On the first drive of the game, University of Louisiana at Monroe effortlessly ran through the Northwestern defense until a flea flicker left a Warhawk receiver streaking alone towards the endzone. ULM 7 Northwestern 0. The announcer who screams OH NO DISASTER was in my brain yelling “oh no disaster.” Northwestern was about to get torn apart in its most homecoming-ass homecoming game in recent memory in a Sun Belt paycheck game before having to throw itself into the gears of the Big Ten schedule. And then Northwestern rattled off 42 points and won the game easily.
The score is a little deceptive. ULM drove the ball effectively, but missed a field goal badly and got stopped on 4th down deep in Northwestern territory when they had an opportunity to make it an actual game in the first half. But it’s hard to find fault with a Wildcat team that was firing on all cylinders, dominating the lines of scrimmage, and, much like a civilization unlocking a new tech tree in a complicated strategy video game, discovered the new invention Receivers Other Than Griffin Wilde. Stone did not even complete a pass to Wilde until the third quarter, though his top target still piled up 64 yards and a touchdown.
All of those people in the stands are rooting for Northwestern
The fundamental issue for Northwestern or what I would refer to as the Northwestern Question if I was a muttonchopped nineteenth-century guy, is that it has far fewer fans than almost any FBS program and certainly any “Power Four” program in the country. Northwestern literally has tens of thousands of fans in Chicago and across the country; this is still closer to zero fans than any other team in the Big Ten. As anyone who has ever attended a Northwestern game and attempted to cheer for the home team in a Big Ten game can attest, the stadium is almost always overrun with visiting fans. This was true in Ryan Field (R.I.P. in its gnarly rusted glory), it is true in the tiny lakeside stadium, and it will be true in Patrick Ryan’s billion-dollar Xanadu where you will still have the experience of being tut-tutted by a Michigan fan who is upset that they are only up by eighteen except now you have to pay like two hundred dollars for the experience.
Pondering the Northwestern Question
It is only during the non-conference schedule where smaller, far-flung teams are trucked into Evanston that you can experience a pure Northwestern home game. At the old Ryan Field, that meant the stadium was about a third full of parents, onlookers lured by cheap tickets, and high school marching bands all lolling in the blazing early September sun. Northwestern’s quirky quarter system meant that most students were not even on campus for the first several games. But in the diminished college football microdose ecosystem on The Lake, those same scattered fans are a dominant force, the vast majority of the capacity crowd. In some perverse way, this homecoming game against a Sun Belt team from northern Louisiana that has never played Northwestern in football before may have been the most overwhelmingly pro-Northwestern homecoming crowd they’ve ever had by percentage, and perhaps ever will have assuming that they revert to playing homecoming games against Big Ten opponents; in that case they are homecoming games because they are being played closest to their opponents’ homes in the greater Chicagoland area.
There is one game left at The Lake. The stadium is still a minor college football wonder. It feels like pretty much every game there has been in picture-perfect weather designed to look gorgeous on television; the game on Saturday was played on an uncharacteristic and frankly alarmingly warm day for October in Chicago. The end zone seats still have a vast and impenetrable network of poles in the way but this year they have oriented the speakers so you can actually understand the announcer when he bellows that it is time to move the chains instead of hearing him as a warbling Peanuts adult and then you have to turn to the person next to you and say “he said it’s time to move the chains.” I even heard the psychologically satisfying Wildcat Growl noise, which I only learned over the weekend is taken from the intro to a Janet Jackson song and not from an effects library entitled Royalty Free Sports Yowls.
The ‘Cats are now 3-2 with no more FCS teams, Sun Belt squads, or reeling Big Ten teams with recently-fired coaches to feast on before heading into the abattoir of the Big Ten. But a funny thing happened to that UCLA win, and it involves their next opponent.
