knagston, the leader of a strongman outfit coincidentally barnstorming through the same town who was known for his then-unorthodox two strap unitard, picked up Middyons and flung him into the courthouse. No one knows what happens next, although his hideous screams echoed through the town within minutes.
Middyons's grisly bear death left his financial backers and the city of Seattle in a serious dilemma; they had no major attraction for their expensive new stadium. Investors brought in all sorts of acts. They first tried to recruit men from the lumberjack camps for a series of violent games including "trunk jousts," but the authorities shut them down after deciding that a "beard to beard" fighting event was "obscene on a level The Court has never thought possible."
Football fans demanded that they move the team into the new stadium, which abutted the university, but they made a powerful enemy. Vice Provost E. Emmett Brudge had wormed his way into a powerful position at the right hand of the university president by mesmerizing him with elaborate conspiracies about plots forming against him among the faculty. For example, the president's private papers contain an elaborate secret memo that Brudge had written suggesting that a geographer popular among the faculty been attempting to control the university president by putting psychedelic powders in his tea that Brudge described as "the dragon's tendrils." Brudge, for reasons no one ever has confirmed, despised football, referring to it exclusively as "an Oaf's Holiday" or "the Devil's Pork Wrestling" and calling football players "Bovinous Beefs."
Brudge began planting letters and editorials in local papers, but everyone could tell they were by him because they had headlines like "Beware! Bovine Brawls in your Backyard" and "Ban this Farcical Pork Circus from our Beloved Bears-Wrestling Stadium AT ONCE."
Eventually football gained too much popularity for Brudge to hold it off. The final straw came when Brudge's automobile, a model T that he painted himself a color called "accounting visor green" and called "Mrs. Plimstin" broke down in front of a field where Washington players were practicing. They lifted the car with Brudge inside screaming "unhand me, you unseemly hippopotami" and carried him to the main administration building while a crowd of thousands gathered before dispersing into a massive riot.
Brudge had long suspected that his arch-rival Quill Quall had arranged the stunt in a series of "invidious machinations" to humiliate him.* It worked. Brudge lost the support of the university president and left Seattle. He formed the anti-football organization "Manful Society Against Oafery" and toured the country convincing towns to ban football and instead engage youths in what he claimed were more wholesome sports such as "brain pushing" where youths stand forehead to forehead and recite useful facts at each other until exhaustion. Often he was chased from town on a railroad pushcart, scattering his pamphlets as a distraction and to deflect pitchfork blows. G.A. Rimsford's "Lumber Laughs: Touring Vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest 1918-1932" suggests that the popular Rolph and Dolph's Head Sport act was essentially a sarcastic performance of brain pushing, but I am sorry to say that his entire article is also based on Jean-Robert Mitaine's philosophy of "word construction" where it presents as instructions to fold a thin sheet of cardboard into various configurations in order to decipher the words in order as part of the School of Touch Scholarship and it is nearly impossible to determine the citation because my cardboard got too bent up.
*It is difficult to take Brudge's accusations seriously, but some university historians, most notably Katthy Cregg, have noted that Quall was an early automobile enthusiast who could have disabled Brudge's car easily. Quall also benefited from the ascent of Washington football as he was often selected to tackle the opposing team's bursar before the game, which was a popular tradition at the time until a professor of medieval studies showed up in full armor and had to be subdued with a weighted net.
Within a few years, the stadium became the unquestioned home of Washington Huskies football. Every few years, a small group of Brudge sympathizers emerges to denounce it a series of leaflets as a "Odorous Pig Sport" and prophesying that one day a mentalist will bring a horde of rampaging bears back to the stadium to reclaim it for its rightful purpose, but it has not happened yet.