PENN STATE REALLY BEEFED IT
Last week, while Northwestern’s backups were mopping up the remaining ULM players, a remarkable thing was happening in the Rose Bowl. UCLA, thought to be the worst team in the Big Ten coming off a string of embarrassing losses and a surprisingly feisty loss to Northwestern last week, was leading Penn State in the Rose Bowl. The Bruins jumped up to a major lead, led by their superstar quarterback Nico Iamaleava who finally looked like the guy who justified all of the transfer drama and by interim playcaller Jerry Neuheiser, a former UCLA quarterback and son of former UCLA coach Rick Neuheiser and California Hair Guy whose whimsical blonde coiff is as we speak being digitally scanned by a company that specializes in selling comical 1970s-style toupees for the insecure bald guys who refuse to get the Brian Urlacher Hair Treatment. Penn State rallied back and it came down to a fourth down near the UCLA goal line with the game on the line. Penn State farted around and blew it and produced one of the worst losses in the history of the sport. They showed this on the jumbotron at The Lake and I hope Penn State fans are aware that their team suffered the indignity of being guffawed at by a large group of Northwestern fans.
Penn State fans have been in a state of absolute meltdown for the past week. The Lions, returning the core of a playoff team and fortified with expensive transfers, were lauded before the season and started play as the number two team in the country. They looked kind of mediocre against a very weak schedule building up to a major showdown with Oregon at home at night in a famed Penn State Whiteout game that they lost in overtime. The Oregon loss was another blemish against James Franklin in his dismal record against highly-ranked teams, and the letdown from that game plus what Franklin later described as exhaustion from travel in the first known case of an eastern time zone team claiming a Reverse Body Clocks situation climaxed in the historic collapse against a winless UCLA team.
"They did Reverse Body Clocks," a despondent Franklin says at his press conference. "It was simply too late for our boys."
So there you have it: a UCLA team that Northwestern dominated in the first half and sort of crapped around with and unnecessarily made the game come down to the closing seconds in the second was gashing through an expensive Penn State defense. The entire thing was extremely funny except for the fact that Northwestern now has to travel to Penn State (as the homecoming opponent, naturally) letting us enjoy a funny transitive victory for a week.
Do you have any idea what is going to happen in this game? It could be that Penn State is so broken mentally and riven with conflict and hostility radiating from a maniacal crowd that Northwestern could take them out. The Nittany Lions could also be so mad that they take out all of the frustration out on the ‘Cats and annihilate them. After five games, I don’t really have a good handle on how good Northwestern is. They looked abysmal against Tulane, overmatched against Oregon, and took care of business against Western, ULM, and UCLA. Northwestern has looked better and better each week, but all we have learned is that they had a terrible game to open the season and don’t look good against one of the three best teams in the sport.
The Playoff Committee punished Penn State for its brutal loss. But they've waited a week, and now they're going to get revenge... on the Northwestern Wildcats
For many years, we watched Northwestern teams that were on paper much worse than their Big Ten peers manage to go into their stadiums and slop them around so badly that the ‘Cats manage to hold onto a win by their fingernails. It is not impossible for this to happen now, although the presumed gap between a Penn State team with its playoff pedigree and Northwestern is theoretically much greater than the usual scenario of Northwestern surprising a Nebraska team that is getting too big for its britches or a Minnesota team with a backup quarterback. Despite the turmoil and horrible vibes in Happy Valley, the ‘Cats are enormous underdogs.
My guess is that Northwestern will go into a Penn State stadium echoing with chants about firing the coach and the Nittany Lions will win comfortably while its fans grouse the entire time in a very annoying way and then get mad that they didn’t win by enough because everyone who roots for a college football team with expectations is functionally a toddler. The Penn State fans you see catastrophizing on the internet about this game have not watched a single second of Northwestern football since the last time they played Penn State and are just using the Wildcats as a vessel for their angst. But I would invite any of them who claim they actually want Northwestern to win because they are that mad at James Franklin and who have a ridiculous Philadelphia/Delaware County accent to immediately send me a recording of themself saying the words “let’s go Caleb Komolafe.”
Or maybe Penn State is in such disarray that James Franklin does some of his world famous James Franklin-Style Clock Management and they lose and then he instantly flees to a waiting blimp to whisk him off to Stillwater and immediately install him in Mike Gundy’s disused Antler Palace.
INVISIBLE BIG TEN CITIES
At first Marco Polo and the great Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti could not communicate in the same language. Polo was mystified by what Petitti and his court meant when they kept demanding to see a “deck.” But Petitti soon came to understand Polo’s description of his conference’s far-flung cities that he would never see because there are so many of them through a series of gestures: Polo stomping around like an ungainly giant meant that there were fullbacks there, grabbing his head and pretending to angrily undo a chin strap meant that the city featured an inept Big Ten West-style quarterback, squinting into the middle distance meant an overmatched coach on the hot seat. Eventually, Polo mastered the Commissioner’s language and the Rosemont dialect spoken in his court, but after several conversations, he and Petitti soon decided that the gestures told him much more.
Cities and The Future I: Happylis
The city of Happylis is the great unfinished city of the conference. Every person you talk to in Happylis is excited to tell you about the great treasures that the city will have eventually. Every place you stand is the site of a future monument or edifice. And every person has a different idea what it will be. For example, you can stand in an alley and talk to one Happylisian and he will tell you that you are the foundations of what will be a great museum. Run into another person (the Happylisians are very busy) and she will tell you that you are standing where there will be a brilliant spire with decorations that will bathe the city below in different type of light depending on the position of the sun, turning the entire cityscape in its shadows into a psychdelic art project. It is a city that is becoming.
But while the optimism for the future radiates through every person in Happylis, all of them are despondent about the present. Here, any existing museum is a dump, any existing spire is a ruin, and any existing structure is only a placeholder meant to be demolished and paved way for something larger, bolder, and better. Everywhere there are signs on walls depicting what is going to eventually be there and contrasting signs with differing visions.
On one building, largely considered the finest and most intricate in Happylis, the entire edifice has been covered in placards going up ten or eleven stories where residents have been feuding for decades about whether it is going to be a luxury hotel or an elaborate arena for laser tag; this argument for several stories until, as you reach the upper floors, the placards give way to personal insults about the person who had made the placard immediately below it. For two stories, the placards go back and forth in threats where the placard-writers threaten to fight each other, sending each other hypothetical combat moves.
“Pig fucker!” one placard reads. “All you do is write on placards. When I see you in the arboretum (which will eventually be replaced with a helipad) I will do drum fills on your skull with my nunchucks.” “Swine-rutter! I have sketched a picture of my elbow on this placard to exact 1:1 scale so you can prepare for it to meet your solar plexus!” No one, as far as I can tell, has ever fought, and both placard-writers seem content that they had made their point.
The one thing everyone in Happylis can agree on is that the current leadership in the city cannot fulfill their future vision. Everyone spends all day with plans to depose the leader, to throw him in an oubilette. Every poster with his picture, warmly smiling on the site of hypothetical construction, immediately becomes a site for outdoor bowel relief for even the fanciest citizens. Those in their regalia, tails flapping in the wind, elegant evening gowns enmeshed in elaborate scarves that are cut to seem like they come directly from the neck, stop immediately and erect elaborate screens that they carry for this purpose to they can befoul pictures of city leadership. “He will not build the sky library,” one of them tells me as he laps up water to assault an etching of the city leader at a bus station. “That maniac wants to build a sky library” another one on tells me as he charges toward the same image.
For the traveler who is cursed to see Happylis as it is, the city is bustling and idyllic. But after spending any length of time there, the traveler begins to see the city becoming. The entire city becomes subsumed to becoming, the present becomes poisoned. The charming neighborhood becomes a slum, the parks a blemish. The streets curdle and disintegrate. Happylis drowns in its prosperous misery.
